Your call cannot be completed as dialed.
Please check the number and dial again.
I am two.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a cough.
It 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!
Bum Diddly Bum
Bum Diddly Bum
And a very good evening to everybody.
The program is Off the Hook.
Emmanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening, joined tonight by Kyle.
Hello.
Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
And I forgot to mention where you are.
You're in Signal Land.
I am.
Coming to us with the magic of signal.
And we also have Gila.
Hello.
And we have Alex.
You do.
And it's Thursday here in Blighty.
Good morning.
Say what now?
It's Thursday here in Blighty.
Are you okay?
Did you hit your head or something?
What are you talking about?
Blighty.
What is that?
You don't know what Blighty is?
B-L-I-G-H-T-1.
No, I'm kidding around.
Of course I know what Blighty is, whatever you're saying.
Yeah, I'm just making...
No, I have no idea what you're talking about, Alex.
Blighty.
Blighty is an affectionate term for England.
So it's England.
I'm in London.
Okay.
Why couldn't you just say that?
Well, I could have, but it would have been not nearly as much fun to see you confused like this.
Okay.
Well, that was a minute of the show gone.
Okay.
We have all kinds of things to talk about tonight.
Wow.
All right.
So different world this week than last week.
How do you all feel?
Can everybody make it to this crazyville okay?
Sure.
Super.
All right.
Alex, there's that weird noise again.
You hear that?
I don't know.
It's like someone's frying eggs.
Hey, Rob, can you cut your audio?
All right.
I will mute now.
Oh, okay.
It went away right before you said that.
So, but I do think it's you.
I think it's coming from you somehow, and it's getting worse.
I'm sorry, Alex.
You were saying something.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Other than the fried eggs here, it was strange.
Let's not keep talking about it, please.
I'll try not to mention the fried eggs anymore for the rest of the show.
Yet, we're still talking about it.
Can you please say what you wanted to say?
Okay.
Anyhow.
No, I have had a lot of issues for this.
So, one of the reasons why I'm here in London is because on Saturday, I'm supposed to go
to Mumbai for the ICANN meeting.
ICANN, of course, being the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which is the
not-for-profit.
Alex, my advice is for you to say to ICANN, I can't.
Because, seriously, flying over there at this time, I think, would not be—everybody's
firing missiles at everybody.
It's insane.
It gets worse.
It gets worse.
I haven't even told you the best bits of this either, right?
So, I came here because I have to teach at King's College, number one, right?
So, I'm doing a couple lectures this week, and I was like, oh, this is perfect timing.
I'll pop over to London, and then I'll leave from London and head to Mumbai.
So, I'll be kind of halfway to Mumbai and get some stuff done while I'm here in London.
And then this whole war thing kicks off that everybody's calling World War III.
I really hope it doesn't devolve into that.
But, my connecting flight from London was actually in Abu Dhabi, which was hit by missiles.
You know, the airport was hit by missiles, and people died.
But, yet, my British Airways flight right now still says it's on time.
Yeah, because they will say that up until the last day, and then they'll tell you, oh, yeah, we can't do that.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I wouldn't count on it.
And even if you could count on it, I wouldn't do it.
Well, that's the decision that I came to today.
I mean, I'd really come to this decision yesterday and really almost the day before.
But I got into London last night, and you're starting to see where everything goes.
And it's not good, right?
And you have the U.S. Embassy in Doha being targeted.
I'm sorry, Dubai being targeted.
And it's just, it was a bad decision that I had to make today, but I had to pull the plug for all of ENS, all of the Ethereum name servers.
We're not going to the ICANN meeting.
I just cannot have people traveling to make a meeting that I asked them to go to and to put themselves in harm's way to do it.
And the potential to be stranded in the Middle East right now is really awful.
Also, one of the things that I was told at the British Airways desk when I was checking into the flight in New York at JFK was really quite interesting as well,
which was that most people are trying to go through India now to try to avoid the Middle East.
