we'll let the machine get that i am busy a very good evening the time is just about 7
01 p.m you are listening to radio station wbai 99.5 fm wbai.org everywhere and it is just about time for
another exciting edition of off the hook
the telephone keeps ringing so i ripped it off the wall i cut myself while shaving
now i can't make a call we couldn't get much worse but if they could they would
bum diddly bum for the best expect the worst i hope that's understood bum diddly bum
a very very good evening to you
program is off the hook rob t firefly here with you and i am joined by gila good evening
and out in skype land we have alex
alex can you hear us
alex can you hear us can you feel us near you
skype land not skype land signal land whatever land it is i'm wondering if the land can hear us
well while we work on that let's uh see what uh okay alex are you with us
i am i am now you are here we go yep okay i turned you up and turned you up and turned you up
and then you blew my ears out okay yeah there we are yeah it's a it's a process this uh this program
it's a celebratory evening tonight so it really is it's uh you know it's a it's a cultural uh sort
of day of celebration and uh alex i understand uh you're you're out there running around there
out there in the world somewhere what you up to i i am i'm in florida i'm uh believe it or not i'm
actually sitting in my my little sister's driveway here because we've just showed up for
uh christmas eve dinner here um and so i i won't be able to stay the entire show with with you guys
i'm sad to say but i will hang out for you know 15 20 minutes something like that just to to see
everybody off and um next week as well i think is new year's eve and so this may be the last show
of the year for me because uh i will be abroad next week um and maybe i maybe i'll try to join a
little bit after midnight my time because that's um i'll be in london next week so depending upon how
things are going over the chelsea arts club i will uh you know perhaps join but um i might be
i would anticipate being a little bit over served as well while joining the radio um next week but
um yeah i'm in i'm in florida here and kind of down in the fort myers area as some of the listeners
will probably remember my sister called in a couple of years ago during i think it was hurricane
ian right yes this place was was really devastated and i was around sanibel island today where you
could see still the vestiges of of that devastation but i have to say it's it's um being down in florida
for this particular christmas has been somewhat um emotionally raw for me too because this is the
first time that i've been back down to florida during christmas which i used to always do with
my mother and as you all will remember my mother passed away in july of 2024 so i haven't been back
down this way for christmas since then and got to see my stepfather a bit and then i didn't realize
you know how much it would affect me being back down here but not seeing my mother and we've been
staying at this resort that we went to with her down um in the cape coral area so not too far from
my sister but over on the west coast and my mother really loved this place we went there with her a
couple of years before she got sick and then she loved it so much that she went back with her friends
and so it was a special place for us and we decided that we would go back there and and it's been so
crazy to me because i'm i'm in the same space that we used to be in together but in a different time
and there's something about time and space that is you know that's brought back all these memories and
all these emotions that's that's made it a lot more resonant i think than than just being a memory of
itself like there's a vibration there of this particular memory and it allows me i think to to hold
hold hold those memories a little bit closer being in that same space even if it's at a different
time if that makes any sense at all i guess but that's my way of saying it's been uh it's been an
emotional time for me down here and um and i'm glad to see off the year with you guys for a little bit
of it likewise likewise and we we definitely look forward to next week if you can join us from
next year and let us know how it's all going to turn out before we get there um because again time and
and uh time wounds all heals and uh as as it is uh over here new york is uh pretty much as you left
it um i may have uh i may have been to your place and started a little fire this morning but um i i
think it it's probably under control that's fine with me that'd be totally fine i wouldn't mind if
the if my building actually um you know went up in flames as long as i'm not in it of course that
breathe that'd be totally fine um yeah but i i hear you guys are bracing for snow or something
right i mean it's like 85 degrees down here it's extraordinary yeah it's definitely not 85 degrees
here um no it i'm hearing somewhere in the area of like four to five inches of snow i think the band
is i think the full storm i think is eight on the high end but not in the city um i saw someone say
it's not going to be a white christmas but it'll be a white weekend which i think you have to be
very careful about quoting because that could be really bad in certain contexts yeah but no it's good
it'll be a nice snowy early weekend and um i will say that my big plan for next week is trying
to maybe go back to my office for a day i figure you know do it in the slow season
mm-hmm and when like there's no school so the trains will be a little emptier and
