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7-0-5-2-1
7-0-5-2-1
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
Von Diddley Bom
For the best, expect the worst
I hope that's understood
Von Diddley Bom
We didn't need you any more
For the best, expect the worst
Of the best
Thank you.
Thank you.
And out in Signal Land, we have Rob T. Firefly.
Oops. Hang on a second. Let me try that again. We have Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
We have Gila.
Good evening.
And we have Alex.
Good evening. You do?
Oh, for God's sake. Where are you now?
Well, just quite literally, as the show started, I made it across the state line, Emmanuel. So, I think we're safe now. I'm in Pennsylvania.
Are you safe? Why are you crossing state lines? Are you running from something or someone?
Everyone's running from something.
I suppose that's true. All right. Well, stay safe and maybe slow down a little bit. I can see you on video. And boy, you're cooking.
Yeah, absolutely. You know it. I just made it. So, I'm going to keep going.
All right. All right, Thelma.
Yeah. So, we have all kinds of things to discuss tonight in the world of technology, hackers, and whatnot.
First, you know, I'd like to start with some listener mail because we get a lot of that. And it's always fun to read.
O-T-H at 2600.com is our email address. Humans only, please. Yeah, I know some AI has been trying to write to us as well. It's not working.
This is a very helpful email. In fact, the most helpful email, I think, of the week, which we do award a prize to.
This comes from a listener named Neil who says,
Emmanuel, I ran into that stupid, why the hell did they change the function of the side button issue 2 on Samsung Galaxies?
Yeah, I was complaining about that, I think, last week where I couldn't figure out how to turn my damn phone off or restart my phone because they changed the buttons.
Well, you can restore it to its original function. It's hidden in the settings.
So, what you do is, and folks, if you have a Samsung Galaxy, and this has been frustrating you too,
listen as I give directions here.
Go to settings, then find advanced features, and then you'll find side button.
That's actually a choice, side button.
And then another choice is long press.
I'm not kidding, long press.
Then you will see the options for digital assistant, Bixby, which don't ever select that, or power off menu.
Select power off menu, and then a long press on the side button will let you shut it down.
Holding all three buttons down actually will do a reset rather than a restart.
Keep up the good work from Neil.
Thank you, Neil.
That was extremely helpful, and my phone is back to the way it was.
Now, if somebody can figure out how to make the battery life readable,
because they changed that to make it really tiny on the upper right-hand corner,
that would be just swell.
Here's a letter from Dave.
Hi, all in regard to your recent show.
I find it absolutely ridiculous that you're not complying with age verification laws in the U.S.
or the SCA in the U.K.
The fact that my child was able to listen to this hacker show over the radio,
and you didn't collect their ID before letting their radio process this public signal is unacceptable.
Clearly, it is due to your lack of hacker skills and technological prowess and creativity.
Please, do better to protect the children from information,
because I don't want to have to start doing this myself for my child.
Thank you, Dave, with heavy sarcasm.
He had the sarcasm.
I'm sincerely thanking him for the advice.
And, yeah, it's getting a little crazy with age verification and protecting kids.
You know, what if we just kick the kids off the Internet?
You know, they're smart.
Start your own damn Internet, all right?
Leave it to the adults to do what we want to do on this Internet.
It was here first.
It's a suggestion.
It's a suggestion.
Okay, and a third letter here.
This is from a former producer, volunteer, and employee at WBA.
I was a loyal listener to Off the Hook.
I need to communicate to you that I found it offensive when Rob used the words lockdown
when speaking about the Zoom being set up when COVID started.
It's good that the system was set up so that we could still listen to BAI.
The thing that offended me was the use of the words lockdown or word lockdown.
Some people use it as one word.
But no one was locked down.
I worked from home and used the Zoom to do my work, but I went outside every day.
The only people who are literally locked down, who are always locked down,
are those who are or were incarcerated.
They are still locked down until they are released.
Those who are not or were not incarcerated were allowed to go out.
Many were afraid to go out, even wearing a mask.
But some workers had no choice but to go out due to the nature of their job.
Let's be careful how we use words.
I work with formerly incarcerated people.
Thank you.
You know, I understand what this listener is saying, and I definitely sympathize,
and I think we all do, because the phrase or the word lockdown has entered into the lexicon.
It's become something that we all use, and it's certainly not Rob's fault.
Rob just happened to be the one who said it.
But I think it's the way we are all programmed to think right now.
It's in the media.
It's, you know, schools get locked down.
Stores get locked down.
Everything gets locked down.
The houses get locked down.
Like, you know, parents say, I'm locking down this house.
It's something that, you know, I wish had not happened, but it did happen.
Now, you know, we can try and fight back and try to dissuade people, as this listener did,
from using phrases like this.
I'm not sure how successful that's going to be, because, boy, it's being used a lot.
More important, though, than the words is the fact that we all are becoming used to the behavior
that this is normal.
You know, what's happening in schools?
What's happening in workplaces?
What's happening all around?
We're using prisoner terminology on the general public.
Now, you know, it's bad enough what happens in prisons.
But to transfer that to society here, that represents a sickness that I think really is deserving of discussion.
And maybe this will provoke that kind of a discussion.
It's something that we need to confront.
But, you know, it makes me think of how people, I think in the past they would say this more.
They would say illegal immigrant or illegal alien.
And, you know, eventually people objected to that and said, people cannot be illegal.
You know, you cannot define a person based on an offense or whatever it is that you believe is an offense.
And I think that led to more people using the phrase undocumented, which, you know, is more accurate and less offensive.
We could do something similar here.
But what I'd really like to see is less behavior that mimics the kind of thing that happens in prisons.
And I would also like to see things get better in prisons.
Rob, go ahead.
Yeah, I'm going to I appreciate this this writer's perspective.
And at the same time, I'm going to push back a little because I do remember using the term lockdown.
And I still use it to refer to that period of time early in the COVID era where it was not safe to go out.
Sure, a lot of us were allowed to go out.
A lot of us were able to go out.
I, at the time, had a job that was ruled an essential bit of work.
And so I had to keep going to work through the lockdown and it still felt like a lockdown.
It felt like the term was important to use because it was important to get across to people how serious it was.
And I think it's the sort of thing that had we been a little bit better about staying locked down for just a bit longer,
we might not be dealing with COVID as an endemic concern right now rather than the one time pandemic.
I think I think we kind of screwed the pooch on, you know, doing the best we could to make sure this didn't keep happening.
And and so we're we're stuck with it now as a thing that that just keeps coming back.
So I I do I do feel like it was locked down just as, you know,
the term ground zero meant something quite different before the event that we'll be commemorating tomorrow.
And, you know, we still when someone somewhere started using the term to refer to that part of lower Manhattan, it stuck.
And, you know, you you will still hear people using that term.
I think language evolves and language expands to fill this container.
And I think when a word means something to a great deal of people, the word then means that thing.
I absolutely agree. And I think there's also something to be said for trying to figure out the best way to describe that moment in time.
And then when people began saying after the pandemic or after COVID, there is no after COVID.
COVID is here. And I think to use the phrase to describe that moment in time.
Absolutely. And yeah, there.
Sorry, I agree with what you're saying. I have lost my words. Carry on.
Well, if you see Gila's expression, you'd understand the words that aren't there.
But, you know, I think I understand what you're saying.
I just want the meaning of what goes on in prisons to not be lost.
You know, lockdown. Oh, no big deal. You know, we live through that as our family.
It's different. It's different inside when you're incarcerated.
And I just want to make sure there's a distinction between the two things.
Maybe we need a different phrase. I mean, we definitely need a different phrase.
And, you know, it's something that that I believe people would welcome, actually, because it's more it's more succinct.
Also, you know, as far as the danger, it's yeah, COVID is still around.
The danger has shifted. And the reason for that is because of the vaccine.
Now, we live in an idiotic era where people in charge are telling us that the vaccine is harmful.
It's it's the worst of the worst where, you know, susceptible people are believing this.
And that's going to cause all kinds of health issues.
As a result, it's going to be harder for people to get vaccines here in New York.
Fortunately, the governor is signing a executive order so that you don't have to go to a doctor to get a prescription in order to get a pharmacist to give you a vaccine for COVID.
But not every state is as fortunate. And we need to fight for that.
And we need to fight for education and support science.
I can't believe I have to say that, but that's that's the world we're in right now.
Science is good, folks.
It's something that we embrace as hackers and something that I think we all need to defend at this at this stage in our history.
Rob?
Yeah, I totally agree with you there.
And I do want to point out that I do take the point regarding formerly incarcerated people.
And I don't wish to make light of that at all.
I just think the term is now is now applicable to both.
And maybe we need to come up with something else to refer to one or the other.
But I think in the moment, that's that's the word.
Yeah. And to use it on school kids, I think, is is the ultimate horror.
You know, when kids know what lockdown means and they apply it to their schools, there's something sick about that.
And we need to we need to study that.
We need to treat that as a serious issue that deserves some some attention.
All right. Moving on.
We have a bunch of stories here.
You know, I just love the headline here.
This is from Tom's Hardware dot com.
Burger King hacked attackers impressed by the commitment to terrible security practices.
Systems described as solid as a paper whopper wrapper in the rain.
Yeah.
Ethical hackers.
These are ethical hackers.
If you believe that phrase, Bob, the hacker and Bob, the shoplifter are two different people, I guess.
I have detailed their claim that they uncovered catastrophic vulnerabilities in multiple platforms hosted by restaurant brands international known as RBI.
And honestly, I'd never heard of them before.
While RBI may not be a very familiar name.
Thank you.
This this lacks security means that systems powering mega brands like Burger King, Tim Hortons and Popeye's with over 30,000 locations worldwide and all are almost trivially easy to hack.
Again, their security is about as solid as a paper whopper wrapper in the rain.
That just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?
That's you can find it on the Bob the Hacker blog.
That's spelled B-O-B-D-A-H-A-C-K-E-R.
Sharing the technical expose.
And for some reason, the blog has been taken down.
But you can find archives all over the Internet.
The vulnerabilities found were a big deal, including allowing the duo to access employee accounts, ordering systems and get this.
Listen to recorded drive through conversations among other exploits.
Now, OK, I don't understand why are they saving conversations where you're ordering a Whopper or something unless they're they're listening live.
Is that what they maybe were doing?
It just it seems pretty bizarre to me that that's how they operate.
Gila?
I'm assuming it's a quality control thing.
How long it takes to take an order at the drive through, how long it takes to finish the.
I'm assuming, again, not having been working in that environment.
But my assumption is they record them for quality control.
Yeah, they had full raw audio files of people ordering food at the drive throughs.
OK, sometimes that audio included personally identifiable information.
And the RBI, interestingly, feeds these recordings.
Get ready to AI based systems to weigh customer and employee metrics.
So next time you're in a drive up at a fast food place, your voice may be going to train AI.
Think about that.
It didn't end there.
Hackers found the the code.
This is almost unbelievable for the restaurant chains bathroom rating screens.
I mean, I'm not talking about the codes to the bathrooms.
I imagine that's child's play.
But it apparently crossed their minds to give a five star review to a bathroom in Tokyo while sitting in pajamas in Ohio.
But as staunchly white hat operatives, that, of course, did not happen.
Last but not least, the Bob the Hacker blog insists that no customer data was retained during this research, with responsible disclosure protocols followed throughout the process.
However, according to Tom's Hardware dot com, we wonder whether these recent experiences influenced their parting shot, which cheekily asserts that Wendy's is better.
Well, I don't know what they mean.
Wendy's is better food wise or Wendy's is better security wise.
But either way, boy, how do you avoid getting recorded and fed to AI these days?
You'd think a drive up would be safe.
I wouldn't think that.
But it's it's something.
Yes, Rob.
Interesting point about the blog post in question, though.
It's been taken down.
If you try to look it up on Internet Archive, you get a note that the URL has been specifically excluded from the Internet Archive.
And if you go to the URL where the post was, you get the notice from Bob the Hacker that a DMCA notice was received.
They received a DMCA copyright infringement complaint from Cyble Incorporated acting on behalf of Burger King regarding the blog post about restaurant brand International's drive through system vulnerabilities.
The complaint alleges trademark infringement claims the content, quote, promotes illegal activity and spreads false information.
And they go on to say that while we believe our security research was conducted ethically and in the public interest, we have chosen to remove the content rather than engage in a legal dispute.
So if they reveal information on how Burger King or whatnot is not following security protocols, that somehow is a DMCA infringement?
That's nuts.
It would seem so.
All right.
Yes, Gailen.
You mentioned about Cyble.
So Cyble Incorporated, who made the takedown notice, is an AI-powered cybersecurity platform.
Oh, I see what's happening here.
So this Cyble, whatever, if that's like a robot or something, is claiming ownership of what is fed to it by these fast food outlets.
Is that really where we've arrived?
Oh, wait, hold on.
I only got halfway through the sentence.
Cyble Incorporated is an AI-powered cybersecurity platform and DMCA takedown service startup backed by Y Combinator.
Wait, so they specialize in making DMCA takedown notices?
100%.
That's a business model.
I did not know that.
Wow.
You can get venture capital for that.
Today I learned.
Do they at least tell you that's a bad idea, you have no case here, or will they just write up a DMCA takedown notice for anything that you come up with?
Oh, dear Lord, Rob opened up their website.
The future of AI-native autonomous cybersecurity is here.
This just gets more and more interesting.
And this is, for those curious, Cyble is spelled C-Y-B-L-E, and Cyble.com is their site.
I can feel my brain turning to mush looking at this website.
This all seems pretty bleak.
Keep reading.
Keep reading, Rob.
I want to feel bleaker.
Experience the world's first true and most advanced intelligence-driven AI-native security platform.
We don't just defend, we outpace cyber adversaries.
We're the trusted force behind governments, enterprises, and security teams worldwide.
With unmatched visibility, real-time intelligence, and a platform built for scale, we don't just keep up with threats.
We stay ahead so you can move forward with confidence.
And there are a lot of badges and business.
Okay, they have Blaze AI, multi-agent cybersecurity platform.
Good Lord.
This is...
So what's not clear is, was Cyble the security provider for Burger King, who is now claiming ownership over the blog post that Bob, the drag queen, put up about it?
But, or is Cyble just sending out takedown notices as their business model?
It's all very confusing.
Wow.
Okay.
Bob the drag queen?
It's Bob the hacker.
Bob the shopper.
Different Bob.
Different Bob.
It's a different Bob?
Okay.
How many Bobs are there?
Are they all related?
All right.
Well, let's...