So India is an absolute nightmare in terms of all of the airports.
And I can only imagine landing in Mumbai right now with all these people trying to flee the Middle East or at least get home in some way through India has really got to be fairly awful.
But ICANN, on the other hand, has put out a statement saying, we know this will represent some kind of travel disruptions for a lot of people, and it might be difficult, but we're still going to have the meeting as planned.
We're still going to go ahead with this.
I think that's a little bit crazy.
The person saying that, no doubt, is already in India, so I'm sure that's why they think it's no problem for everybody else.
But, you know, obviously India is not the Middle East, but to get there, your flight path may very well cross into a hot zone or two.
Yeah, it mostly does.
I mean, you're either - there aren't a lot of direct flights to Mumbai.
You're either going through Doha, Dubai, or Abu Dhabi in some way, and that's where your connecting flights are generally hitting.
And all of those places are not great places to be flying when there's missiles going around.
Now, what you could do, you could fly to China over the Pacific Ocean and then get another flight from China into India.
That might be a little inconvenient, but it would get you there without going through those hot zones.
But by then, who knows?
If I wasn't in London on my way to Mumbai, that would make a lot of sense.
But then I would have to go all the way back to New York and then all the way back to California, let's say San Francisco or Seattle or whatever, and then over to China.
It's just too much.
Well, we can discuss your travel itinerary after the show, but -
We'll do that in detail.
Please stay safe.
And that goes for any listeners out there, too, because the world is crazy, and there are certain crazy people who have way too much power.
In fact, you know, I was just reminiscing about the - I remember July 1st, 2024, that's when the Supreme Court ruled that presidents have absolute immunity for acts committed as president, no matter what.
And apparently assassination is something that - one guy decided to do that.
How do we feel about this?
One guy decided to kill the leader of another country.
It doesn't matter, you know, how bad that leader is.
That's not the issue here.
The issue is one person having that kind of power just deciding not only to assassinate a leader but to start a war.
And there's no question he started the war.
He did.
One person.
And it's just weird seeing our system - you know, we talk about broken systems all the time.
That's how we're tying it into hacking here.
We have a broken system.
Today, the War Powers Act was voted on by the Senate and was defeated.
They voted not to do their job.
They voted to not hold the president accountable for anything, let alone we have this crazy-ass system where if they did pass it and say that Trump has to get permission before he starts bombing countries and assassinating leaders and things like that,
he can veto that.
I mean, that is the dumbest thing I have ever - if you're trying to rein somebody in, they shouldn't have the power to say,
no, I'm vetoing your right to rein me in.
It just seems like that's the kind of thing that he should have been exempted from having a say in.
But we didn't even get to the point of doing that because our senators - the Republicans mostly and one Democrat - don't even want to have that kind of responsibility.
They just want to trust it all with one person.
Our country has never been about that.
One person making all the decisions.
But basically, looking at this ruling, I was just reading over what Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote.
She said granting immunity from prosecution would reshape the institution of the presidency and risk permitting criminal conduct by presidents.
She said that the majority opinion would effectively expand what may be considered official acts beyond their core duties,
depriving prosecutors of an effective means of bringing charges.
She expressed concerns that a president would be immune from prosecution in a number of hypothetical situations,
such as in ordering assassinations of political rivals and taking bribes for pardons.
Political rivals.
That's different than foreign leaders.
But it's on the agenda.
It's there.
He can do it.
She wrote that the ruling on presidential immunity was more expansive than the founders would have recognized.
Justice Roberts responded to the dissent, stating that the majority opinion was a narrower ruling than Sotomayor had described and referred to her hypothetical scenarios as fear-mongering.
Not so sure anymore.
So that is where we are.
That's the world we are in right now.
And Justice Katanji Brown-Jackson wrote another dissenting opinion, arguing that the ruling on presidential immunity would effectively empower the judiciary as a gatekeeper of accountability,
resulting in downstream effects of weakening the power of Congress and removing incentives against presidential abuse of power.