see how that process goes yeah and for for those who might not have listened to last week's show yet
you you had a bit of a medical situation which has necessitated you staying home for a while yes
i had emergency surgery two weeks ago tomorrow um and i did actually have my post-op follow-up with
my surgeon today who said everything is healing great and things are on the right track so hooray
excellent and uh we've had some well wishes from listeners and uh and folks and we definitely
appreciate those we definitely we we as a group do but i certainly do as as a human being it is
yes but i appreciate them too and you know this is about me well yeah most things are
but no the support i have received both from the on-air crew here and from our listeners who have wished
me and us well um it's been remarkable i was telling someone today that yeah we just spoke about
my health last week for 15 20 minutes and i appreciate having all of you folks in my life um
it really is a gift to have this community and to have the support of a lot of people as i'm
embarking on this particular healing journey that's that's definitely something that uh i think
comes into sharp relief for many right now uh many find this time of year um nice and celebratory
and everything many find this time of year uh particularly difficult to uh get through for a variety of
reasons but uh either way the importance of finding your folks and you know maintaining contact with
them saying hi checking in on folks uh cannot be overstated and i think those of us in the in
the bai community in the hacker community um and just anyone out there yeah if if there's someone you
haven't called in a while maybe maybe give them a call shoot them an email text them uh use some sort
of messaging app but uh yeah this is a time of year for saying hi and maybe being said hi too
and uh yeah go from there there's a lot going on in the news uh this this week that uh is really
of interest um pdfs pdfs um i know alex you probably can't stick around for too much of this
story but uh have you heard of this uh this fun little story that's been going on about uh certain
government uh published documents with red actions that did not stick as these things go
oh yes yeah i heard that you know not surprisingly like every time there's major redactions in
in some kind of public release there are crafty people that figure out how to unredact
these redactions and i didn't dig into it too much because i've been running around florida with my
family here but would i be right rob and gila and in saying that a lot of the redactions were
unredacted by things like cutting and pasting into google docs and other things it seems like
that's that's been one of the one of the most effective ways of unredacting these documents
yeah it's unbelievable yeah and it's not it's not particularly um like the like the things are
being unredacted so much as they were never redacted correctly in the in the first place most
people i think uh listening will know what a pdf file is it's a form of document uh you can
pull it up and it ostensibly looks the same on whatever computer whatever device whatever but
um when the government published the latest batch of documents from the epstein files
a lot of things were redacted you would see black bars across the text and
to redact something in a digital text file properly you have to do something that removes
the text data um and the redactors of these files didn't always do that they would
paste a black bar over the letters but the letters are still there and you can't see them
visually but if you select the text and copy and paste into anything notepad a text editor
um whatever you you would get the text that uh that you were supposed to not be able to see
so let me make sure i understand yes this is the redaction equivalent of writing a mean letter
in wingdings and leaving it in word so that whoever could just come and change the font and
find out what you were saying that is an old school hack and i love it um the the great thing about this
is that there are tools out there there is there is a tool um there's a tool on github by uh published
by free law project and it is known as x ray that's x dash and ray and uh the use of this tool
is to use it to check your pdf files to see if there are any bad red actions now obviously you're
supposed to use this um to double check things you're publishing maybe to make sure you're not
making any stupid mistakes but if you point this at any batch of files you may have hold of
um it will just as uh easily tell them if they have bad red actions in them so um interesting
stuff to play with there um free law project on github.com and people are are finding all kinds
of fun stuff people are uh saying you know there's uh there's a bit of uh unredaction here published by
on uh on twitter by someone called ed krasenstein um where a section that's been redacted says uh
defendants are also actively obstructed law enforcement by denying investigators access to
little saint james beyond its boat dock defendants also attempted to conceal their criminal sex
trafficking and abuse conduct by paying uh and krasenstein says this is one file in the epstein
files that was released and you won't believe how i unredacted these red actions i simply highlighted
the text copied it and pasted it in a document why is the trump administration hiding this stuff and
why are they so freaking incapable of doing everything how many other files are not really
redacted yeah and that's that's uh that's the important thing here they are not really redacted this