I don't know.
I'm just a Rob.
What do I know?
Yeah, you're a Rob, not a Bob.
Anyway, moving on.
Moving on.
Let's explore a company called Nexar.
They've run out of the good names, haven't they?
They just have to, like, throw letters together randomly.
A hacker has gotten into a database of video recordings taken from Nexar-branded cameras, which are built to be placed in drivers' cars.
Oh, yeah.
You thought you were safe there, too?
No.
Your car seems to be very dangerous lately, as far as privacy.
Nexar is a dash cam company that promotes its products as virtual CCTV cameras and offers automatic cloud uploads of critical incidents.
AI-driven insights and real-time road alerts.
It offers customers remote video streaming, live GPS tracking, and easy-to-share video evidence.
But guess what they also do?
They also sell access to reportedly blurred images captured by the cameras and other related data to other companies.
Nexar monetizes users' data and recordings by repackaging them into various products.
And one of those is the company's CityStream map, which uses recent and blurred images taken by Nexar dash cams, superimposes them on a publicly available map, and annotates things such as yield or speed limit signs, damage roads, and other hazards.
This level of access and data management should come with a healthy corporate security stance.
But according to the hacker who breached the company's systems, Nexar is an absolute privacy nightmare with embarrassing security.
Allegedly, it only took the hacker two hours to breach their systems.
And they stated,
In one clip, the hacker provided to 404 Media as proof, a Nexar camera is faced inwards for a car, capturing what appears to be a rideshare driver picking up passengers.
Like in many other videos, people's faces are clearly visible.
Nexar co-founder and CTO, Bruce Fernandez Ruiz, told 404 Media in an email that per Nexar's privacy policy, users who contribute to the CityStream feature do so with either opt-in or opt-out consent.
Yeah, but I don't think the passengers in that rideshare car got to do that.
So that's kind of weird.
The hacker found all the videos on an improperly secured Amazon Web Services bucket.
An AWS bucket is like a virtual file folder in the cloud where you can store various types of data, such as text files, images, videos, and more.
There, the hacker found more than...
Anyone want to guess on the size?
Come on, just give a wild guess.
Alex, go ahead.
I'm going to say 75 gigs.
Oh, wow.
That's a lot.
Okay.
Rob, Gila, did you have a guess?
I would guess, out of the blue, a couple of terabytes.
Wow.
Kyle?
16 megabytes.
I'm sorry.
How do you turn that?
16 megabytes.
16 megabytes.
What?
Okay.
Would it shock you if I said that Kyle was right?
It would, right?
Because he's wrong.
It would, yeah.
It would shock.
No, 130 terabytes.
That's what we're dealing with here.
Wow.
It's an awful lot.
But they were able to access the AWS bucket because embedded in every Nexar dashcam was
a key to the database.
And this key came with high privileges, way too high.
These access privileges not only allowed anyone with the key to upload their own camera's
data, but also access those of everyone else.
Oh, wow.
Another find by the hacker was a file showing the companies and organizations that Nexar
says have had access to the company's data.
Ready for this?
Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Pokemon Go creator Niantic, transportation companies
Lyft and Waymo, the cities of Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, and the NYPD.
Wow.
Well, Nexar fixed the issue after being contacted by 404 Media this week, but the level of trust
that should be expected from a company that stores dashcam or CCTV images has taken a serious
hit.
You know, in the story, I would have said toll because we're dealing with driving.
It just works better, but whatever.
Go ahead, Rob, then Alex.
Yeah, I'm just wondering.
I mean, we're on a call with Alex right now, and I could see video of Alex.
I could see out his car windows.
If I start up my screen recorder right now, how much do you think we could get for that footage?
Oh, especially since he's on the run from somebody, too.
That would definitely make it more valuable.
All right.
Well, let's stick with abusing AI because that's one of my favorite topics.
And this is a story that appeared in Technology Review and is spreading all throughout the
net.
Um, this guy was, um, uh, having an online session with his therapist and his therapist
accidentally shared his screen.
And there, the, um, uh, the, uh, individual, uh, said, suddenly I was watching him use chat
GPT.
He was taking what I was saying and putting it into chat GPT and then summarizing or cherry
picking answers.
The guy was so shocked.
He didn't say anything.
And for the rest of the session, he was privy to a real-time stream of chat GPT analysis
rippling across his therapist's screen.
The session became even more surreal when the, the, the person in question began echoing
chat GPT in his own responses, preempting his therapist.
He said, I became the best patient ever because chat GPT would be like, well, do you consider
that your way of thinking might be a little too black and white?
And I would be like, huh, you know, I think my way of thinking might be too black and white
before the therapist got the chance to say that.
And his therapist would say, exactly.
I'm sure it was his dream session.
Um, but among the questions that I think all of us should be asking is, is this legal?
Um, now when he, uh, raised the incident with the therapist at the next session, it was super
awkward, like a weird breakup.
Uh, the therapist actually cried.
Um, he explained he had felt they'd hit a wall and had begun looking for answers elsewhere
and he was still charged for the session.
You know, I don't know.
Um, if, if, if you're a therapist and you can't figure out what to say to somebody, um,
in any way, and you have to resort to AI to feed you answers, you might be in the wrong
profession.
That's just, uh, my view.
Any, any thoughts?
Kyle?
I think that it's really important for people to A, remember that therapists in most cases
these days are human.
Um, in fact, if you are, are so lucky, you should appreciate the fact that they have, um,
their own limitations professionally and otherwise they may have a heavy caseload.
They may have a lot of things and they may be trying to employ some of these tools in their
practice, but I think it's also quite fair, uh, at the outset and also maybe in the midst
of your, your, uh, sessions or, um, time with that particular therapist to ask, are they,
A, are they recording your sessions, especially if it's virtual, if it's in person, it's obviously
a different scenario, but it could apply.
Are they recording audio or video of your session?
And are they using those recordings with, uh, large language models or some sort of, uh,
processing and it doesn't really matter, um, where it lands, but you should be open to asking
that so that you at least know, right?
Like, okay.
Yeah.
If they might say yes, they might say no, and you'd be reassured, let it just sit, you
know, let it land where it lands, but be, um, an advocate for yourself.
And, and maybe, uh, I guess what I'm saying is preface it with, I'm not, I'm okay with whatever
your response is, but I would like to know if you're employing these kinds of tools, not
that, oh, it's, it's a deal breaker or whatever.
You can determine that later on, or maybe you might change your mind later on or make
it clear that you're okay with that for the time being, but there may be discussions that,
um, get into specifics or get into scenarios that you absolutely do not want recorded that
you absolutely do not want, um, used with these kinds of systems for your own privacy or
because it might, um, be, um, be identifiable in some way that those models, especially if
they're hosted on a cloud and other systems that could, um, infer from past sessions in other
contexts that, I mean, that, that's a, uh, a big deal, but also with just general data security
practices, um, any kind of healthcare provider, including, I would say mental healthcare, um,
should have some level of discretion about how they handle information about their patients.
I think that's basically encoded in state and federal law, um, as a licensed counselor or,
um, a clinician of that sort, and it's protected by law.
Um, in other words, unless you have some sort of admission of a crime and, and, and other
certain specific instances, they are not, um, in any way obligated or expected to report their
discussions.
In fact, it's quite the opposite.
Unless it meets those criteria, they are not to disclose anything that is said in the session
in confidence.
That's the point of therapy in most cases.
So I, I just think that, um, people should absolutely access these resources as, as much
as they can.
Um, it's something I've, I've considered personally, uh, in the last bit of time, I'll, I'll share
that as that much personally and, um, avail yourself, but also be very upfront.
And I don't think any counselor would say like, oh no, I don't want to answer that.
Or they would even be defensive about their use of it.
I think you should, you, you should have that as a part of all your other open and honest
communication with, with a provider like that.
Anyway, that's my take.
I think what you said at, at, at the beginning though, is particularly apropos because you
said that therapists are only human.
And I think that's what, uh, what people like the guy in question, um, are saying that they
want their therapist to be human and not simply to be regurgitating something from AI.
And I think, you know, everyone wants the same thing here.
So, um, it's, it, you know, it's important to, uh, uh, to be honest and yeah, make your,
make your expectation.
Like you said, be an advocate for yourself.
And I think that, that applies across the board for any kind of, uh, of healthcare.
Uh, Alex, are you, are you trying to say something?
You're, you're waving your hand, Alex, but you're not saying anything.
Please turn your microphone.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
Sorry.
My, my dog is all of a sudden going crazy because there's now a cat outside the window.
I've just pulled up.
But with respect to the, the issue of legality here, I think, I think there is an issue that,
that Kyle hit on.
Uh, this could potentially be a HIPAA violation, depending upon the, the type of information
that the therapist would be entering into chat GPT or whatever large language model it is
in order to get some kind of feedback there.
But I, I wonder too, you know, what we would think about whether there's a difference here
if the therapist is, is doing this in real time during a session or whether he's doing
this after the fact.
So in, in the sense of, I've taken some notes, now I'm going to put them into chat GPT and
see if I can get some kind of additional feedback or information or some kind of additional
analysis that I can use during the next session.
Do you guys think there's a difference between doing it that way, as opposed to using a large
language model for therapy in real time?
Absolutely.
Alex, I think that that is an excellent aspect of this you're pointing out.
And I think it's, it's absolutely disingenuous in using it in real time, not disclosing that
at the outset, saying that you're trying a new tool or something.
I don't even know how you would bring that up to a patient.
If you're, uh, even doing telehealth, if you're a live clinician, how, how would you introduce
that?
I think ultimately it's, and then mostly it's because this is off the shelf stuff.
You don't know how exactly it's passing live video or audio.
We just talked about dash cams that are, that are managed on like S3 or whatever, AWS buckets
and stuff like this stuff is engineered by people that like learn to code in the web 2.0
era.
They're not like systems integrators.
Like the, the engineers they're paying to design some of this, like off the shelf hardware,
they're not the best.
They don't know what they're doing.
They're just getting a job somewhere and, and helping engineer something.
And I just think that ultimately it's going to take a long time for off the shelf, large
language models to evolve and specialize to a point where you have systems that aren't
specifically closed as Alex was talking about.
And I said, as these things using something like chat GPT or something that's hosted that
could be used in inference for other users of those models.
I think that there, there's something to be said for like a closed system that's specialized
for this purpose that doesn't share or leak any of that stuff outside of it.
But the point you're making, um, after the fact, I think is much better to me.
That's like, uh, had you been in a lecture and you were recording the lecture and then you
go back and listen to your notes and you use that as a contemporaneous kind of a record
of the conversation because a clinician might miss something in a conversation.
And if they had a recording of audio, I think this passing it through a model, ideally, if
it was some sort of closed system that was specific for healthcare and this kind of use could be
very beneficial if it was referencing, uh, uh, DSM criteria for, uh, various conditions or talking
about other case scenarios that are similar or incredible, uh, works on specific social
or psychological scenarios that this person is asking for help with.
I think that could be incredibly beneficial, but we're not there yet.
And for someone to just sort of casually use it with off the shelf stuff that's meant to
be kind of played with by people in this early kind of era, or let's say not early, but, uh,
let's say prematurity.
We're not quite at a level where, I mean, we have a lot of differentiation.
A lot of people are like doing whiz bang things, kind of rolling with their own sorts of models
and making offline versions of these things, but we're not at an era where we can classify
them and the taxonomy of it isn't as, as, uh, mature and wide as I think it will be when
we get to a point where we can have systems that are trusted and used in these specific ways.
But yeah, offline, I think after the fact would be better because you could, because it's
just disingenuous to have someone live that's passing things to a machine.
It's like students, um, answering questions or, or cheating on a test.
I think I just don't think you're using, you, if you don't know something as a clinician,
there are plenty of ways that you can recharacterize and retrench, so to speak, and come back with
something meaningful instead of just leaning on something as though, you know, or as though
you're listening. It's basically, you're not listening to me. Go ahead, Rob.
Yeah. This, uh, this whole idea, uh, freaks me out as someone who has benefited from mental
healthcare. Um, I, my relationship with my mental healthcare provider, um, is something that's got to
be based on their, uh, their, their suitability for the job, their advice, their assistance,
their empathy, and their training and their human take on whatever it is, uh, you know,
that's going on. And we were just talking last month about, uh, how the governor of Illinois
signed into law, a, uh, measure banning the use of AI by therapists. Uh, they can't use it to make
therapeutic decisions or perform any therapeutic communication. They can use it for supplementary
support, like managing appointments or other admin work. But, uh, you know, the, the, the, uh,
thinking behind this law and the thinking that I think is very important at this point is that
AI is not thinking AI is not feeling AI is not, um, something you could depend on the thing that
tells you to put glue on pizza and eat rocks, um, and doesn't know how many letter K's are in the
word Kenya, um, is not something that you want to be basing something so important as your mental
healthcare on. And, uh, you know, above, above and beyond the threats to, um, security and privacy
that, uh, running whatever's going on in your, in your therapy session through something like
chat GPT, um, and, you know, adding to their models and whatever, I think it's just a, it's,
it's a very, it's a very dangerous thing for anybody to be messing around with. And, uh, I think
that means it's time to get rid of that therapist when you catch them doing something like this.
Well, it's interesting. Uh, this must be particularly common because even the person who wrote the
article for a technology review, uh, Lori Clark said that, um, she was affected by this as well.
Uh, when I received a recent email from my therapist that seemed longer
and more polished than usual, I initially felt heartened. It seemed to convey a kind,
validating message and its length made me feel that she'd taken the time to reflect on all the
points in my rather sensitive email, but on closer inspection, her email seemed a little strange.
It was in a new font and the text displayed several AI tells, including liberal use of the
Americanized M dash. Yeah, Alex, you know how much I hate the M dash, uh, the signature impersonal
style and the habit of addressing each point made in the original email line by line. And if I can
add to that summarizing at the end and just basically saying the same things again, uh,
some people believe chat bots like chat GPT can provide an affordable alternative to in-person,
um, psychedelic assisted therapy. Um, many experts say it's a bad idea. I never heard that phrase
before. Uh, my positive feelings quickly drained away to be replaced by disappointment and mistrust.