That's pretty much what we saw today.
Weakening of Congress by Congress.
Well, if there's one thing that the branches of government have proven in the past, well, decade now,
it's that reigning in President Trump is not something they're interested in doing in any context.
And what we're seeing now is the logical next step to the inaction we've been seeing.
And, you know, they could decide that, you know, he's not prosecutable for his crimes.
I wonder if the same would hold true for, say, international courts that prosecute war crimes.
But that all remains to be seen.
Well, our country doesn't recognize those courts.
And that's something else.
That's, you know, this is when you see the result of just casting aside,
even if you don't agree with the conclusions they reach, even if you think there's corruption in those courts,
you have to respect something so that you can come together and have a conversation.
We're not even at the stage of doing that.
And, you know, the rifts are getting deeper between our own allies.
And, you know, it might seem like smooth sailing right now because, believe it or not, this is the easy part.
You know, where you're just bombing another nation into submission and you have all the weapons.
Sure.
But, you know, I read just before Showtime that, you know, one missile fired by Iran, it costs about $20,000.
It can cost up to $3 million to shoot it down.
So how long do you think that's going to be sustainable for?
And there's a dozen other depressing facts that we could look at.
But the reality is we're in a world now where we just seem to be doing, we meaning the United States, whatever we want.
Nobody else can do anything about it.
And we just have to kind of, you know, hold our breath and say, well, you know, what happened in Texas last night, maybe that's a sign.
If we can make it another, what is it, three years?
I'm losing count.
Alex.
It just seems to me like Congress is uncomfortable with its role as a check and balance on the president at this point, right?
I mean, how could they?
I don't understand how they can abdicate this kind of responsibility either.
I mean, it's constitutionally mandated that they check the president, right?
I mean, this dissatisfaction with unilateral presidential action, you know, needs to be turned into some kind of legally binding constraint on presidential action, right?
Otherwise, what we have and what we result in is the centralization of additional powers in the presidency.
And that may serve the Republicans well right now when their man is in office, but it's not going to serve them well when their man is not in office and it doesn't serve the country well at all in the long term.
Any kind of centralization of power in the presidency is not great.
That's why we have a system of checks and balances that was designed in the 18th century to prevent this very thing from happening.
It's like we've forgotten all of this.
In a sense, it's very, very basic civics.
And Congress just seems unable or unwilling to act to check the president.
Yeah, well, it's something about living in fear of that one person.
And it seems like every Republican congressperson lives in fear of Donald Trump.
And I can't I don't understand that because what is the worst thing he can do?
He can make you not win reelection.
OK, is that really the worst thing to not win reelection?
You know, how how what kind of a hell is it to live your life knowing that you didn't speak your mind when that was the right thing to do and when you actually had power to make some kind of a change and you didn't do it?
You know, I think that's a far worse fate than, you know, getting this this guy pissed off at you.
In fact, I think that's that's a badge of honor.
Well, I don't think that's right, though, Emanuel.
I think that there are far worse things that the president can do.
And I think he would do.
And I think he has done in many respects.
So I think you're right that some of these lawmakers are obviously concerned about not getting reelected.
And that's that's the short term interest that they have.
But the longer term interest is that, well, the president has shown his ability and his willingness to abuse the office of the presidency, to abuse the Department of Justice and its investigative powers to target his political enemies.
So if you're seen as a political enemy of the president, he's going to weaponize the machinery of government against you.
And he knows and people know that that's the possibility that can happen.
And the the ironic thing is that the more you abdicate your responsibility to act as a check and balance on the executive power, the more power is centralized, the more power that is become centralized in the in the president itself.
And the more powerful that person becomes to abuse the very processes that you're supposed to use to check that person.
And so this this abdication of Congress's responsibility of acting as a check and balance on the presidency is really detrimental to our democracy as a whole in the long run,
because it is creating this centralized, essentially rogue cis admin for the government who has no check on him whatsoever right now.