is not people breaking into anything to uh to access this information this is people taking the
documents that the government has put out there themselves and uh simply highlighting text and
copying and pasting from it um this is this is not like uh you know hacking the gibson here this
is copying and pasting and it is it is fantastic that it uh that it's working yes alex well i mean
the the the level of incompetence here is somewhat astounding to me i mean even after so many years of
of seeing the incompetence levels rising kind of like the like the sea levels here but the what
what i just don't understand is that adobe has this this redaction tool within the the you know the
program itself and it's specifically for redacting text and it's really simple and you just literally
make a square you draw a square over the text that you want to redact and it's redacted and it's
redacted because like you said rob it destroys the underlying text there right so that data that is
underlying that text becomes unusable and unreadable it's it's like corrupting that particular that
aspect of beta within that particular that uh that field that you have drawn and this is here
yeah go yeah well well here people just assume that a square that square that redaction square
is the equivalent is the same as any other black square that you could draw so they're drawing black
squares and then cutting and pasting and then redrawing those black squares around other text
and assuming that it's doing the same thing as the redaction black square but why would i mean you have
to in the um and to bring this back to like legal terms right you have this um rule of superfluity
right or that there shouldn't nothing should have surpluses right when you're interpreting a contract
all the language is supposed to be given meaning and you're supposed to you know assume that one
clause is not supposed to be surplus to another right so this redaction tool people are just
assuming is surplus to the square making tool right that it's just that it's the same thing
right as opposed to something else if it's the redaction tool you're supposed to just use
the redaction tool not draw a square i mean how many times do we have to do this over and over and
over again it's unbelievable you you want to know something funny about that we got an email from a
listener who didn't sign their email so i won't uh say their name but uh uh they write i have no clue
if you'll see this in time for an upcoming show but i've been informed via twitter that the likely
reason for the reason the recent epstein files redactions being easy to bypass is that it is
highly possible doge cut their acrobat pro subscription and acrobat pro is uh evidently the
version of acrobat with this redaction tool that would do it correctly so if uh if if the government
agency that was handling this was not able to pay their adobe bill because of doge cutting their
resources and uh ended up doing it the wrong way this is only a theory and uh they they passed us
some screenshots of what looked like uh you know uh some sort of conversation whether this is on social
media or privately i don't know but this was posted to twitter and uh it is it is people uh discussing
apparently that uh the doj masters are incredibly miserly with adobe pro subscriptions uh which is
what you need to do red actions correctly so uh as as our writer notice uh notes in the in the email
um it would be beautiful to to see the scumbags at doge get blamed for this mess so it might be it might
be just incompetence with the people using the tools it might be incompetence on an organizational level
um forced by uh current uh screw uppery or it could be all of the above it could be a bit of all of
the above yeah so this is truly a fascinating story or it could just be karma i mean i think i think karma
it just might be that that's the way to to describe it perhaps well unbelievable but to get to go back to
it in the last few minutes here that i'll hang on with you guys but um has anything been revealed
from these redactions that weren't actual redactions that were cut and pasted into notepad or google
docs or word or whatever i mean have there been any major revelations so far i mean i think there's a
lot of documents as i understand it to to uh to analyze there there is a lot and i don't know of any
particular uh reveals just because i i haven't been able to dig that far into the uh into the stories yet
but if there have been major revelations they have not been massively publicly shared
the thing that i'm most reminded of honestly is when children learn how to play cards and children
learn how to hold their cards in front of them so you can't see them and then they just flip them
real fast and say oh did you see oh did you see and no because they turn it around for two seconds
everything that has come out people are obviously looking they're parsing if there have been major
revelations um i don't believe they have been that publicly reported um alex uh in the last minute we
have with you um what do you what do you think of any sort of responsibilities people would have
with these files and publishing the information that um was ostensibly not supposed to be decimated
but uh or disseminated rather decimated um but but has been oh i think people are going to get in
trouble um and it seems like this was very likely a department of justice screw up is what it sounds like
to me um and i'm guessing that there was probably some kind of supervising attorney over at main
justice who tasked a paralegal with the responsibility of doing something like this