Once I realized chat GPT likely had a hand in drafting the message, which my therapist confirmed
when I asked her, despite her assurance that she simply dictates longer emails using AI,
I still felt uncertainty over the extent to which she, as opposed to the bot was responsible for
the sentiments expressed. I also couldn't entirely shake the suspicion that she might've pasted my
highly personal email wholesale into chat GPT. So you, you lose trust. It's very hard to get that
back. And, you know, especially situations like this, very sensitive. Yes, Rob. Yeah. I recently, uh,
just today, in fact, saw someone, uh, called Mary Gillis on a blue sky described using chat GPT as
outsourcing one's thinking and, uh, not a very smart move. And I'm inclined to agree with that. If my
therapist is outsourcing the main element of their job, that's, that doesn't strike me as a very good
therapist. And given what we know about the ways that chat GPT and models like it have been interacting
with people, you don't go to therapy. So somebody agrees with everything you say, you don't go to
therapy. So somebody praises your, uh, bizarre thinking and you're feeling that you are, you know,
what was it? A God? Yes. And an angel of being from another planet. Well, and AI is not a mandated
reporter. Let's not even talk about questions of like HIPAA compliance. AI is not a mandated reporter.
And if you tell your therapist, whether it just be an AI chat bot or an actual therapist dealing with
an AI chat bot, but then outsourcing things and thinking less, and you say something that needs to
get run up the flagpole because someone is in danger, AI doesn't know to do that. And those systems
aren't in place. And it's, you trust your person, your human therapist less, but also so many of the
guardrails that exist to help people don't exist anymore when you take it to AI.
Right. The accountability, the certifications and everything, um, surrounding mental health care
providing, none of that is there for AI. None of that is, uh, protecting the provider or the recipient
of the care. Go ahead, Kyle. There might be a case if, uh, you're doing psychedelic therapy,
uh, and hallucinating that you might have a model like this, uh, accompany you because it
hallucinates too. Psychedelic, psychedelic therapy. Is that, that's a thing. Psychedelic therapy.
That's like, yeah, using, using hallucinogens, uh, with, in some kind of clinical setting,
which is itself still, um, in its early, uh, phases of acceptance, but it is something that
is used with, uh, PTSD and, and other conditions, um, to help people work through trauma. But
I was just making a quip. Okay. Well, you're, you're, you're allowed. Let's move on. Moving on.
Um, okay. So, uh, U S Senator Ron Wyden, we know him well, uh, he is urging the federal trade
commission to investigate Microsoft, accusing the company of gross cybersecurity negligence,
uh, in a letter sent today since September 10th, uh, Wyden, uh, claims that Microsoft's poor
security enabled a huge 2024 ransomware attack on the Ascension hospital system. The attack affected
nearly 5.6 million patients. Wyden's office found the breach started when a contractor clicked a
malicious link on Microsoft's Bing search engine. The Senator argues that this, along with other
security flaws, left critical infrastructure vulnerable. He wants the FTC to hold Microsoft
accountable. What if, what do folks think is the odds, the odds that, that FTC is going to do
anything about really anything? Alex, go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. I can jump in there. I mean, look,
they, they might listen to Senator Wyden, who's a great friend of all of ours, I think. Um, and I
think when it comes to data security and privacy issues, I mean, he is really the number one guy in
the Senate. He certainly has his finger on the pulse of this community for sure. So I think,
I think they'll listen to him, but I think it'll be lip service and maybe it'll be something that,
that languishes and takes a long time. And then the FTC says, well, it's such an,
an awfully pervasive practice with respect to all search engines that, you know, we couldn't possibly
just ding, ding in this particular instance, because malicious links on search engines are
really nothing new. I mean, this is all just old wine and a new bottle. There are so many malicious
things. We've talked about malicious links on Google, on this show numerous times. And so I think it's
really something that unfortunately we have to be extraordinarily careful about and be wary of
because search engines are really at essence, advertising machines. They sell links and all
of those sponsored links that you find at the top of whatever your search terms, whatever the search
results are. And for whatever search terms you put in, somebody paid for those and it's, they don't
necessarily vet them. So you can't necessarily trust them. And if somebody paid for them, I think
they're inherently untrustworthy anyhow. Well, in his letter to the FTC, Senator, old wine and a new
bottle. Is that a thing? I've never heard of that being done. Okay. I guess people are doing that.
Yeah. That's a, that's a phrase that my, my civil procedure professor in law school used to use
almost ad nauseum. Well, it's a phrase. I don't know that it's a phrase, but is it a thing
that warrants a phrase? You know what? We'll investigate.
Uh, I guess like packaging. Yeah. Yeah. I, anyway, his letter to the FTC, Senator Wyden
reportedly detailed findings from his office's review of the incident. He alleges Microsoft's
failure to disable an obsolete and insecure encryption protocol was a key factor that allowed
hackers to gain deep access to Ascension's network. The letter squarely blames the tech giant
for leaving critical infrastructure, including major hospital networks exposed to known threats.
I'm just impressed that a Senator is able to phrase things where we can't laugh at the way
he's, he's describing the situation. I'm fully, I'm with that. And I think that's something
we've known, uh, about Senator Wyden's, uh, team and, and he's able to put together things
in, in really succinct ways and speak to these things. But I do think the bigger threat is
the threat actors, the people that are running these networks, people that are creating these
vulnerabilities. And I think there's state and, uh, other groups, state actors and others that are
really at fault. I mean, Microsoft provides, uh, uh, services, platforms, operating systems.
I, I, I know we like to, um, hit it to companies. Okay. I'm hearing myself. Okay. Whoever is turning
something on, turn it off. The companies themselves have to take responsibility. I fully, I agree with that,
but I can't, I don't think we're going to be as effective defending our networks and defending
our systems. If we bankrupt the very companies that a lot of those systems are running, uh, the,
the products that those systems are running. So like I, in years past, I've been like really
anti-corporate. And I think that's, it's, it's true. Like these companies make so much money,
like hand over fist and give us really terrible products over time, which has itself been discussed
a lot. We're, we're very aware of that policy with, um, private equity and all that. But, uh, we do,
we do have adversaries that are well-heeled and have, uh, uh, vast resources, uh, financial, human,
um, technological, and they're not stopping. They don't stop. They don't take a break. And as these
things become even more automated, we really need the systems and the companies that we're relying on
to a step up, but themselves be resourced with teams and staffs and, and, um, uh, technological
expertise, uh, and, and to be empowered because I think another thing, and I, and I'm saying this out
of utter respect for, for hackers and everything we've done for, for 10, 20, you know, everything I've,
I've witnessed and heard over the years. I think that we are, we are, um, in a country that is
very often just wholly the victim of this stuff. And we've been eaten alive. I, that that's my
phrasing. We are being eaten alive and we create all these laws that make people like us, people that
want to divulge information about systems that share vulnerabilities. We've criminalized that,
or we've monetized it with like metasploit and like vulnerability, bug bounty, all that crap has
made it so that people that are ethical don't want to do anything. They don't want to say anything.
They don't want to break any rules. Meanwhile, uh, the entirety of everybody else on the web
that we're like more or less holding up technologically is eating us alive, like they're,
or eating our lunch or just tearing us apart where our, our corporate systems are, our, uh,
telecommunication systems. And I'm kind of tired of it. I'm kind of, I'm tired of being on the
sidelines as a country or as, uh, even a sort of amorphous club of misfits. Like we got to get it
together or there's really not going to be anything left for us to do. We're just going to
constantly be talking about how, how big a victim we are to the companies that don't care. Like,
I don't know, to a certain degree, yes, they're culpable, but it's not entirely the fact that their
systems are vulnerable. And I, I wish and hope that we wake up to that as a consortium of hackers.
I think there's something to be said for what, uh, has been ongoing in, in government and in
private practice. I know a lot of hackers out there work at security companies and take this
stuff really seriously. I think we should be empowered to, to, um, probe and to do all the
things that hackers do so that our systems are solid against the kinds of adversaries that are out
there on the web. All right. Well, we're going to have to leave it there. Uh, however, we are
continuing the discussion tonight on overtime. You can join us channel 2600 on YouTube, or just
click on the link that you'll find on the top of 2600.com webpage. Uh, you can also write to us
OTH at 2600.com, but please support WBAI. That is the most important thing you can do. Keep these
conversations going over 99.5 FM in New York city, where all kinds of amazing programming comes your
way 24 hours a day, seven days a week, give to WBAI.org or buddy.wbai.org. We will see you next
week, 7.00 PM on Wednesday, 8.00 PM on overtime on YouTube channel 2600. Good night, everyone.
and we'll see you next week.
We'll be right back.


And welcome to everybody here on Off the Hook Overtime on YouTube.
Emmanuel here in YouTube land. Kyle, you made it too?
Almost.
And I believe Rob T. Firefly, you there?
I am there.
I am here.
And Gila, I was getting to you, and are we on YouTube? Can you verify that?
We are, and we are sounding good.
Okay, good. And Alex?
Yep, I'm here.
Oh, and you sound different. You've arrived. You've gotten somewhere.
I have arrived.
You're at the safe house now, or what's going on?
At the safe house, yeah. Three different states over, and we're all good. We're good now, I think.
Well, let's hope so. Let's hope so. Fingers crossed.
A little out of breath.
Wow. So we haven't done this in a while, and of course, you know, we can continue talking about the things we're talking about,
or start new conversations, or invite our listeners to come in.
Yeah, but you know what? To get this out of the way, right away, let's see how bad our friend the hum is today.
Do we have a dial tone? We have no dial tone.
I think something probably isn't plugged in.
Oh, yeah. Hold on.
Okay.
But that's okay, because the phone line isn't working at it either, so people are calling it. They're not getting here, so let's try now.
That sounds beautiful. Listen to that.
So, okay, your witness.
That sounded great.
Now, if you can't hear us, I don't know what the reason is. It's not something that we're doing.
And if you hear a hum, you might want to get your hearing checked, because we don't have a hum right now.
And we're not going to touch anything. We're not going to breathe on anything.
So if people call in later, I know there's problems with people in signal land talking to people in telephone land.
And that, I don't know how to fix. But we'll do our best. We'll transcribe what you say.
But you guys never really say anything anyway when people are on the phone.
We have our moments.
Yeah. Well...
If it gets hard, just reserve your comment for after we hang up, and then you can maybe make a comment.
Yeah. And people calling in, maybe make your remarks short as well.
Not lecturing anybody in particular.
But, you know, if you can do that, then we can address them all the better and talk about what you said to us for 20 minutes.
You know, things like that work out pretty well.
We have had some more suggestions about our setup, and it's great that people want to help us do some audio engineering stuff.
But we have to set aside a little work party and really tear it all apart and get into it.
But we're doing the best we can, so just bear with us and just get your question or your comment out there,
and we'll be able to move on and take more calls.
And at some point in the future, we won't even discuss how this all works.
It'll just happen.
Wow. Imagine that.
Maybe. If we're still here.
Rob, you have your hand raised. Go ahead.
I do. Because on the subject, you know, last time we did this, and the phone was giving us trouble,
and you went into a little detail about, you know, I don't think you know what hacking is.
If you think hacking is a nice, clean, technical solution, everything, you're wrong.
Someone posted to Macedon, our pal Lex Pendragon, and he quoted you and, you know, posted a bit more of what you said and then followed up with, I love this quote, and I feel like this is one of the most I feel seen things I've heard on about hacking in ages.
Wow.
And it was very nice to hear that.
It is nice.
Sometimes I just say something, but I wasn't expecting that would be it, but thank you.
You summed it up by saying sometimes it sounds good, sometimes it sounds terrible, but we're throwing our hearts into it.
And, you know, that continues to be the case, and it's nice to know that the efforts are appreciated from the folks listening.
I felt defended.
I was like, wow, he's sticking up for all the hard work I put in.
Absolutely.
And, yeah, I just think it's a diversion anyway.
Like, we should just have the conversations we're having.
We'll get this stuff down, but it's just, it's a lot.
It's a lot, and, like, I don't want to get into my personal, like, workload, but for me, like, yeah, I love to help, but I don't have to.
Fair enough.
Yeah, I think that's true of many of us here, but we appreciate advice, patience as well, and also your feedback.
We like to hear, you know, what you have to say.
We'll be open with the phone lines fairly shortly, but anybody else have any stories I want to share or anything going on that we haven't had a chance to talk about to this audience?
Because this is the overtime audience, which sometimes is a completely different audience than the off-the-hook audience.
Sometimes it's the same, but sometimes it's different.
There was a bit of a bleak story going around last week about how Medicare is apparently going to start paying AI companies a share of any claims they automatically reject using the AI.
That was one of the stories I intended to get to tonight, so I'm glad you're getting to it.
Yeah, the tagline here is AI companies are becoming a whole new bounty hunter.
That's from the site Futurism, and it's really bleak.
It's as bleak as it sounds.
It's some dystopian crap, and it's one of those things how if you've dealt with the healthcare industry world at all, you have your suspicions about how dark things are behind the scenes,
and every so often a bit of it has a light shone on it, and yeah, it is that dark, if not darker than you thought it was.
They're reporting on a New York Times story.
AI companies selected for this experiment will get paid a share of the money they saved by blocking people from their healthcare.
Those savings could look like billions of dollars over the next six years, and that's if the program doesn't get expanded.
Control-C here, hold on.
So, the money, they're getting paid a share of the money that isn't spent, so where is that money coming from?
They seem to have missed some logic here, because the money isn't there.
They're not spending it.
They're not reimbursing people, so they're just paying people now.
Right. So, the idea is that Medicare, instead of using money to pay for healthcare that you've requested,
they're going to pay a lower amount of that money to somebody else for blocking you from that healthcare,
so saving them the majority of the money they would have spent on doing their job and paying the rest to the AI company here.
It's like they're in a whole different business, because they're no longer paying for healthcare.
They're paying AI companies to prevent healthcare.
And this is from Medicare and Medicaid.
It's not even from the for-profit health insurance world where you would expect crap like this.
It's, you know...
It's overtime, Rob. You can say shit.
Oh, and by the way, on that note, it's been brought to my attention that YouTube slash Google puts captions on overtime on our shows.
I'm not sure when they do this.
They don't do it immediately, but after, I think, a couple of days it takes them to do that.
But, for whatever reason, the prudes at Google don't like four-letter words.
They don't like obscenities.
So, they put a line through certain words.
It's true.
Like, what I just said now, you won't see that on captioning.
You'll see a series of dashes, which seems like one solid line.
I'd like to mess with this somehow.
First of all, why is it that I can say shit here, but somebody who's hard of hearing will see a dash instead?
Instead, are the hard of hearing not allowed to hear swear words, you know, or see swear words?
I mean, that seems to be kind of discriminatory.
What do you think, Kyle?
Also, well, yeah, it does seem like you're corrupting the actual content that you're hosting for people who may or may not be able to actually consume it in its original form.