You would think they would know that, you know, these are not stupid people.
We can call them stupid.
They do stupid things, but they're not stupid people.
So how is it that that thought process is not, you know, inching its way through their brains?
Well, think think about what's happened, right?
I mean, as soon as as soon as Trump came into power, he he started to dismantle all of the machinery that could keep him in check.
One of the first things that he did was to fire the inspectors general of most of the federal agencies that were around.
And these are the inspector generals are the guys that are there and the women that are there to stamp out fraud, waste and abuse.
In other words, that's that's long form for corruption.
And I think that's a that's a real problem with the system that he is able to do that.
I mean, that's that should be one of the checks and balances right there that he should not have that authority.
Yet somehow he did.
Well, the whole presidential appointee system is crazy in and of itself, too.
I mean, that that is that is problematic on so many levels as well.
I mean, if you think about this issue that we had going back to to George W. Bush in was it around 2002, 2003, I think, with the stove piping of intelligence.
Right.
You know, and the first Iraq war, which I think there is a real analog to be drawn now as well, obviously, with what's going on in the Middle East.
But there was there was a lot of criticism about George W. Bush appointing people in the intelligence community that would just do whatever the hell he said and would stovepipe, essentially send him over directly intelligence that seemed to support his position without looking at the facts objectively.
And that's the case.
You look at the you know, the director of the CIA is a president.
Most of the directors of all of the intelligence community are presidential appointees.
The general counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency of CIA, for whom I used to work a long time ago, is a presidential appointee.
It doesn't seem right that those people should be appointed and serve at the will of the president.
They should be accountable to the people, not to the political whims of the president.
OK, so we are identifying design flaws in our system of government that really need to be addressed, need to be fixed one way or another.
I want to turn things a little bit, be a little bit more positive here and say the word anthropic, because, you know, anthropic is an example of what happens when a company or an individual shows integrity.
Um, yeah, you know, you'll piss off the powers that be and, uh, you might lose some money, but, um, you can hold your head proud, high.
And, um, you know, a lot of people will look to you as, as a model.
Um, now, anthropic CEO, uh, Dario Omari, am I saying that right?
Uh, told investors Tuesday, his company is still in talks with the Pentagon to try to deescalate the situation.
Um, he, um, uh, basically, if you recall last week, uh, anthropic refused to, um, get rid of their safeguard.
This is what the Pentagon was demanding, that they get rid of their safeguards and, um, um, uh, I, I guess not insist that that noise is really loud, wherever it's coming from.
Guys, can you just mute your audio until we figure out what that is?
Thank you.
Um, yeah, I, I don't know where we get these weird noises from, uh, but anthropic basically was saying that, um, uh, they, uh, they were not comfortable, um, handing over artificial intelligence, uh, technology to the Pentagon.
If the Pentagon could not, uh, promise not to use it against the American people, not to use it for mass surveillance, uh, it's really, um, uh, you know, it's a no brainer, but no other company would do something like this.
So, um, of course, Trump was outraged by that.
He canceled anthropic's government contracts.
Um, Pete Hegseff, uh, uh, called the company a supply chain risk.
Uh, and, uh, the, the, uh, CEO, um, uh, said that the label, that label was retaliatory and punitive.
And he pledged to fight that designation in court.
Um, he said, anthropics sought to draw red lines in the government's use of its technology, specifically presenting it, uh, preventing its use for mass surveillance of Americans or for fully autonomous weapons.
I mean, you know, how crazy do you have to be to say, no, we, we, we insist on the right to make fully autonomous weapons.
Uh, and, um, we may spy on Americans or may not because, you know, who are you to tell us what to do?
Uh, he said, we believe that crossing those lines is contrary to American values and we wanted to stand up for American values.
Can we put this person in the white house for God's sake, American values.
Remember those disagreeing with the government is the most American thing in the world.
He said, and we are patriots in everything we have done here.