just saw a whole bunch of red boxes i'm sorry black boxes around various texts and said oh this looks
great and let it roll out um and what what also would be quite interesting to review would be to take a
look at the metadata for the individual pdfs that have the redactions as well because even though
there isn't a lot of metadata associated with pdf files themselves you should be able to get
information about at least the last time the file was accessed and when it was created and so you might
be able to get additional information from that metadata about the time uh at which the redactions
were made to those particular documents if you recall and go way back to what was what was it 2018
or 2017 i can't it must have been 2018 or 2019 i guess when the muller report came out that that was
interesting in that it was a pdf and it was uh i believe there were a bunch of redacted portions in
the muller report but when you looked at that particular metadata i believe what had happened is
somebody had printed the document and then actually scanned it at a copier and created a pdf
so that redactions could not be unredacted like this that even if there was a screw up there was a
printout with the black box on the document and then a scan of that document and then that document
that was scanned was released to the public so that even if somebody had idiotically redacted something
like we see um in this particular instance it still wouldn't have been able to be unredacted
by cutting and pasting um and so i wonder if people are going to be digging into that metadata and
if they aren't i would encourage them to do so because i think there may be additional revelations
about the nature of the screw up and who should be held responsible from that particular data in and
of itself yeah this is definitely something that we're going to be hearing more about even on this
holiday news week and uh yeah keep it keep your eyes open if you're of uh of a mind to start playing
with this data and uh poking around in it we of course would love to hear about anything interesting
you find in it uh you can always get in touch with us oth at 2600.com um alex you're looking a bit
uh um antsy and i think we have to let you get on with your life this evening but uh thank you so
much for popping in and joining us for a bit no it's it's it's a pleasure and um i want to wish all
of the listeners that celebrate christmas uh merry christmas or or happy christmas as they for some
reason inexplicably say in the uk so for those of you listening in in london and elsewhere happy christmas
to all of you and um hopefully i'll be able to join you guys even uh briefly next week but if not i'll see
on the other side and 2026 it's been a fun year 2025 and um i trust that you will um keep the
listeners in good company for the next what is it uh 36 minutes we will do our best uh thank you
all right travel safely alex thanks everyone talk to you soon good night dude good night
and uh that is about it for alex um it's now just us in this room it's just us in this room on this
edition of off the hook well and uh yeah i think we've done this once or twice in our in our time
on this program have we um i i i have definitely had you when when we were recording in brooklyn i
definitely had you in the studio as the only person with me we maybe had someone else on the phone
um i'm gonna challenge you on that you can challenge me on that i remember being in the studio
with neo i remember being in the studio with nina with other people on the phone there has never
until right now been a moment on off the hook where it was just you and me wow okay so we we we do audio
stuff in other contexts and things and uh so this feels very familiar so i i guess i had not realized
that we had never done this uh just as a duo before on off the hook on the wbai airwaves and uh so this
will be fun um and thank you uh thank you listeners for continuing to put up with us so what else is
going on in the world there is a there is another story about uh which also involves something uh being
disseminated that uh was not planned to be okay can i tell you how dumb i am
um i'm going to challenge you on that because i think you're very smart but please please continue
okay so this past sunday yes um we were going to be watching the cbs news special they did about
the life of rob reiner yes because certainly some of us are having a hard time coping with that piece
of news absolutely and it was going to be football football football 60 minutes and then this special
so i turned on the cbs affiliate when i thought it was time and it turned out that football had gone
into significant overtime everything was running about an hour behind and then i saw something go by
on social media saying that a story had been pulled from 60 minutes and because i am a very trusting
person my assumption was that they just said oh gosh we're massively behind schedule we're just
going to shorten 60 minutes by one segment uh-huh that is not what happened that is not in fact what
happened a new story from usa today uh from the 22nd which was uh which was the other day which
was monday uh cbs pulled 60 minutes segment on el salvador's ccot prison um cbs uh pulled a 60
minute segment hours before it was set to air on december 21st a move that has apparently sparked
backlash from its correspondent um it announced the programming update in a statement around 4 30 p.m
on the 21st uh that was sunday adding that the piece will air in a future broadcast we determined
it needed additional reporting cbs news said um this came down from the c the ceo of uh cbs news the