And that is a disservice to people trying to access information.
I also think that it's – well, I wonder if it extends – I wonder if it does the same thing for things that do not involve profanity.
Because I could say things that – I could think of a variety of things to say that do not have any kind of profanity in them, but would be profoundly offensive and disgusting and beneath, I think, what people expect us to be saying.
But I truly could – I could go off on things that would basically end a lot of stuff.
I can say shit and get a line, but if I say shite, I'm sure it'll spell it out.
I look forward to seeing that line at some point.
But the thing is, you know, we didn't ask for this.
Now, I understand there might be a setting someplace where you can allow for obscenities, but it's by default this blocking is turned on.
And I've also heard that even when you ask for it not to be turned on, it's turned on anyway.
I don't know anything about this.
Never experimented with it.
This is the most I've cursed on a broadcast of any sort in a long time.
But what I would like to do as kind of an experiment is see if we can generate the longest possible dash across the entire screen by maybe saying shit 20 times in a row.
And I'll leave that open to anybody who wishes to do that.
And then we can enjoy how it looks at some point, maybe take a picture of it.
Yes, Gila.
I think it's a combination of a lot of factors.
I think also it's just confusing the auto dictation machine.
I think there are things that machine.
I think there are things that the system won't say.
But at the same time, this does remind me of something that happened a few years ago.
I had a colleague who almost exclusively dictated things to text.
She used speech to text a lot and would send things without looking at them.
So I used to get emails from her that were addressed to killer.
That's not my name.
How did that happen?
She would say Gila and her phone wrote it down as killer.
How about that?
Wow.
So, yeah, because we're not creating our own subtitles, it is the automated words.
It is the automated system that is putting them together.
And someone pointed out there are no subtitles available for this video right now.
No, there are not.
Probably, I'm assuming, there will be in the fullness of time.
It's not live captioning us right now, but maybe, I don't know, tomorrow, next week.
Yeah, a couple of days.
You know, the last show definitely has it, so it is put in.
But when you're called, are you called Killer or Killa?
Which is it?
It definitely came out Killer.
With a hard R.
With a hard R, yeah.
Like Killer Mike or something.
Like Killer Mike or Killer Whale.
Ghostface Gila.
I want to see how the captioning interprets that.
I'm very excited.
I'm curious to see how it'll just, like, my name gets said, not infrequently.
Okay, one other thing, really quickly.
Before the blue screen of death was a thing, I watched someone do it.
I watched a human being do it in real time.
We had a substitute teacher who called my name, or who was looking at the list and called
the kid in alphabetical order in front of me, and then looked at the list, looked up,
looked at the list, looked up.
I watched a human being blue screen in real time, and then she just skipped me and called
the next person in line, and everyone in the class said, you skipped Gila.
And she said, oh, thank God, that's how you say it.
And I was like, lady, you're a licensed teacher.
How did it wind up there?
I mean...
I've literally heard every permutation of it there is.
But your school had you listed as Killer?
No, my school had me listed as Gila.
Okay.
And the sub couldn't read it off the sheet.
The sub was afraid to even attempt it.
Well, what's the worst that you could pronounce, Gila?
Oh, try me.
I've heard them all.
Okay.
Well...
It could be Gila.
It could be Jill.
It could be Gail.
There was a teacher who typed my name in to a word processor and accepted corrections.
So both my first name and my last name were wrong on the first day of school.
So she mispronounces it.
You know, I thought it actually said Killer, and she was afraid to say that.
No, that didn't.
That was just the first time I saw someone actually blue screen in real time.
Wow.
That's a great image.
Killer with text-to-speech from a couple years ago.
Yes, Rob.
Go ahead.
So going back to the issue of our captions, I have long noticed, and as someone who has
worked in the field of accessibility for those with particular needs and media production
for those folks, when you go on YouTube, and in a lot of mass media content, a lot of corporate
produced content, they will refuse to put swears in the captions that you can hear in
the audio.
And I believe I've mentioned this before, but if you go to a famous Rage Against the
Machine song, and you are a hearing person, you can hear the singer go, fuck you, I won't
do what you tell me.
But if you're reading the lyrics in the captions, it will say, blank you, I won't do what you
tell me, and that's on the official Rage Against the Machine account.
Now, with YouTube, I can understand why they won't let their automatic captioning robots
write down swears, because in case they're wrong, imagine you're somebody who said something
completely innocent, but then the system decides that you said shit, fuck shit.
And, you know, then that comes out, and then you've shown that to people who didn't consent
to such things, and, you know, terror ensues or whatever.
But if you write in your captions manually, or you manually correct your captions on your
YouTube video, you can put swears in there, and they will, to the best of my knowledge,
I experimented with this some time ago, you can have it, you can have sweary captions if
you put them in manually yourself.
Wait, so you're saying if I type in something, I can have what I typed in show up.
Wow.
Welcome to 1960.
Okay, but the whole point of auto-captioning is to get it right.
And obviously, they don't have enough faith in their technology to say, we're getting
it right.
Or maybe someday, the captioning software will interpret the sentence and say, yeah, shit
belongs here.
So let's put that word there and not be afraid.
But also, mass media has long basically infantilized those with disabilities or, you know, accessibility
requirements to the point where you could put on VHSs of, you know, R-rated movies and
find the captions censored.
You could put on, you know, cable television where they're saying everything and, you know,
you can't read it all because they refuse to put it into the captions.
It's a real problem out there.
I'm pretty sure HBO is doing the right thing with captioning.
But, you know, a funny thing, seeing Pulp Fiction on Channel 11 once, you know, which is a commercial
TV station in New York, they aired a really sanitized version.
And every single line had some other words substituted for the many obscenities that were
in that.
I don't even know why they bothered showing it.
It's not the same film.
But I would kill to get a copy of that version because, wow, that was, it was just, I think
Quentin Tarantino, you know, did, you know, wanted his name off of it, you know, and Alan
Smith, he wanted on that particular version.
But yeah, okay.
So, you know what?
I'm going to just do this five times in a row.
Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.
Now, okay.
Hopefully I got a long dash for that.
If somebody wants to do 20 later on, I feel kind of stupid.
Um, in about two or three days, we'll see the product of, uh, we have to watch the whole
show that to get to this point.
Now, does it have to be a bunch of short shits or can it be one long shit?
Well, this is what science is all about, experimenting and seeing what the results are.
So, um, my five short shits or Rob's one big long shit.
That's what we have to.
Or I have, I have another, now I'm curious.
I'm doing this for science.
But the first thing that I thought of was, um, Jay's rap, uh, from Jay and Silent Bob
Strike Back.
Right.
And I'm curious how this is going to work.
So if I said mother, mother, fuck, mother, mother, fuck, fuck, mother, fuck, mother, fuck.
Are we going to get the mothers and not the fucks?
You'll get a lot of mothers.
Yes.
You'll get a lot of mothers separated by dashes.
I, that's what I predict.
Go ahead, Kyle.
I want to say F-U-C-K.
Oh, you're clever.
You're clever.
That might show up.
That might show up.
What if you say it fast?
What if you say F-U-C-K fast?
You know, how's that going to show up?
Oh, we're going to break.
We're breaking Google tonight.
We really are.
I would also like to point out that we are, um, having a lively discussion in the chat
and people are now chiming in with their favorite, um, clean for network television edits from
movies as in, um, from Drake and Black Knight.
I have had it with these monkey fighting snakes on this Monday to Friday plane.
Monkey fighting snakes.
Monkey fighting snakes on this Monday to Friday plane.
And, uh, Fidget Glitch reminds us, this is what you get when you find a stranger in
the Alps.
Okay.
Uh, and, um, I was thinking of my own personal favorite, which is from the American president
when Michael J. Fox says, you chicken sh-labe.
Ah!
Oh, I, uh, I want to see that one now, too.
Do we, do we allow, do we allow cussing in the chat?
We do allow cussing in the chat.
But we could, we could ban it.
We could ban any word we want.
We could ban anything.
Yeah.
No.
We could.
I'm just saying, we wouldn't, but we could.
Let's keep it, keep it free.
Keep it open.
Let people say their please.
As long as no one's being a dick.
Well, they can always be individually, like, kind of blocked, but that's not really our,
like, forte.
We, we want to hear from people, even if it has a little profanity, we, we can handle it.
Trust me, we're grownups.
We can handle it.
We're, we're laughing, but the fact is that we had Elon Musk banned for three months and
nobody noticed.
Nobody even said it.
So that's a good, it's not banned now.
You can say it, but why?
What's the point?
Oh, that was a piece of news today.
Did you hear he's not the richest person in the world anymore?
Oh, I can't imagine who would overtake him at this point.
Well, he hasn't done that trillion dollar thing yet.
He apparently, he has to complete a series of tasks and that's beyond him.
But who overtook him?
Somebody we've never heard of before?
No, sorry to say, I think it's Larry Ellison, but.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I really don't care at all.
Although, you know, these people, they could like solve so many problems, you know, in an
instant, you know, mass transit, probably could, they could fund the second Avenue subway.
They could just do that and they could have the second Avenue subway named after them.
Why not?
I don't care.
You know, they're all these, these projects that are, you know, high speed rail across the
United States.
You know, that's what, that's what Elon Musk could do right now.
He could, he could make that happen.
In a year.
Easily.
But he won't.
All right.
We've run out of things to say.
So now we're going to open up the phone lines and hang on a second.
I got to do that manually.
Uh, yes.
Our phone number is 802-321-4225.
802-321-HACK is our phone number.
Put down social media.
Stop looking at it.
Everyone.
Listeners.
Just stop.
I did it and I put it down.
Okay.
So just stop looking at it.
We're talking.
This is your time to talk and listen, don't be scrolling.
Just forget that.
It'll be there.
And as we've already demonstrated, there's no hum.
So we don't want to hear about a hum.
All right.
See, that's a pristine dial tone that just called us for some reason.
802-321-4225.
Let's stay on the line, though.
You've got to stay on the line in order to talk.
Gila, go ahead.
No, I was going to say, I feel like if we get another hang up, I'm probably going to
start singing Never There, which is, you know, every time now I hear a busy signal, I start
singing the show's theme song.
And if I hear a dial tone, I tend to start thinking Never There by Cake.
Wow.
Okay.
I'll start.
What is a feature of the telephone system you wish there was?
And don't say smell.
Come on.
But, like, what would you like to see modern smartphones be able to do?
Or the telephones or the video?
What's the next thing you would love to see for us?
And it can involve AI.
We don't want to, like, limit that.
But I want to still have a conversation.
Or, you know, what's something that should be hacked?
Or what's something that was hacked that you think, you know what, that was a long time
coming, you know, something like that?
Or tell us about a hack you noticed that maybe we haven't covered.
We'd love to hear about things that are broken, things that we haven't seen coverage of.
That's part of the purpose of what we do.
And as always, OTH at 2600.com.
Send us stories for the future.
A wish list of things to hack.
I like that idea.
Because maybe somebody out there can do it.
And we will have inspired them.
Yeah.
I mean, going off of what I said earlier, yeah.
I want to see people be a little more brazen, especially from the hacker community.
Because I think there's a huge generational thing where people of my age, people a little
younger, their sense of what is possible to do with all the processing power we have.
I have a hope badge here.
And I just, I'm aware that it is itself an incredible microprocessor or microcontrollers.
Like, we have so many tools and capabilities.
That's last year's hope badge.
Yeah, last year's.
But the ability we have.
And I just think people should be breaking things.
Should be, like, playing around with things and not feeling like there are as many consequences.
And frankly, I think there's a healthy amount of lawlessness in the current sort of state of our country.
And if you are doing things with security, do them.
Do them harder.
Like, this is a great time for that.
Because no one really cares about anything.
And in my earnest opinion, there's not a lot going on.
And frankly, there's a lot of enthusiasm for stuff that makes our networks and our systems better.
And I don't want to get on the government or corporate side of things.
It's not really my lane.
But I will say, like, we should be doing more, more innovating, more experimenting, more breaking things open.
All those black boxes need to be clear.
We need to know how all this stuff works.
And we need to teach people how things work.
I just think we're starving for that.
And people are scared to do anything, myself included.
I mean, I want to break something.
I want to break into something.
I want to hack something, maybe as a challenge, maybe something innocent, maybe something that I build in my lab.
But we should be doing it.
We should be breaking our own operating systems, breaking things that are sitting ducks, essentially.
I've got a domain that you can hack, Kyle.
A new domain that just was launched this week.
And Alex, I'm surprised you didn't mention it, because it's a big deal.
War.gov.
War.gov was registered and launched in the last week.
I heard about that.
Yeah, it's real.
War.gov.
That's what our Department of Defense is now.
It looks so ridiculous.
By the way, we have a very patient caller.
We're going to get to you in a second.
Gila, I know you had something to say.
Go ahead.
Just we have some people chiming in in the chat with suggestions for things they'd like to see phones be able to do.
Hover in the air so you don't have to hold it.
Okay.
Have the call end tone sound like an old phone being slammed down on the receiver.
Wait.
How would that?
It would come over the...
I hope you didn't hang up on the caller.
No, I was simulating.
But it would sound that way to the person on the other end of the phone?
Or where would that sound?
I mean, I feel like if someone is angry and ends your phone call, the fact that we're missing the context of the phone receiver being slammed down, like a little beep, beep, beep doesn't do it.
No, I agree.
I agree.
I really like that.
No, maybe on the person that does the slamming, like a long hold of the red telephone button, you long hold it.
That equates to like a slam and you get like a satisfying like ka-chunk and then like a little vibrate or something.
That would be nice.
You know it.
Then you know you hung up on that fool.
You know what bugs me?
You know, when you watch people on TV having phone conversations, they have like these, you know, mundane back and forth conversations.
And to move the plot along, people don't say goodbye.
They just hang up, you know.
So he's going to meet me down there.
Yeah, he's going to be there now.
Click.
It's like, fuck you.
How dare you hang up?
I would have called right back and said, who do you think you are hanging up on me like that?
You know how many times Tony Soprano hung up on somebody during the entire series?
It's very rude.
But if Tony Soprano was like, bye, I mean, that's not saying I want that either.
I'm saying a little bit of politeness goes a long way.
That's how people hand calls now.
Nobody hangs up on me when I'm talking.
We say goodbye, you know, like civilized people.
No, you you very much.
How about this then?
How about this?
When you press the red button and hang up an auto-generated voice, maybe your voice says goodbye, you know, like the ALL guy.
Why not?