We have stood up for the values of this country.
Uh, Emil Michael is the Pentagon's chief technology officer.
That must be a fun job.
The, um, okay, now I'm echoing.
I'm not sure who's doing that.
The, uh, the military had offered written acknowledgements of the federal laws and military policies that restrict mass surveillance and autonomous weapons.
Though anthropics said that offer was paired with legalese that allowed the guardrails to be ignored.
Um, and, um, this guy, Emil Michael from the Pentagon said, at some level, you have to trust your military to do the right thing.
I couldn't agree more.
At some level you do.
And the Pentagon, uh, you guys should be working to achieve that level because we'd love to see you arrive at that finish line.
You're not there yet.
And we don't trust you.
I don't think anybody really trusts you.
Uh, so, uh, don't expect people to, um, uh, to, to assume you're going to do the right thing because you've certainly proven that you don't do it often.
So, uh, anthropic, uh, I, I really hope they don't, uh, cave.
Wasn't it something though that within minutes, within minutes of, um, uh, of Trump, uh, ordering, uh, all the contracts to be canceled and Hegseff saying what he said, that open AI announced they had reached a deal with the Pentagon within minutes.
How crazy is that?
That is where we are living now.
I just want to know more about how they're using AI in warfare, because, um, the thought of that is really terrifying, especially if you're one of the folks familiar with how poorly the technology, the technology actually works at this point in our history.
Um, are we using it to decide on targets to fire at, you know, because AI has trouble figuring a lot of basic things out.
And I don't know if I would trust it with any, anything relevant to whether, you know, deciding who lives or who dies basically.
And the fact that the AI bubble is so, um, prevalent that we're even seeing this sort of, uh, bickering going on in the, in the sphere of providing this technology to the military.
It's, it's at least as frightening as anything else that's going on right now.
Kyle.
I'm, uh, also wondering if incidents like the, uh, friendly fire where, um, uh, relative allies, uh, were able to down airplanes.
And if some of the decision-making models are our own systems, our own technologies that we've sold or otherwise, uh, lent to other nations, how those things could be used against and sort of, uh, backfire because of, uh,
well, their capabilities being, um, you know, so able, they could, um, in a situation where that isn't managed well, uh, with, with, um, whatever level of competence, uh, that it endangers people that are, are meant to be, um, otherwise protected because of, uh, the level of sophistication that that automation brings to the battlefield or whatever terms you want to, uh,
uh, uh, put it in.
But incidents like that where the unintentional hasn't been thought through and planned for adequately.
Yeah.
There's an old saying that military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
Um, I don't think adding artificial to the equation is changing that.
Alex.
I think this is so heartening on, on so many levels too, because think about what we've been talking about over the last couple of months here.
And in particular, with respect to ice, you know, we, we had on the creator of the ice block app and talk about what he was doing with that and how he was helping people.
And we saw after the ice block app was taken off of Apple's app store, basically, as soon as the, as soon as the department of justice and this presidential administration had requested Apple to do something like remove that app from the app store, they didn't push back on it.
They didn't insist on getting a court order.
They didn't, they didn't try to narrow the scope of, of, of any of the government's requests at all.
They just did it.
They just blindly complied because they were afraid of being on the wrong end of a tweet or the wrong end of an executive order.
Uh, and that is really sad to me.
And you see all of these platforms, especially meta cozying up to the president, trying to curry favor with them.
And then on the other hand, out of nowhere, you have anthropic come over and say, no, I'm not going to curry.
I'm not going to try to curry favor here.
I'm going to resist.
I'm going to refuse.
And when they have refused, they're now making it easier for every other platform out there to see that resistance to the president is not some kind of treasonous act.
It's not some kind of suicidal business practices.
It's a legitimate, even expected part of their role.
They are essentially surveillance intermediaries for the government.
They're speech hosts.
They provide access to, to information, to data and, and, and, and to speech in, in ways that are extremely important to this, this democracy.