editor-in-chief barry weiss um and uh there was sort of an outcry about this and also some more
incompetence because the segment that they said they were not going to show um it was accidentally put
online it wasn't accidentally put online it they well it was because they uploaded the wrong
episode because they replaced the segment as opposed to just making it shorter to get things
back on schedule like i thought again very trusting very wrong and the original episode ran in canada
right okay i thank you for that uh thank you for that clarification that correction um yes it aired in
canada and uh copies of it were grabbed and put online um our friends over at distributed denial of
secrets have uh have pointers toward where you can view this segment um it's been backed up it's uh
it's on torrents it's on the internet archive and uh it is devastating we we watched it earlier we did
um i will say that if you're looking to see it you will do best with a vpn
which puts you outside of this country yes the um some of the mirrors that are going up
are getting takedown notices from cbs news yes that's going i know i somebody just put that up on
social media like i saw it go by on um mastodon right as we were going on air which is what i was
pointing at yes and it is utterly devastating and the contention that it had to be re-reported
because they hadn't gotten an interview with the department of justice or the department of
homeland security uh massively problematic because they reached out for a comment and the department
said didn't respond right so the reporter whose name sharon alfonzi um i believe that's uh i believe
that's correct but let's uh go me see if you can find the yes okay sharon alfonzi said basically
great now you've just handed the uh administration a kill switch and if there's something that we're
reporting on that they don't want us to talk about they just don't have to respond to the request for
for comment and then she won't run it also i've said this to you before but i want to go on public
record right barry weiss yes is giving jewish women with brown hair and glasses a very bad name
well that's why you're here to give it a better name um but uh yeah so the obviously people people's
interest in seeing this was all the more uh sparked by the unavailability of it um streisand effect
raises ugly head again absolutely we love that streisand effect and uh if you go to uh the distributed
denial of secrets site d-d-o-s-e-c-r-e-t-s that's d-d-o-secrets.com um the first thing on the list
at uh at time of this broadcast is inside secot and uh links to downloads and torrents and all that
sort of stuff so you will be able to see this and yeah it part of understanding why it's so important
important to let things like this be seen um i think involves seeing it and it is it is rough it
is not a good watch uh in any emotional sense but it is it is stuff that i believe is important to know
it's stuff that's incredibly important to know i think for many many reasons not least of which is
the whole uh series of mistakes lies and downright falsehoods that the administration has been
perpetrating that are all shown to be a big load of uh hooey in this particular segment yeah um i don't
know when i was growing up we were a very hardcore 60 minutes family we watched 60 minutes every week
and the idea that the teeth are being taken out of 60 minutes my parents always said you know 60
minutes had whatever three or four segments every week and we would watch the you know the beginning
when they would mention like 10 seconds of what everything was and then my parents would look at each
other and say okay what's the up this week the up the up now what does this mean that there was
always there were a few very serious news stories and there was one that was more heartwarming
happy less you know spit on your neck kick you in the teeth sad right what's the up yeah and and 60
minutes uh for those who may not be familiar because i don't believe it's uh the case in the current
generation really but you know we're we're a couple of gen xers um and uh you know raised by people
older than ourselves as as many are and yeah 60 minutes was the thing that was the one with teeth they
were the ones saying that cigarettes were bad for you back when uh you know people didn't uh didn't
commonly accept that and the the financial uh monoliths that sold cigarettes were fighting tooth and nail
to have this uh information uh not disseminated but cbs was the ones that were they were the ones
that were there 60 minutes was the place right but 60 minutes had that story with jeffrey wygand
wiggand i'm not sure how it's pronounced and they spiked it for a little while right and then there
was this massive backlash um reputational issues right a movie and they got back from it it took some
time but they got there what's gonna happen now yeah until now so and in this in this era in this
media environment in which we find ourselves where it's so easy to fake anything now and it's so
difficult to find sources that um you can trust to be objective to be truthful to uh put out the stuff
that's important to put out without clogging it up with bullcrap it is it is um all the more vital
that we have something that we have these these uh these media outlets that we could trust that we
could depend on and it's harder and harder to find anything like that and i'm going to use that point
to seg into the fact that wbai's fundraiser is ongoing our end of the year fundraiser and it is