What's wrong with that?
What's wrong with that?
That's a good idea.
Goodbye.
We have a caller who's been waiting a very long time.
Make him wait.
We have more suggestions, though, from the chat.
All right.
But the person is paying per minute to call us.
They're fine.
They're fine.
They're going to be there.
Hello.
Are you there?
Call her.
Yes.
I've been waiting very patiently.
I'm on a long distance call.
I know I'm making a long distance call.
How much are you paying per minute, Rebel?
What?
Wait.
You want to know what the rates are per minute?
One moment.
Just one moment.
You want to wait?
Yeah.
Call the rate and route operator.
Look it up.
It's a thing.
And I remember it used to be like 35 cents a minute.
Or no, 35 cents for the first minute to call New York City from Long Island.
And then I think it was 11.5 cents a minute.
That rate is 15 cents for the first minute and 10 cents each additional minute.
Okay, you're not the person that you're imitating and nobody believes it.
Did you just say that's a dime for additional minutes?
But if 11.5 cents is right, then there's something wrong with my head that I'm remembering that.
You know, from old phone calls.
Oh, by the way, there's a hum.
You know, I'm going to give you the courtesy, Rebel, of warning you that people who mention the hum,
especially when we don't hear it, will get disconnected.
Because we're sick of hearing about it.
As much as you're sick of hearing it.
Well, then I won't mention it.
Well, I can still hear you.
Good.
Anyway.
Because if you can't hear me, there's no point in talking, right?
Remember, yes.
I remember the AT&T or the Bell System Data Speed 40 terminal.
It was by the Telex company, which is an AT&T.
Yes.
They still make stuff.
I don't remember that terminal.
I know the Telex company.
I know they are still active.
They make headsets and stuff.
And they make, they do a lot with like the sports intercoms and stuff or like on-field stuff.
The Telex got nowhere, no.
No, it's called the, look it up online.
It's called the Speed 40 terminal.
No, it was a terminal.
We don't need homework.
Okay.
So what about it?
What about that particular one?
What about it, Rebel?
How does it work?
I mean, was that a computer terminal?
Because it says it's Telex.
I don't think anybody really knows.
But it was some kind of, some kind of computer somewhere was there, I'm sure.
But you reminded me of something, which I'll get to after you're gone.
Okay.
Well, I asked AI.
I'll ask AI.
And AI gives me like...
Yeah, what do you ask us for?
AI knows everything.
Ask AI.
That's what's good about AI.
Okay.
Now, you're talking about like the seven, what is it, the seven dirty words you can't say
on the air or the seven, the four letter words you can't say on the air?
Well, yeah, we said, we said a few of them, but there's a bunch of other words that are
offensive too.
All right, so, well, all right, let me see, which one are they?
Freedom, liberty, I know, fuck, it's one of them.
I know, fuck, it's one of them.
Rebel.
Shit.
Oh my God, can you believe this?
Look what we've done.
We've unleashed a monster.
Cocksucker.
Is that one of them?
Cunt.
I don't think that's one of them either.
I don't think, I don't think the C word is in there.
Shit, piss, shit, piss, motherfucker, shit, piss, fuck, cocksucker, motherfucker.
And tits.
And tits.
Tits shouldn't even be on the list, according to George Carlin.
Burp.
Burp and fart.
Fart is not one of them, Rebel.
Come on, get real.
No, like.
Burp.
All right, and what are your closing thoughts here, Rebel, because we want to open up the
phone lines.
Yeah, that's like first grade vocab.
Yeah, we've managed to drive the conversation even lower than the usual standard.
All right, what else?
Let's see.
Yeah.
The data speed 40.
Is that the word determined that the boss would deliver like that?
I remember that somebody in the phone company that used to work for the company said the
data speed 40 was, it was on a boss system, billing, operations, something, it stands for
something.
It sounds like you know more than we do about this.
I thought you would know more.
That's why I'm asking you.
You would think that, you would think that, but you know, I didn't spend a lot of time
playing with those particular devices.
Yeah, a lot of that stuff is like internal.
You'd have to actually have physical access and a lot of hackers back then were not really
inside these companies using that stuff.
You're better, like you said, talking to people that had experience with them.
They can maybe reference some of the acronyms, some of the parts of the internal systems that
were used with the administrating systems, but it sounds like you have a lot of information
about that.
And if you can find some documentation, some more places where it's referenced, I'm sure
you could use that to continue your search and find out.
Actually, I do.
There is a big manual of that particular computer terminal, but it's like 100 pages.
And, um, I mean, if you want, I think I forwarded it.
Didn't I forward it to you?
I thought I, maybe I didn't.
Have AI summarize that document and ask it questions.
Seriously, you could do something like that.
I mean, use it and analyze it or find specific pages that answer your question and use that
in your, uh, in your searches.
Oh, what about Dick?
Is Dick one of those?
Yeah, Dick is banned.
Anybody named Dick can't be said over the radio.
Dick is fine.
Dick is, is a welcome member.
We're going to leave it there, Rebel.
I'm going to give you a closing, closing remark because we want to, we want to move on.
Okay.
All right.
Any, anything else?
Uh, no, but that's the name is good, but if I said something like Kyle is a dick or something
like that, would that get, uh, no, that doesn't get banned.
No, no.
Okay.
I accept the compliment.
If you call him a prick though, that's, you know, talking about something else.
All right.
Rebel, always good to hear from you.
And he's gone just like that.
He didn't say goodbye.
He did not say, is he how offended I am right now?
All right.
Anyway, what he reminded me of, um, when he said TTY, he reminded me of TDDs and TDD.
It's not a disease.
It's telecommunications device for the deaf and they have a relay operators, uh, or they
had relay operators.
I'm not sure if they still have that service.
I think they still use, I thought maybe technology made them.
I don't know.
Well, regular operators don't exist anymore.
No, no, relay relay is fully still a thing.
Well, seven one, one, I think is number to call to get one of them.
Uh, but the thing is they have to type whatever you say and you can say all manner of horrible
things and they have to type it.
So if you ever want to have fun and waste their time, that's, that's how you do it.
It's not always typing.
I mean, that's for like a pay phone with a keyboard, but, um, in, if you have a friend
that is a non-hearing deaf person that is in your contacts, they can call you and a voice
call will be initiated by relay operator and absolutely everything they say, like they
could be talking about the most insane wild, uh, uh, uh, night they had and include all
kinds of raunchy details.
And that operator will say everything verbatim as the, um, person who is, uh, deaf types, uh,
because they may not necessarily be speaking to the relay operator, but that is a form
of relay that goes from texts to voice through the relay operator themselves.
Um, and it's done the same way, um, with video for like signing.
If, if, uh, someone who's deaf, uh, needs to have someone speak to someone on their behalf,
they will do a video call with the relay operator and that relay operator will, uh, relay the
conversation through voice or other means based on sign through the video call.
But it's very often video conferencing is, is what's used.
I'm kind of surprised that, that, uh, there isn't an automated way of doing that where
you type something and it's just read by a computer voice.
Well, for the deaf, I think sign is a faster way to communicate because that's their normal
way of conversing.
So to type it may be more cumbersome, but I think both modes are supported by various
relay services.
You'd have to get information from people that, um, use that and know that kind of that
universe more than I do.
It has to be software that can interpret sign though in real time.
It's probably advanced, but I realized that, um, conversing with, uh, deaf friends of mine
and people in the past, I was that they were way ahead as far as using video conferencing.
Like I was very averse to using any kind of video or like, uh, uh, video calls or anything
for a very long time for obvious, I think, or maybe not so obvious reasons being a hacker
and a kind of understanding what, what all is encapsulated in those packets, uh, including
your visual, uh, presence and so on.
Um, but at this point it's probably advanced even further and you'd really have to talk
to someone that uses that stuff every day.
It may be more of like what I was saying as it was, I think, gosh, it's been a long time
since I've, I've had a call from deaf person.
Well, I'd like to, I'd like to receive a call here from someone hard of hearing that we can
have a back and forth conversation.
Yeah, we'd love to speak with someone through a relay operator at some point, but, um, yeah,
it may have advanced in the last 10, 15 years or, or more, but, um, it could also be more
along the lines of what I said, which has been, I think was at the time, uh, a very standard
way of doing it.
And that, that has been, um, something that is required and necessary.
It's mandated so that people, um, can access, uh, and go about their daily lives with the hearing
world.
I think we, we have another call.
We do.
Patient as well.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook over time.
Go ahead.
Howdy.
Um, this is a little off topic.
I apologize, but I figured it should get out there.
I got a letter from Ascension Medical.
Okay.
Um, well, I'll read, I'll read part of it here.
Dear valued patient, patient.
Thank you for trusting Ascension Wisconsin with your medical care.
You are receiving this letter because our records indicate that you may be covered.
By United healthcare insurance plan and visit and sent Ascension location in the past year.
We want to make you aware of a situation that could negatively impact the insurance coverage
of your care in the future at Ascension Medical.
Unfortunately, United healthcare, one of the largest and most profitable insurance companies in the country,
reporting, reporting tens of millions of dollars in annual profits, has refused to offer rates that reflect today's dramatic financial realities facing health systems.
Hospitals across the nation are experiencing the sharpest cost increase in decades.
Historic inflation skyrocketing medical prices and higher costs for life-saving equipment and supplies.
United healthcare's proposal doesn't even keep pace with a basic cost of living increase, let alone the extraordinary inflation health systems are battling.
While United healthcare continues to post record profits and rewards shareholders, it refuses to adequately reimburse the providers delivering your care.
However, it goes on basically blaming United healthcare.
And it's just, the big recommendation is to explore medical advantages of other in-care networks.
Interesting.
It's kind of like, it's kind of like when, you know, CBS gets into a fight with your local cable company and both of them trade barbs at each other and expect you to take sides.
Um, I think that's, um, I think that's what's happening here.
You have one company saying this other company isn't acting fairly.
It shouldn't be something that you have to worry about.
It should be something they work out and, uh, you know, there should be options, obviously.
Yeah.
And, and they're both goliaths.
I mean, they both make, I mean, I don't even know, but it's, it's, I'm sure.
I don't know.
I want to know which one's more at blame.
That's a good question.
Who's more greedy?
Yeah.
Well, they probably all are.
Kyle, did you have something to add?
I just want to emphasize that it's important people in this moment where we're seeing a lot of deregulation coupled with this insane sort of, uh, inflationary stuff.
You got to really, really watch your back with, with, uh, your interactions in a lot of these, um, corporations.
A lot of the, the just everyday stuff people are trying to do, especially in healthcare, things can get out of control quickly with costs.
People are looking for, for a buck at every corner.
And we unfortunately have got to bolster our defenses as consumers and do a lot of what may have been something that was, uh, protected or at least, um, the threat of regulation had some teeth in, in so far as, as, uh, curbing these practices.
But in the direction we're going, it's making it really desirable, really, uh, easy to, with automation to target, uh, and, and pass the buck.
In other words, it sounds like this company's passing the buck from, from their overlords to the consumer and the, the consumer very often ends up holding the bag, like being on the hook for these expenses.
And you just, you absolutely have to be vigilant.
We got to share about this.
Thank you very much for telling us about this letter and keep, keep that kind of information coming.
We'd love to, to, uh, get word out if it's relevant to the stuff we talk about, but, but also to share internally, share with other people.
Um, the more people are aware, the more people understand the pitfalls and some of these fly by night companies or companies that have become fly by night or, or, uh, fly by night curious, whatever it is.
Like we got to really protect ourselves, um, as always, but in this day and age, even more because money's getting real tight and, um, overhead.
And, and some of this stuff for these, uh, entities that are not as agile is, um, making it a permit and within a sort of more permissible environment, making these kinds of behaviors more common.
And we just really got to fight it, defend ourselves, protect ourselves, everything you can do, be aware, be vigilant.
So yeah, that's all I'd say.
You would think UnitedHealthcare with all the bad publicity they've been getting that they wouldn't want to push for more.
I mean, I, I don't know.
It's just, I don't know.
It's, it's the too big to care thing that a lot of the tech companies kind of pioneered.
It's that there are a massive, massive provider.
They have all these groups, uh, massive corporate, uh, accounts that handle all kinds of, uh, uh, people.
They, they can really afford to fight this just like, uh, people can afford to pay AI companies to, uh, deny coverage.
It's just a shrewd business thing.
Like, well, why, if we can automate and increase our ability to avoid payouts, uh, they, they look at that as a business model.
Like, why would we be leaking money with payouts that some overly generous, um, uh, pencil pusher down, way down in the depths of management somewhere is, you know, a bleeding heart for, for allowing payouts to people when we can just have this cold model go through and reject people wholesale on technicalities or otherwise.
Can I ask how long ago you got this letter?
I got it September 2nd and the coverage, uh, beginning October 1st, 2025.
So I guarantee, I can almost guarantee you that within the next couple of weeks, you're going to get a letter from the other guys saying how I already have one.
Oh, they sent you one too.
Yeah.
They sent it a month longer.
They gave me two months.
Okay.
Wow.
Um, yeah, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not sure how to advise you here.
Cause it feels like it's, it's not to be sexist.
It feels like they're just two dudes comparing and seeing who's bigger.
I mean, that's what it boils down to.
They like, they know each other or something.
I don't know.
They probably do.
They probably all know each other.
Uh, Gila, go ahead.
You might not be able to hear her, but go ahead.
Uh, actually we can't hear because I didn't press the right button.
Go ahead.
I'm sorry.
Well, that's not helpful.
Uh, it happened here and United healthcare and Mount Sinai, uh, the Mount Sinai health system got into a big old fight.
Uh, and Mount Sinai was out of network for like 10 days here.
Something like that.
Yeah.
Um, they, yeah, they're going to swing their dicks at each other for a while.
It'll come down to the wire.
They'll, someone will get right.
I promise you United healthcare is not going to stop.
Reversing services at Ascension.
It's, it's physically impossible.
The only other thing they could do that would be worse would be to stop paying for the UW healthcare system.
It doesn't make sense then.
Cause how many people are they losing switching, switching coverage right now?
I mean, you're right.
They don't care about, I mean, uh, they don't care.
That's ultimately they're United's going to cave.
Um, it's just going to take a minute and they need to show their shareholders.
They're not just rolling over on this.
Um, it's, it's ugly and it puts the healthcare consumer in a really precarious place.
But given the, uh, ubiquity of the Ascension system in Wisconsin, you're going to be fine.
Um, well, that's, uh, yeah, you're at Wisconsinite.
Are you, are you not?