so vital to the um future of this station that if you are able to throw a little something in to
help us keep doing what we do here on independent um community sponsored radio at wbai now is the time
to go to buddy.wbai.org or uh call 833 wbai nyc that's 833-922-4692 and throw in if you can throw in a
little bit if you could throw in a one-time donation if you could throw in a recurring donation
um and uh and do what you can to keep us doing what we do on this station and on this program
and on this uh pacifica network because yeah we say this sort of thing a lot but that's because
it's true um you the the the the the the outlets like wbai the outlets that are community-based that are
your neighbors talking to you that are not bound by uh relationships with commercial entities and that
are not known for uh spiking things because the government wouldn't like it this is an activist
radio station it was started by hippies it is still a very uh a very a very uh activism centered force
in the media landscape and it has been for 65 years now so buddy.wbai.org 833-922-4692
and uh keep us going with what you can exactly one thing i have said a lot over the last few years
is the more you give us the less we have to ask you and do want to uh plug the buddy program a little
bit the best thing any non-profit can have is a really dependable scent of set of monthly income
and the more people who sign up as buddies and if you pledge ten dollars a month ten dollars a month
that will give us 120 a year that will make you a voting member of wbai which is also a very important
thing that you can do um once your second month goes in third once you make once you have given more
than 25 you're a voting member of bai um but again the more you give the less we have to ask
and that's good for us because we can talk more about news and all kinds of fun things you may
notice we haven't done as many fun drives in the last couple of years um we're shifting some of the
models we we appreciate it i hope everyone else does too we've been preempted a lot less than we had
been which is great yes and your support is what keeps us on the air absolutely buddy.wbai.org
and don't forget to tell them that you're becoming a buddy in our name yes tell them that you're
that off the hook sent you because they will ask what your favorite show is and uh that that uh
helps us show the station and the management that uh yeah our listeners will uh will be there for us
our listeners can throw in their support um of course the media landscape is a real pile right now
and we are going to continue to do our best for as long as we are able to um sift through some of it
um okay so another another interesting uh another interesting thing going around is uh spotify
spotify is a music service it's a music streaming service it is known for um paying the artists behind
its music a pittance um while uh making tons of money off of uh off of their listeners and uh
they have been hacked they appear to have been hacked and scraped by people who downloaded um tons of
their their audio files and their metadata and um apparently the predominantly music files not podcasts
correct and apparently the the folks who did that are preparing to release them online according to
this uh station the according to this uh story from the guardian um platform with 700 million users
says it's investigating after anna's archive which is a site that posts things uh claims to have
scraped tracks and metadata um and uh yep uh observer said the apparent leak could boost ai companies
looking for material to develop their technology because it all comes back to ai now doesn't it
well that is my question you know the organization that did this is saying they describe its mission
as preserving humanity's knowledge and culture cool cool cool cool we know of quite a few organizations
who do that sort of thing we certainly do but but but um are our friends at the internet archive
keeping things so that they can then get scraped by llms are they helping ai produce things in the style of
what they have scraped i don't know about that but um these numbers are pretty interesting uh
oh excuse me um and as archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from spotify and 256 million
rows of metadata such as artist and album names uh spotify which hosts more than 100 million tracks
confirmed that the leak did not represent its entire inventory um now wait going back for a second
though sure okay um when digital music first started becoming a thing oh yes napster bad not even what i
was gonna say all right i remember when i got my first mp3 player it wasn't an ipod no it was a big
boxy mp3 player by some company i do not even remember anymore all right and i sat there with my cd
collection and i ripped a bunch of stuff to put it up and i had to track down the metadata for every
single track and type a bunch of stuff in manually oh yes and type so i mean kudos to these people for
getting the tracks and the metadata you've made everyone's life a lot easier uh certainly and it's
i think uh the main thing on this is it's hard to feel bad for spotify because uh as as said i mean
i've seen musicians professional musicians post at the end of the year their revenue from spotify for
the year and you can have millions upon millions of listeners and as a band get back a check for
something like 50 because you get fractions of fractions of a cent for for each play and um i can
only i can only hope that this continues to uh show people the value of maybe using other means to
listen to their music like say buying it directly from the artists um things like band camp are great