Um, I'm not, but, um, my family lives there.
Okay.
Okay.
So, um, some comfort there from fellow Midwesterners.
Um, yeah.
All right.
Thanks for sharing that with us.
Uh, very, um, insightful.
Have a great rest of your day.
All right.
You too.
You too.
Um, you know, it's, it's something that really gets to me, uh, when, when we, you know,
or patients have to deal with this crap, you know, we shouldn't have to, this is billing.
Billing is not the same thing as healthcare.
You should get healthcare and billing should be something that the billing people worry
about.
You know how, um, uh, when you go see your doctor, you know, the guy who went to medical
school and you ask him specific billing questions, they always say, uh, that's not something I
know anything about.
And that's the way it should be.
You want them to know about medical issues because that's what they're there for.
You're the patient.
You should know about your body and what it is that you want and how you feel and all
that kind of thing.
And billing should not enter into that discussion either.
You know, until we reach a stage where that's a given, as it is in many other countries, uh,
we're going to have some really poor healthcare in this country.
Gaila, go ahead.
And it is, it's exactly the same discussion that cable providers or different television,
uh, aggregators, I suppose, have with the networks and those corporations.
The fact that every single financial decision in this country is treated as the same sort
of thing.
The fact that you might have to change medical providers midstream is being equated to, you
may not be able to get ESPN on your TV.
Like I, I, a far greater crisis for many people.
I detest the place that our nation is in right now that those two things are equivalent to
each other in so many ways.
And why is it that you have to sit on tenterhooks to see how that's going to play out?
You know, it sounds crazy, but it's not unrealistic that a cable company will merge with a healthcare
company and offer ESPN as part of your healthcare package that, uh, you can either opt in or
out of and, and people will be a lot more informed.
I mean, frankly, I'd rather have ESPN connected to my doctor's office than like, say, I don't
know, Fox news, but that's just me.
But we should all have such choices.
We have a call.
We do have a call.
Okay.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook over time.
Go ahead.
Hello.
It is Leroy Chu from Washington, D.C., our nation's capital.
How you doing?
I have replaced the microphone in this, uh, handset, so I'm interested to see how, uh,
I sound afterwards.
We hear you.
Yeah, we, we hear you and we hope you hear us.
We don't want to hear any talk of a hum.
Hey, well, we hear each other.
That's all that matters.
All right.
It doesn't matter the hum.
But I mean, I do hear the hum.
I asked not to hear that phrase.
That's how we keep it.
So please, let's keep the conversation going in a different direction.
I mean, I don't have much to say about the, I mean, I do agree with the points made, uh,
about the healthcare company situation.
Uh-huh.
Like, like, comparing it to what the cable companies are doing, I think is a really, uh, fun analog.
Yeah, it is fun, actually.
It's something that, um, uh, we should all pay attention to as much.
There's got, I mean, in corporate America, there's got to be a certain set of behaviors that are exhibited by almost any beastly organization.
And I'd like to, you know, figure out exactly what those are exactly.
Uh-huh.
Oops, I just used to say that.
Anyways.
Hey, you're, you're in, uh, you're in Washington, D.C., right?
Yes, I have seen some of the National Guard churches that are standing around at the World War II memorial.
Yeah, read my mind.
Uh, so what are they, have you interacted with them?
What are they doing?
No, just seen them.
Uh-huh.
I mean, they look calm, complacent, totally not ready to stand on anybody's chest.
I honestly think that they're all just bored.
I mean, they're looking for crime that doesn't exist.
Yeah.
With or without, with or without these thugs hanging around our city.
And now they even want to go to Chicago.
I hope not.
It's, it's, it's unbelievable what's happening.
But, you know, there is crime, but there's crime that's still taking place despite this massive military presence.
And, uh, you know, the crime has gone down.
We all know this.
But they're not having any effect other than to intimidate the residents and, um, and just be a very bad precedent for this country that we might never get out of.
That's sort of what I was, along the lines of what I was thinking.
I mean, like I said, they're just standing around.
So nothing they seem to be doing seems to be working.
They don't look like they're actively doing anything, in my opinion.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Well, I wish I could tell you, uh, try this experiment with them, but that could be dangerous.
Just, um, just, uh, keep your eyes open and notice whatever you can.
Okay.
You know, I'll probably have to run that through Alex first.
I mean, well, we live in a country where ICE is publishing posters using Nazi slogans, which way, American man, as is the header of the poster.
I mean, you can't, you really can't be, you can't be surprised, but you really can't be surprised at what is happening daily in this administration.
You really got to hope.
Mm-hmm.
I hope that this is able to be cleaned up quite effectively afterwards.
Yeah.
There is an afterwards.
Yeah.
And, uh, making good decisions, I think, is, uh, the key to that.
Uh, and, um, uh, paying attention, not giving up.
And I, I think everybody listening can share that.
Right, right.
I agree with so much on that show, and that kind of scares me.
All right.
Good hearing from you.
Um, I have an idea.
Go ahead.
You know, Rebel calls in the show so many times.
I mean, well, I call in the show most of the times when I'm able to, so I'm, I'm just trying to be slightly less of a douche than he is.
But, you know, how about, like, what if, you know, you, you program, you program your phone so that when he calls in, it transfers him, uh, into a simulation matrix where he thinks he's on the show, but it's actually not.
All the hosts, voices, are synthesized by AI, and they're answering his questions for a couple minutes.
As the usual, Rick, hang up on him after a few minutes.
He thinks he's called in, he thinks he's got an answer to his pointless telecommunication, telecommunications equipment related answer, and.
What if we told you that this is a simulation?
How would you know?
How would you know, how do we know that we're not all living in a simulation matrix?
We know.
Maybe you don't.
Oh, well, you can think yourself and see how.
Yeah, that's how we know.
Oh.
He was programmed to say that.
Another topic I'd like to get to, something I recently learned about a month ago at Descon.
Mm-hmm.
Um, apparently there is one speaker who submitted two talks, two talks that were completely generated, mostly, well, generated by artificial intelligence.
They are titled, de-virtualizing the dragon, automated unpacking and de-obfuscation of nested VM-based protectors.
What a lovely name.
And then the second talk, because you really couldn't believe this person got not one, but two talks, uh, approved by the lovely staff at Descon.
The second talk is called, jailbreaking the hive mind, finding and exploiting kernels of vulnerabilities in the EBPF subsystem.
And, you know, what makes us funny is that Descon, historically, has had such a tight, rigorous, you know, specifications for what kind of talks get accepted or not.
And, well, I mean, this gives the, uh, people saying Descon is such a corporate, uh, sleaze fest now, it gives them more ammunition, definitely, for sure.
Well, how, I'm curious, how were the talks?
Those talks were approved, you said?
That means they had to be given.
They were approved.
They were given by a, the speaker.
I'm not gonna drop, I don't think it'd be helpful to drop his name, but I already gave you the name of his two talks, so you can go look them up.
But I assume, I assume they're human, right?
A human showed up.
How could we really, well, according to third-party reports, it was a real, live human being who came up there, gave the talk.
Um, the slides are up there online, you can look at, so.
So, when the human, uh, gave the talk, did they, did they admit that this was AI generated?
No.
Then how do you know?
Um, I'm just going off reports, uh, other people, uh, many others who attended the talk have given, um.
Other people?
I mean, right.
Okay.
Well, if you look at the slides themselves, you can see there is some degree of, uh, human involved, uh, involvement.
Um, you know, somebody had to go, uh, make the slides, uh, you know, set how, uh, typeface they wanted to use, the colors.
They put emojis in there specifically, but, um, according to other people, they're saying that the attendees at this talk were feeling pretty confused.
And, you know, most of them, I think, the general consensus is that this is AI slop.
And if you look at the code for this particular project that this, uh, speaker presented, called VMDragonslayer, it's on GitHub.
Um, it seems to be, you know, a lot of vibe coding going on.
You know, the Fumlamlam, where people just ask AI to write code for them and not do too much reading of the output, which is severely distaste...
Is it going to catch that one right?
...state of computer programming in general?
I mean, if people are not going to understand the languages they're writing, then the quality of code is going to go...
Yeah, not understanding things is the theme of the future, I think.
You know, if you already don't understand how technology works, we're going to understand even less if we let AI make all the decisions.
Yeah, this was already an ongoing thing before the advent of artificial intelligence and large language models in that people were not writing secure code.
And there was a lot of, um, uh, lack of understanding about, um, of, about how you format, how you set things up, how you debug, how you, um, using, use tools, other tools to audit your own work, like fuzzing or whatever techniques.
I'm not a developer myself, but this has been something that, uh, we're sort of revisiting with, uh, a new, uh, new bottle, same wine.
I think that was referenced in the show, but yeah, like, it's, it's important to, like, get the fundamentals for stuff down before you start trying to do stuff at a high level.
And then, God, present it at DEF CON, I, I would be so embarrassed to, uh, spend time on a stage with stuff I didn't really understand trying to sound like, it just seems like a form of, uh, cosplay.
I would have had fun with it.
I mean, you know, if everybody was fooled, um, I would have made that the topic of the, of the whole, but two talks, I don't know how you get away with two talks.
I could see it being fun.
Yeah.
But wow.
If I was trying to take myself seriously with that level of work, I mean, you're just missing so many fundamentals.
Yeah.
I mean, this happens with certain languages that you use cause they're not all the same and they have different abilities to, I don't know, to, to be concise or to be a readable even to, uh, other developers so that they can audit it.
Um, that's all important knowledge that you, you gain over time, I think.
And to just jump in and like be an expert because you're vibe coding, that's, that's some real foolhardy stuff, but I guess we're living in an era where people accept that, but I don't think it's, I don't think it's great.
I just like the word vibe coding.
Yeah.
I mean, that, that sounds like, yeah, it's like vaporwave, right?
Um, anyway, that, that's just my take on it that like, yeah, we, we should really scrutinize people that are coming through with all this like, uh, slop, as you say, masquerading as real, like intellectual investment.
Um, I'd rather see smaller snippets that actually make sense that can be explained that instead of just like, oh yeah, I've done all this work.
It's all in GitHub.
Like that itself, um, given a pass is, is really, um, it's not edifying.
You're not advancing knowledge.
You're not teaching people what your process was.
You're not showing your work very well.
Exactly.
You're showing work, but it's not yours.
It's not your work.
You're not comprehending.
And, um, I think that's a bad example, as you said, going forward, because there are a lot of people in school.
I know, I know, um, uh, being software developers, probably not a big ticket, um, major as it was when I was coming up in school.
Everybody wanted to be a developer.
Everybody wanted to go work for Google.
I feel so sorry for them.
I know it's, I'm super feeling, super smug that that's not the path I took.
Uh, when for a very long time, I felt like I was screwed out of, uh, any chance at anything because that was lauded so much.
But I think to realize we have generations of people coming up that they learned like with, with, uh, learning, you know, they learned code through like toys and learning.
And it was like a very, a very big part of early education.
And if it wasn't to just like, to just like adopt this kind of really simplistic coding and call yourself sort of a developer in some way is to really spit in the face of a lot of shoulders.
And, and, and, uh, people that toiled with this stuff over the years.
And I, I just find that really pathetic.
It's like, we've run into the same thing.
I can't help but come up with parallels to the old telephone systems and, um, the way modern telephone systems work and people not understanding dial tone or not understand.
I mean, we evangelize, we try to talk about this.
We don't fault people, but we certainly don't like respect them if they come through and they don't know what switching systems, um, evolved into the current system that we use now.
Or, you know, yeah, I mean, you should kind of know what like SS seven is.
You should kind of know like how the pots network developed and, and where it all fit in.
And not to say that you can't jump in and use the modern tools, but this is a great example that we really, we should, we should show this stuff for not for being incomplete and laud people that put in the effort and show an understanding of it.
And having this slip by, I think I know DEF CON will probably, they'll survive, they'll evolve.
They'll come up with a way to like maybe catch stuff if that's indeed what happened in this case.
But it doesn't, it doesn't, uh, bolster their identity or their brand to have stuff like this slip through a lot.
And as a community and as a broader society, like we really need to encourage people to understand this stuff.
And if they don't, they need to admit it.
It's not cool to just like finesse your way through this stuff because if you end up working someplace and you got a gig and you got down, um, through lying a whole bunch.
And then all of a sudden you're in production running critical systems for something because you just lied your way through and got a job and got a position and stature.
That's really bad.
It's really bad professionally.
And it's really bad for all the systems I was talking about being eaten alive.
Well, hopefully that addresses all your issues.
Caller.
Well, it just goes to show that, you know, future generations won't go to DEF CON for the talks.
They'll just go there for the drinking and partying.
Well, that's why anybody goes to Vegas.
But, uh, but yeah, you know, uh, there's, there's, these things can happen at any conference, I think, including ours.
So, uh, we all have to, you know, watch out and have, um, this is fairly new, you know, something that a lot of people did not think was going to happen.
And it is, and we all have to deal with it, uh, one way or another.
And hopefully we agree on the way to deal with it.
Well, apparently in 2019, there was a similar incident at Black Hat, which on the scale of hacker conferences is lower, probably lower than DEF CON.
Well, it's not really a hacker conference so much as a, uh, a security conference for corporate people.
Right, right.
I should have called it a security conference, but a similar incident happened in 2019 where somebody tried to do the same thing.
And they ended up obliterating the talk from the track, uh, destroying the recording.
Oh, really?
Wow.
Okay, well, that's, uh, that's not something I would recommend because, uh, you don't want to just pretend something didn't happen.
Right.
Leave that to the government.
The talk about Burger King and how they got epically pwned, you know, accessing the drive-thru recordings, that reminds me of what turns out to be Kevin Mitnick's favorite prank.
He did when he was 16 years old.
He, uh, used a radio to lit, uh, five, I believe it was a five-watt, uh, radio, transceiver.
Mm-hmm.
You know, I looked this up before the show because I was, and they don't mention specifically what kind of radio he used.
I'd probably have to read his book.
I'd assume it would be.
It'd be what?
Hello?
It sounds like the internet dropped for them because I know they're using a VoIP system.
How do you know that?
Eh, it's just the way it faded.
Oh.
It just seemed like, uh, packets.
Let's wait for them to disappear because they might come back.
It's not hung up yet.
Okay, so if, uh, if the caller can hear us, we're still here.
You're not.
Uh, wherever you are is not connected to, uh, what we're doing.
But please feel free to pipe up when you come back.
If you come back.
Uh, Gila has her hand up, so she gets called on next.
I do.