for for uh digital uh folks there are there are other digital uh services out there that artists can
put their own stuff on and you know make reasonable amounts of money for um when they sell them or you
could still buy cds i love cds i mean we are digital media first let me try that again we are physical
media first people in this household yes in this household yes we we still have uh we have our cd
collection which uh takes up a large amount of space under under our main uh sort of shelf and we have
you know my gigantic cd wallet we have functionally a floor-to-ceiling yes shelf of dvds and blu-rays yeah
and uh many many bookshelves in what is a small studio apartment in uh the heart of queens new york city
so yeah we we live here and so does our hard media collection because that means we own it it does it
means we it means we own it and it also means that for every one of these that exists the people who
made them maybe got a little more than a fraction of a fraction of a cent exactly but also no one is
going to say you don't have access to this anymore absolutely no no company can shut down or change its
terms of service or or change the content um we've seen we've seen cases of digital uh books being
uh changed after the fact uh after they've been published or even made you know pulled from shelves
after they've been published there was the very in retrospect funny but also not funny case of an
edition of george orwell's 1984 um being pulled from amazon which uh if you're if you're familiar with
what the book is about that's that's extra fun but at the same time i you know have been watching
older things that we have in our library i've been home a lot recently yes and talking about
the u2 album oh yeah that just appeared in everyone's apple music library whenever that was
and the hoops you had to jump through to not have that anymore
i like the fact that if you purchase something we have it and we're not you know getting handed
things or getting things taken away from us um and i recognize that it's a weird um position to take
in the year 2025 that yeah i support physical media and not because i am a pretentious human being who
like loves vinyl man
sorry about that no but um you know and another important fact of the cd collection we have is all
our cds are there but they've also been ripped and we we have a shared uh file server here and
here in our place which has all of that stuff as flack files we can take those we can play them on our
computers we can play them on our phones we can play them on whatever the heck we want um we can
load up a whole grip of stuff to listen to if we go on a road trip we can and we have and uh you know
this this is stuff that's uh that we can that we can decide what we do with it um it could even take
things that uh that we have and you know rip the audio from them and use it for other audio purposes
um you you mentioned rob reiner uh last week we closed the show with a song from spinal tap
in in uh in his honor and you know that's an album that i have so yeah the the ability to do this sort
of thing is important um vinyl i can't say that i understand so much just because i remember growing
up with vinyl records as the uh format of the day i remember that being how you listen to music at home
um and um i i really found it clunky and also annoying and the records always got skips and they
got scratches and i was happy to move on to cds and i i kind of stayed there because they're it's
digital data it's always the same you can shift it from one format to another and it doesn't degrade
it doesn't destroy itself every time you play it a little um but uh i do respect the the folks who
are passionate about vinyl and their willingness to not only collect the things that they love but
track down new and weird stuff because that that is something that's not so easy to do nowadays in
the digital streaming era is you don't really you don't really find new stuff to get uh to get
pointed toward you don't really you can't dig through a crate of of digital you can't dig through
a crate of streams and find something that looks interesting because of its huge weird cover art
and all of a sudden have a new band to follow no that's very true and even as we've kind of moved
away from the mix concept that you know early pandora early early spotify you know i would put in
a song and then it would say hey we think you will like this and this is actually very funny
all right early spotify early spotify early spotify this was 12 years ago maybe more and i was
listening to spotify and it suggested to me a song from a band i'd never heard of before but the song
was called gila so i figured i'd check it out was it a good song it is a good song i like it quite a lot
actually it's by a band called beach house who i'd never heard of before interesting hey we live in
queens we we do um we we live uh right by both big airports around here so yeah anyone who's
listened to our uh broadcasts knows that uh planes like us anyway so gila yes rob the song gila oh yes
yes um yeah the song gila and it said okay these you know based on certain characteristics of things
you listen to we think you might enjoy this they were right it was always very weird how
you know pandora or spotify could like get into your brain and figure out what why you liked what
you liked and give you more things i thought you would like based on melodic patterns and chord
sequences you know you know what else does that sort of thing people people people like you could