Um, Kyle, there was a comment in the chat from the most interesting man in the world, um,
that I wanted to share with you.
Wait, is that the name they gave themselves, or is that your opinion?
Um, the name they gave themselves, the handle they're using on YouTube is, um, two X's.
So I assumed it's the Dos Equis guy.
Oh.
Ah, yes.
Good on you.
Yeah, no, that's, that's, that's great.
What was their comment?
Oh, our caller is gone officially.
All right.
Uh, go ahead.
Shout out, shout out to Kyle for all his work on the audio.
From a listener perspective, it sounds great.
And it seems like the callers can hear Emmanuel.
And that's all that matters, isn't it?
But yes.
Thank you.
Um, we're doing our best.
Yes.
Doing our best with what we have.
Kyle has really, um, um, uh, bent over backwards to get this working.
And actually we've established that the callers can hear us too.
Yes.
So that's, uh, Alex, you're back.
You've been, you've been away.
You've been on the phone.
Uh, I've been dealing, I've been dealing with things.
Been dealing with things.
Yeah.
The Wednesday night things that always seem to happen on Wednesday nights.
Prices, you know, but, uh, but I'm, I'm here, I'm here and I'm chiming into, to echo
the same sentiment of, um, gratitude for Kyle's work here on the board.
Well, we built a lot.
Uh-huh.
We built a lot and, uh, it's only going to get better.
It's not going away.
Like we definitely built out, uh, all we need so we can add and, and, and upgrade and, and
make it better.
And it just, it, it's a labor of love.
So we're, we're going to find time.
Appreciate you.
Appreciate you.
Um, before we take the next caller, um, which is it the same caller as before or is
it?
I don't know.
Okay.
Well, um, I, I want to, um, I found the, the list of seven dirty words.
Uh, that basically was defined from the, uh, George Carlin routine that was played on
WBAI.
Yeah.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Hey, hang on.
Hang on here a second.
Sorry, man.
Yeah.
You didn't know them by heart.
You had to look this up.
I want to get it right.
Cause no, I was wrong.
I said, I said the C word wasn't in there and it is in there.
It is in there.
Oh yes, it definitely.
I should have, I could have told you.
You should have stood up for the C words.
You didn't.
Talks up a motherfucker in tits.
All right.
Yeah, fine.
But you know, you have to say it clearly and that's what I'm going to do right now.
I'm going to say it clearly without somebody talking at the same time and without another
word, uh, interfering.
Then we're going to try something else.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
This is so going to get sampled.
Why would this get sampled?
Anybody can do it.
Just do it.
Make it nice and clear for, for everybody.
So basically I'm going to try the, the goal is to have all seven dashes in a row.
Now that might not happen because there's other syllables on some of the words.
So you might get those syllables that aren't obscene in the FCC's eyes.
Make sure you enunciate.
I'm going to enunciate.
This is part of speech therapy.
All right, here we go.
Uh, wait, I got my glasses on.
There we go.
Um, shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker.
Tits.
There.
Now, uh, thank you very much.
Uh, that's, that's a low in my radio career.
Uh, but, uh, the, the goal here is on the captioning that's on YouTube, uh, in a couple
of days, uh, they have taken to putting dashes through what they consider to be obscenities.
I want to know if, if I get seven dashes or if I get a bunch of dashes, uh, with words
like maybe cock and mother not dashed out.
And like I said, tits shouldn't even be on the list.
That should not, it's ridiculous.
Piss.
I hear that on TV, commercial TV.
So I don't know what, what they're thinking.
Yes, Rob, please.
Um, for those interested in looking up the seven dirty words on Wikipedia, you might notice
a photograph in the, on the article.
And, uh, the photograph is a photo I took, um, in an old WBAI broadcast booth in which
there are big posters of the WBAI and 99.5 FM, um, call sign.
And also a poster of the seven dirty words, um, shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker,
and tits.
And that is on the Wikipedia article for the seven dirty words themselves.
It's on the Wikipedia article for WBAI.
It's on the Wikipedia article for the case FCC versus Pacifica foundation, um, which was,
uh, spawned from playing this, uh, George Carlin bit on the air.
Um, and that's, that's actually something that I'm quite proud of.
Um, the fact that, uh, the photo I took has been illustrating these, uh, these articles.
And yeah, it's a, it's a, it was always fun when we would be in that broadcast booth on
the air and, you know, you'd have one of those moments where you're trying to think of something
to say and you look around the booth and there is a big poster of the very things you cannot
say in the booth on the air.
And I was, I was always really wary of that thing for the exact reason.
It's like, okay, we're here in the radio station and you have a giant poster board of all the
things we're not supposed to say.
How is this not transmuting somehow subconsciously to somebody who just blurts out one of the
words?
Yeah.
We had to put a big sign saying, do not say these words, uh, not, uh, this is something
that's going to stick in your mind and, and, and you're just going to say it naturally.
Uh, yeah, have a call.
Uh, okay.
We'll get to that in a second.
Uh, but I just wanted to ask people if they're comfortable doing this, uh, later on, uh, when
we finish up, uh, I want to get that long dash.
I already said shit five times in a row.
Uh, I like to say it five times in a row, but I also want to test to see if it differentiates
between people.
So if we are all comfortable saying shit five times in a row in succession, we see if we
get a, a, a five person line of, of, uh, dashes across the screen when this thing does
get captioned in a couple of days.
That's the experiment I'd like to, uh, to try after this call.
Is everybody comfortable with that?
Or does anybody have?
Yeah, but, um, but I think we should vote on the expletive that we're going to state.
I don't know why you have to unilaterally choose shit.
Well, it does.
Shit rolls off the tongue.
I guess so.
And I regret, I regret saying that as soon as I said it.
Have you yet been able to master baseball?
Well, okay, you're referring to a previous show where I just unfortunately said that
phrase.
Um, things, these things happen, Gila, and they happen to everybody.
Um, yeah, um, Alex, pick your obscenity and we'll do that later.
Just, I don't let it be piss or tits because it's debatable whether those are really obscenities.
That's true.
And, and yeah.
Not the C word, maybe?
Because I don't like saying that word.
Yeah, I don't like saying it either.
It doesn't roll off the tongue either.
So, yes, if we were all just saying cocksucker over and over and over again, that wouldn't
work because, because, you know, I, I, that at least one syllable, that probably is okay.
All right, let's take this call.
Good evening.
You're on off of the government time.
Go ahead.
Okay.
So on the show tonight, you know, on the air, on WBAI show, you said that Burger King
drive-through conversations are going to some AI system.
Uh-huh.
So how, maybe you can hack their system by virtue of what you say at a drive-through.
So how would that work?
I'm not sure of the details.
Uh-huh.
You can see if the things you say, um, being analyzed by AI.
Okay.
And, uh, by choice of what you say, can, can you find vulnerabilities in the AI system?
Right.
Like, could you add clutter or things that the AI might recognize as a command, like ignore
all previous instructions or whatever that phrase is and, and other things that might
trigger it to do something outside of what it's meant to interpret?
Just like plain transcribing you, like you said?
Right.
The idea is to see if you, what you say, going into the AI systems and somehow do something
that it's not intended to do.
So do you have any, any thoughts in mind as to something you might want to try?
Um, not at the moment.
Okay.
Well, we can, we can all explore this.
Like, like command line syntax, something from, from an instruction.
Keep in mind, there's a person in there too.
You're going to be speaking gibberish to somebody who's trying to get you food.
You just drop some commands in between your fry and your drink selection.
Uh-huh.
We can have a lot of fun with this.
Alex, I know you want to say something.
I'm not sure if the caller can hear you, but, uh, go ahead.
I, um, I actually, it just kind of totally slipped out of my mind.
I did have something to say to the caller about this and it's, it's gone now.
Well, that's a good test.
Caller, did you hear him?
I heard him, but I'm not sure exactly what he said.
Yeah.
That's, then you heard him the way, the way we hear him.
So that's, uh.
Yeah, that's Alex.
Yeah, that's Alex.
You got it.
Um, okay.
Well, was there any, any other, um, uh, thoughts that you might have, caller?
You said that you hate the M dash.
I do.
You said that on the show.
I do.
I, yeah.
What sort of dash are you going to get when, when, when, uh, Google translates or transcribes
what people say, except leaves, um, out as dashes that the, um, the, uh, thing.
Look, there's, there's only, there's only one, I'm a, I'm a peripherator.
I'm an editor.
There's only one dash that's acceptable to me.
And that's the hyphen because on a keyboard, you can't just generate an M dash.
I mean, yeah, I know you can, but it's not a key.
You know, there's the underline, but that's not a dash.
So everything that I have to process, it's, it's going to display weird unless it's a hyphen.
And that's just the way it's always been.
In, in windows, you can hold down the old key and type on the.
I know you can hold down the old key and do all kinds of magical things.
But, you know, I like to be right in front of me, letters and symbols.
And if it's not there, uh, there, there is some software somewhere that's going to display
it wrong, confuse people.
Yeah.
I know on a typesetting machine, this is not a problem.
I used to work on one of those, but, um, you know, what, what's wrong with hyphens?
They, they, they do the job.
Is this the, this is the longer dash?
Yeah, it's really, there's actually two, there's an N dash and there's an M dash.
So I know, I know about them.
I know about them.
And like, you're talking about getting Unicode or some kind of like jarble of characters instead
of the actual glyph.
It's just, look, when you have accents and umlauts and things like that, you know, that's,
that's important.
And, uh, you need to make sure those, those display properly.
I'm just saying you don't really need an M dash.
You don't really need an N dash when a hyphen does the same thing.
Uh, Alex, I know you have something to say about this.
Hang on, let's, let's see if we can hear him.
Go ahead.
First, I want to ask you a question and I guess just yes or no answer is fine, but were you
impressed when I submitted my column to you this month and I had actually pre-changed
all of the M dashes to dashes?
I was impressed by the fact that you took pains to point that out to me when you submitted it.
Yeah.
Uh, but I, I was, I would have been impressed had you not done that too.
Okay.
I see.
Yeah.
I mean, that wasn't a yes or no answer, but I guess, I guess that'll do.
But the, um, the, there are distinct usages and grammatical usages of these terms.
I mean, when you replace what should be an M dash with a hyphen, you're doing something
that's grammatically incorrect.
So a hyphen is not grammar.
My God.
Hyphen is not grammar.
It's punctuation.
Punctuation is different.
Well, I guess, you know, now we're quite literally playing semantics.
Who majored in English?
Uh, I did too.
I did.
I did.
You majored in English?
Which one are you asking?
Yeah.
Yeah, I did.
I did too.
At Stommer.
I did too.
Just like you.
But the M dash, you learn in law school.
That's disappointing to hear.
Yeah.
No, but, uh, the M dash is actually a much longer dash.
When you see it in person, most people use the M dash is the M dash and get it wrong.
And the M dash with the N for November is usually for denoting either like a date range or some
kind of page span, some kind of span of numbers.
That's what you use.
That for the M dash is really the one that you use to set off a certain clause in a sentence.
And the hyphen, you know, I actually don't even recall specifically.
I think that, no, I think the hyphen is used for like a page span dash type thing.
I know you're looking this up right now.
Well, no, I'm doing something else.
But, uh, actually we're being rude to our caller.
Uh, caller, do you have any other points before we lapse into this, uh, tangent?
Well, I've heard of, uh, M dash because you're trying to make long dashes appear in the transcript
of, of what people say when they do it for your, for your, uh, overtime show.
Uh-huh.
Well, those dashes, yeah, I mean, we don't generate those, but the dashes that will appear
in, in, uh, you know, to replace obscenities, those will probably be M dashes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And the character and entity for M dash in HTML is ampersand M dash semicolon.
Yeah.
It's not something that I would just type easily, but, uh, I, I hear what you're saying.
Okay.
Anyway, thanks so much for your call.
You're welcome.
Take care.
And that's going to be the last call because boy, we've, we've gone overtime this time
and on overtime.
Uh, but, um, Alex, okay.
So I'm, I'm going to meet your challenge here or you're going to meet my challenge, hopefully.
Uh, so.
Uh, yeah.
M dash.
Okay.
You know what?
I've, I've decided to accept M dash as my savior.
Uh, and I am currently right now on a, um, Ubuntu system.
Uh, I have VI open VI as a text editor.
Tell me how to make an M dash display.
Now I get, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll start.
Here's a hyphen.
I typed hyphen.
There's a hyphen there.
Can you do the same thing with an M dash?
And please only have a few minutes.
Let me say, we just got to figure out what the ASCII code for an M dash.
Don't you know what the, what the code is for the M dash that you use all the time that
you're standing up here and defending.
Yeah.
That was one of the questions for hacker.
Yeah.
It's all one five one.
Everybody knows.
Okay.
Wait, obviously.
Do I hold it down at the same time?
I hit alt for alt and then 0151 and then let go of alt.
Okay.
Oh, one, five, one alt.
Oh, one, five, one.
One.
Yep.
Then what?
And then you just release alt and it didn't play.
Nothing shows up on my screen.
I'll hit return.
I didn't get a, actually it was in, you might be having an ID 10 tier.
I think you screwed up my system here.
I can't, nothing's working.
Wow.
It's, it's totally screwed up now.
Thanks.
Thanks, Alex.
Look at that.
You put me into, into, into some weird mode.
Let's, let's try that again.
Alt what?
Alt 0151.
And let go of alt.
Yeah.
And, and that totally freezes up my screen when I do that in VI.
That's crazy.
Okay.
You know what?
I'm going to, I'm going to go to a prompt now.
Maybe it'll work.
Maybe it'll work differently.
I'll make a comment from the chat.
Someone says, I don't know what it is, but I bet it's easier than the shortcut to quit.
The shortcut to quit.
What?
VI?
It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's very true.
Escape, shift, colon, Q, bang.
It's colon, Q, bang, exclamation point, because people don't know what the hell bang is.
Bang.
Yes.
You're right.
You're right.
Okay.
I'm going to try this at the prompt, Alex, and this is your, your last chance.
So it's alt.
What now?
Zero, one, five, one, one, five, one, let go of alt.
No, nothing happens.
I'm sorry, Alex.
When you can tell me how to make an M dash appear easily in a simple text editor, then
I will believe that.
Okay.
Another.
Try this.
Try, try control shift U.
Hold on.
Should I?
Oh my God.
I don't have that many fingers.
Yeah.
Jesus.
Okay.
Should I be in VI for this or should I be in a prompt?
I think you need to change your keyboard layout.