uh you could listen to a radio station that plays music you like you could listen to a dj that you
enjoy or a themed music show that uh that has a that has a genre that you that you dig and see what
they've got for you because there is a living breathing human uh who knows about this stuff uh shuffling
through stuff and trying to find stuff that you might like hey rob yes how many of those exist
anymore not so many i mean radio stations music radio stations are by and large robots these days
um at least in the commercial band at least on fm oh except for us except for us here at 95
99.5 95 99.5 wba i on the fm dial in the heart of things smack in the middle of the fm dial yeah we
we don't just uh talk and blather over here we we uh we play music we we talk about news we do all
sorts of interesting things that are still being done with the radio format go to buddy.wbai.org to
keep that happening and are the carts you hear between shows those are real people they are humans
recorded those things humans we know by and large and and humans are pointing uh you know they're not
swapping around physical cartridges so much anymore but they are pointing and clicking and lining those
up in a way that uh will um hopefully please the listenership so yeah i i am so happy and i don't say
this on the show enough but i am so happy and proud to be part of this station to be part of this program
and it is it is just such a it's such a joy in my life and it uh it is a thing that i am so glad that i
get that i get to do that i'm glad you get to do it with me i'm glad our colleagues who are
not um on the air with us now but uh who still you know who will be back um i get to do it with us
i'm this is this is just such a precious resource and it is insane that it exists and it's the kind
of insanity we need more of in the world absolutely do we have time for anything more we uh we have a
little bit of uh time to just uh quickly mention a a the first national website dedicated to documenting
ice license plates is here uh this is a story from lataco.com which is a locally produced news
source from la um talking about how much we like that sort of thing um when a federal raid happens
or when a vehicle is suspected belonging to federal immigration agents community members observe each
of the vehicles and make note of their license plates this tactic began in california during the
beginning of the federal immigration siege on los angeles before spreading nationwide everyday
citizens are forming groups and using this information to protect their communities um one
of the places this is uh being wrangled is stop ice dot net that's s-t-o-p-i-c-e dot net um we've also
got some um some instagram handles if you use that particular service uh at moral resistance at harbor
area peace patrols at pdx underscore pali dot underscore boost and uh music city migra watch that's music
city m-i-g-r-a-w-a-t-c-h those are all uh handles on instagram where this sort of info is being wrangled
and we've spoken about uh public use of things like license plate scanners and databases and uh wondering
about the value of that or if the information can be um misused by the agencies collecting it but it
has now been turned back around and used to keep an eye on the authorities to watch the watchers
so very interesting stuff going on there at stop ice dot net well this is this has been this has been
quite an evening it certainly has an interesting show and uh we will uh we will be back next week for
our new year's eve special and uh send us some email talk to us oth at 2600.com you can find us
on mastodon off the hook at masto.hackers.town and uh i'm gonna wish all of you who celebrate a very
merry christmas uh wish all of you who don't celebrate that particular um festival to have a very
good time regardless for off the hook for gila for me for alex for emmanuel and kyle still away on
assignment have a very good evening
it's real good seeing y'all here due to the shortage of time we'll get right down to work
here he comes
attention everyone
you've been dumb for charlie brown but this time you really did it
this is ridiculous
i just don't understand
what does he want
what does he want
what does he want
i don't know
what does he want
that's the problem
good
me
all right now
all right
that's it charlie brown
that's it charlie brown
that's it charlie brown
that's it
that's it
i love samples
i don't care
what kind of christmas music is that
listen all of you
this is the music
hey
you don't
you don't
you don't get it at all
you know
okay
hey
you know
santa claus
santa claus
santa claus
hey
santa claus
and ho ho ho
guess what
what
disaster time
all right
it's so wrong
it's so ill
i don't see what all the fuss is about
it's not bad
bad at all really
you do that so well
what's going on here
that's it charlie brown
all right
let's take it from the top again
here we go
yeah do something right for change charlie brown
well i guess we better concentrate
yeah
so you play on work too
you see
what do you think about that
it was beautiful
that
lunch break
break
lunch break
it's fun
break
don't worry
it's fun
don't you think it's great
everything i touch gets
everything i do
turns into a disaster
you drive me crazy
all right
all right
there's no
what do you want
the proper move
you got it
we're back
i never get what i really really really want
what do you want
just send money
how about tens and twenties
tens tens and twenties
all i want is what i have coming to me
all i want is my fair share
all right
let's have a quiet
merry christmas charlie brown
that's what christmas is all about charlie brown