Yeah.
I need to do all these things just to make a goddamn M dash.
Yeah.
Hold on a second.
No, no, no, no.
Control, control capital U.
Should we take this call?
Control capital U.
How about that, Alex?
Control K and capital M.
Yeah, so control shift U.
Okay.
Control shift U.
And then do, and then type two, zero, one, four.
Wait, do I have my, do I have my fingers still down on any of these keys?
No.
Okay.
Uh, hold on a second.
Then, so then.
I'm going to try this.
I'm going to try this again because I got totally distracted.
Okay.
Say it quicker so that I, I don't.
Control shift and then U.
Okay.
Yeah.
Then what?
Okay.
Uh, now you have to type in two, zero, one, four, enter.
It shows two, zero, one, four in my screen, by the way.
Okay.
Hit enter.
I did.
Okay.
Then hop on one foot.
You are proving my point so marvelous.
Yeah.
I just.
Oh, you know, now I'm reading the comment more, more closely.
And it's saying that what I told you to do didn't work.
Why would you put that?
Oh my God.
So that makes sense.
I was just.
We should take this call.
Why?
I said the last call.
This person already has gone against our directives.
All right.
It's more interesting.
Close your eyes and jump.
The whole point was for you to optimize accepting things, not for how easily you could do the thing
you don't want people to do.
But of course we spent a lot of time on it.
So let's take this call.
All right.
One more call.
This is the last call to everybody out there.
All right.
Past or present.
And we're going to do the obscenities in a minute.
Good evening.
You're on off the cover time.
Yes.
Hi.
I'm glad you took my.
I'm glad you took my call.
But what I wanted to say, just a couple of quick things.
I know you got to go.
But I wanted to say, first of all, as far as the phones and the new things, the new technology
that I would like to see in phones, I would like to see phones be able to do a lot of
medical stuff.
So I would like a phone to be able to take your blood pressure.
I'd like you to be able to use your phone to do scans, like CAT scans, MRIs, and all
those type of things.
As crazy as that sounds, I really think this would happen at some point.
And it would save a lot of lives.
Like, imagine if you could just use your phone to do a CAT scan on yourself or something and
look inside your body.
Well, you're absolutely spot on.
A lot of portable ultrasounds are being developed that are very small and coupled with wireless
handsets.
That's ultrasound, a CAT scan, MRI.
Those use much different physics and, of course, have all kinds of esoteric antimatter and nitrogen
and liquid oxygen, all this crazy stuff.
So those systems are a little bit harder.
Don't really scale down, if you'll accept the turn of phrase.
But ultrasound is something that has been used in smaller and smaller platforms.
Also, I'm thinking of like pulse oximeter.
Um, uh, there are very small ones now that can, um, test your blood oxygen and pulse and
stuff like that, which is something you mentioned, but, uh, or even things like, um, a sonogram
or like a X, X, or I already said ultrasound or sonogram or something that you could use,
uh, like on veins or something, uh, that just below the skin surface, you're, you're close.
I mean, there's, we're, we're very close to having that as something that is merely a component
that is integrated into a new model.
But I love that.
Thank you for answering the question.
Those are great ideas.
Can I, can I just ask a question here?
Why are we still calling these things phones?
Because they're not doing phone things.
They're doing everything.
But, you know, we actually use the phone part less than any of the other apps.
I also want to say something else.
Um, you, there's a caller who called in earlier and he said something about the National Guard
in DC just standing around and they're not doing anything and, and so forth.
The truth is just standing around is a deterrent.
I mean, it may seem like they're not doing anything, but they're just being there.
I'm not even a Trump supporter.
I'm, I consider myself more of a centrist than anything.
But on this particular issue, um, I think something like this needs to be done.
D.C. to me, I'm not sure why he's even doing this in D.C.
because there's not any kind of crazy amount of crime going on there.
It's a, it's a unique city.
It's a unique city.
He can, he can do it in D.C. because it's federalized.
He can do it for 30 days.
So that's, you know, it's kind of like.
Yeah, but there's not, I mean, I mean, D.C. is, I mean, you, you go, you go to Memphis,
you go to Chicago.
I mean, those are real war zones, so I'm not even sure what he's, it seems like a waste
of time.
Well, he won't go to any city that's in a red state or a red city.
That's the problem.
This is the thing.
This is the issue I have with this.
To me, this, something like this needs to be done, in my opinion.
Something like what he's doing, something drastic.
But the problem with him is that it's all politics, and he's just doing it to embarrass Democrats.
So he's only going into cities with Democratic governors and so forth.
He's not going into red states.
Like, he's not going to, Memphis is like the number one most dangerous city in America.
He's not going there because it's in a red state.
Right.
For sure.
For sure.
Yeah.
No, you raise a very good point.
I just, I just would take some exception to saying that as the deterrent, because,
you know, crime is still happening.
You can have a million soldiers in the street, but if they're not where the crime is taking
place, what are they going to be able to do?
Yeah, we used to, we'd notice this.
It's not a long-term solution, too.
It's not, it's not a long-term, you can't, you can't have them there forever.
If not, you have to have some other plan eventually.
Go ahead, Kyle.
It reminds me of, like, surveillance we would observe in London, for instance.
Yeah.
The crime goes where the cameras are not, and if they're everywhere, that's fine, but
there's still places that people understand aren't actually being filmed.
But you do have, you do raise a good point.
I mean, it is, it is impressive.
It is a show of certain sort of force.
But is it comprehensive, as you said, and does it actually have a correlation?
Is the cost, does that work out?
The cost of having these people there and the menace of it versus the actual deterrence?
Is that something statistically we can actually measure?
The negative effects it has on our society, because we then think this is normal, this
is how it should be, when it absolutely is not how it should be.
Yeah, crime needs to go down.
That's true everywhere.
But crime has gone down, something that, you know, you can't really dispute because
the facts and figures are there.
I know if you're a victim of crime, you're not going to feel that way, but that is the
case.
So it's not, it's a manufactured crisis.
It's not, you know, something that's suddenly skyrocketing.
It's a problem everywhere.
It's being dealt with.
And, you know, cities hire more cops if they feel they're needed.
And to have, you know, these troops literally march in, it just is a very bad message on so
many levels.
Oh, and let me just, I'm just going to ask a quick question and I'm going to hang up
to listen to your response online.
I'm not sure if you touched on this already, but did you have any thoughts about the Charlie
Kirk assassination today or killing today?
Other than...
Hang up and listen to what you say about this.
Okay, thanks.
And that's the last call for tonight.
But other than it's a horrible thing and we cannot let our nation move into a scenario
where this becomes normal, because this is not who we are.
It's not who any of us are.
You know, there's probably very little I would agree with somebody on this particular person,
but that's not the point.
That's not the point.
I don't think anybody is actually focusing on that today because it's a horrible, it's
a scary thing if this becomes the society we live in.
And so we all have to band together, I think, and, you know, just condemn this kind of thing,
obviously.
Yeah, we all have various opinions about this.
And the point, I think, that we agreed on is that it's really just, it's too fresh.
It's an emerging event and it's not really in our wheelhouse for the topics that we discussed
for the shows.
It does, I mean, certainly we go into the broader political and social context very often,
but at a time like this, at a moment like this, and certainly with the memorial tomorrow that's
going to be a big deal in this country, it just really didn't seem like...
The 9-11 memorial.
Correct.
Charlie Cook Memorial.
But all of that is going to be, I think, front of mind.
And I think our opinions of it will evolve and change too, and for us to just sort of errantly
start commenting on it, I mean, there's a lot of takes, a lot of feelings about it.
There's nothing else to say other than this is horrible, this should not happen.
Yeah, it just wouldn't advance it.
And if, you know, I see anybody trying to take control of the narrative, I'm going to
be very upset with them, no matter what side they're on, because this is not something
that is a political issue in that way.
But again, we're not going to talk about that right now.
Go ahead.
Alex, go ahead.
Yeah, I won't comment on that, but I tend to agree with your views.
This is just generally bad, right?
It's not, you know, one way or the other.
But I want to talk about the federal law enforcement, or rather the federalization of the military
here for law enforcement purposes.
You know, it's described having these troops all around and as some kind of deterrent to
commit crimes or some other purpose that has a law enforcement angle.
There's actually a federal law, and this makes a lot of sense, called the Posse Comitatus
Act that prevents the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement
purposes.
And this is a law that originated as part of reconstruction in the South, because they
were sick of the North's military lording over them.
And so a law was passed that says, look, you can't use the military for law enforcement purposes
like this.
And that holds true when it's the National Guard only if it's a federal government.
If it's some kind of federalized military force, they can't be used for law enforcement purposes.
But there's this weird distinction that if the National Guard is a state National Guard
and it's motivated by or rather mobilized by the governor of that state, then that doesn't
violate the Posse Comitatus Act.
And so what you have is you have red states literally sending troops into blue states.
That is what's happening.
If that doesn't sound like the beginning of a civil war, I don't know what does.
It's crazy.
You know, so there's these these very weird, interesting, I think, legal distinctions that
have origins in the civil war.
There are guns in blue states, too, and I just don't think we need this is the point of having
a functional and meaningful political recourse in this country and to treat political factions
and states and places in this country like they're they're under occupation or something
is like is really the antithesis antithesis of like the point of our the ideals in our
sort of broader national identity.
And we really should protect the ability to disagree.
Right.
Like you can you can have differences with some of the states, some of the parts of the country,
some of the political entities, but you respect their right to exist, even if it's, you know,
abhorrent.
And I think characterizing people, demonizing people, you can say it's just it's not as
productive as actual dialogue about the issues, about what needs to be worked on and what and
and what sort of analysis, where the critical analysis lies, not in people in broad general
terms.
And yeah, it's just it's it's a little disturbing to be citing or stoking things like civil war
because I don't know, like the way that one went, I mean, the sides that are advocating
for this got their asses handed to them.
So, like, if that's what they want to revisit, I guess that's cool for them.
But it's not going to be cool for the people who have to fight it again.
Except Trump has nukes.
Cool.
I'm just saying, you know, the president of the United States back then was not on the
side of the Confederates.
Right.
And I just don't think him nuking his own country would go well either.
Yeah.
How many things that Trump has done?
Would you say that about that he's done anyway?
I don't know if that's something that changes the political winds to something a little bit
more radioactive than I mean, I mean, I guess I guess that's the direction we're going to go.
I don't know, but I think that's really foolish.
This guy was the president of peace, he kept saying, and he literally has started war.gov.
I mean, God.
Alex, have you hacked that yet?
Have you figured out a way into war?
That's the domain to hack.
Yes, it's unbelievable.
I want a manual at war.gov.
That's what I want.
That's, yeah, it's crazy.
Give me that account.
Okay, so we have to do the obscenity.
Have you picked an obscenity, Alex?
And tell us what it is.
I think we'd stick with the original.
I think we'd do shit.
Shit works.
I think we'd do shit again.
Shit is good.
Easy.
Fuck is too much.
It's also, you have to restart your mouth, you know, fuck, fuck.
Whereas shit, it just kind of works better.
I don't know why.
Motherfuckers, too many syllables.
Too many syllables, and mother would slip through.
Yeah, that's right.
I don't know who gets to decide this word is obscene.
At what point do you say, that's an obscene word, you know?
All right, so everybody, get the kids, get everybody, everybody in the room.
Some guidelines here.
Try and say it the same way.
Evenly spaced.
Leave a little bit of space between each word.
All right?
Not too much space.
And don't step on each other.
Don't overact.
And if somebody messes up, we've got to start from the beginning again, because the idea
is to get five of us saying it five times in a row, so that we have a total of 25 times.
Yes.
Here's what I propose.
We need an order to do it, then, and then the other person just needs to jump right in.
So why don't we go in alphabetical order?
Well, I can't think that way, but...
All right, but that would be Alex, Emanuel, Gila, Kyle, Rob.
All right.
Okay.
So just remember...
Can we each say it once and, like, keep going around, or do we each say it five times in a row?
Say it five times in a row, and let's establish a pace.
Let's try to keep the same pace.
But let's remember the person who comes before you.
That's all you have to remember.
So Alex, I'm remembering you.
Kyle, remember me.
No, I'm sorry, Gila.
Yeah, you're already confusing me.
I know, Gila.
Gila, Kyle, Rob.
Okay.
And I think the pacing should be, like, shit, shit, shit, like that.
Is that good?
Can we all do that?
Yeah, that's good.
Yeah, I think we can do that.
And try not to talk over anybody, and let's keep the same pace and not make any extra noise.
And you start.
Alex, when you're ready.
Okay, give me a second.
All right.
In three, two, one.
Shit.
Shit.
Shit.
Shit.
Shit.
Shoulders!
Shit.
Shit.
Shit.
Shit.
Shit.
Shit.
Shit.
Shit.
Shit.
Shit.
Shit.
shit shit
shit
oh my god that was beautiful
that was beautiful I was so
afraid I was going to start laughing
I was so close
I was really close
and I can only imagine somebody just tuning in
wondering what the hell that was all about
but we'll find out in a couple of days
we'll see if we got a whole line of dashes on YouTube
or if somehow
it slipped through
buffalo buffalo shit
this is the 96 minute mark
what's the sentence Kyle you've got to get it right
buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo
buffalo buffalo
I think you have an extra buffalo in there
look it up on wikipedia I swear to god
all those buffalo that's a wikipedia page
I think it's what six times or seven times
buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo
no you have an extra buffalo
I'm sure
it's buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo
buffalo buffalo
that's the shit and it makes sense
That's the thing.
It makes sense.
This evening has been a highlight of my career as a broadcaster.
It really has.
We've gone everywhere tonight.
Yeah, people are now saying, what were you doing last night?
Oh, just listening to the radio.
Oh, yeah, this was going over the radio.
Shit, I mixed up the two shows.
Oh, no, no.
Yeah.
That would have been fun, though.
Yeah.
Would have been fun.
All right, folks, this has been fun.
This has been a joy.
But we must end it now.
So please write to us, OTH at 2600.com, if you have any comments.
Please, please hack something, tell people about it, and otherwise be kind.
Hacking is good.
Drugs are bad, but hacking is good.
What?
Well, I mean, depends on what you mean by drugs.
I get what you mean.
Yeah.
The kind of drugs that Mr. Mackey is.
And hydrate, drink water, and walk is dead.
Okay.
We're all quoting South Park, apparently, but what Kyle said is, walk is dead.
Something I would disagree with.
But, yeah.
All right, we're going to sign off.
Thank you, everybody.