And by anthropic refusing to comply with the president's dictates and refusing to give in to his threats, they're hardening these norms, right?
Insisting on things like warrants, rejecting jawboning, all of this stuff that is, is a rejection of the, of the president's really strong arming tactics here is, is, is I think extremely important here because it changes the power dynamic.
It's so powerful because it proves that integrity can actually be an access control system here, right?
By maintaining their morals, maintaining their integrity, anthropic has denied the president access, has denied them some kind of back way, backdoor methodology of accessing their own systems that they created.
And they have the right to determine, they have the right to determine, they have the right to determine who their customers are.
I, I find it extremely heartening and I hope that other platforms will see this as confidence inspiring and follow suit.
Well, I've seen a lot of people say that they're going to stop using open AI or chat GPT and, and, and, and use Claude instead because they trust that company based on what they have done.
And, and hopefully that remains the case where they continue to trust the company, but, you know, I, I was thinking, do you remember all the, um, uh, fear mongering and anger at the so-called woke mobs that were canceling everybody in sight?
And that's, that's how a lot of the conservatives got into power, uh, by, by basically, um, devoting so much attention to that to make it seem like, uh, uh, they had all this power and then they turn around and just do the same thing themselves.
It wasn't that they were afraid they were jealous.
They wanted that kind of power.
Uh, and, um, now, you know, you see that, um, used wisely, it's not necessarily a bad thing, uh, to be able to shame companies when they do bad things, because right now they're all doing bad things and they're all basically following orders.
And that is scary.
That is very scary for us.
Um, there's also, you know, this, this anthropic thing has been going on for a while, both, um, externally and internally.
Uh, we didn't really devote any time to this, but there is an anthropic researcher, uh, who resigned, um, uh, a few weeks back, uh, in a very cryptic way.
Uh, his name was, uh, Miranak, his name still is Miranak Sharma.
Uh, he had led the Claude, uh, chatbot makers Safeguard's research team, uh, since it was formed early last year and, um, had been at the company since 2023.
And while at the company, Sharma said he explored the causes of AI, uh, uh, a sycophancy.
I don't think I've ever said that word before.
Hopefully I said it right.
Uh, developed defenses against AI assisted bioterrorism and wrote one of the first AI safety cases.
Uh, but, um, one day he posted that it would be his last day at the company uploading a copy of a letter he shared with colleagues.
It's painfully devoid of specifics, but hints at some internal tensions over the tech's safety.
Throughout my time here, I've repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions, claiming that employees constantly face pressures to set aside what matters most.
He also issued a cryptic warning about the global state of affairs.
I continuously find myself reckoning with our situation.
The world is in peril, and not just from AI or bioweapons, but from a whole series of interconnected crises.
Unfolding in this very moment, we appear to be approaching a threshold, uh, where our wisdom must grow in equal measure to our capacity to affect the world, lest we face the consequences.
So, uh, yeah, you know, there's quite a lot of, uh, deep thinking going on over at Anthropic, and, uh, maybe it had an effect.
Maybe, um, uh, these words, uh, help steer Anthropic into a better place.
I don't know.
Or there's probably many things we don't know.
There are probably a lot of things that we don't know.
Um, this person does seem to have other stuff going on, um, which...
It's difficult right now, because there are so many pieces of so many things that are going on that you can't say, well, this is one thing, and...
Like, I don't want to say, oh, this person is crazy, but this person might be crazy.
He's not wrong, but also he may be crazy.
Well, we all might be crazy.
I mean, what do we use to determine if somebody might be crazy?
Um, it's true.
I, it, a new school of philosophy called Cosmoerotic Humanism, apparently, was in one of the footnotes of the resignation letter, and, like, dude, I don't know.
Um, okay, that's one thing I know nothing about.
One of many things I know nothing about, so...
I'm not, I'm not in a position to judge one way or another.
Seems weird.
Um, yeah.
Alex, are you trying to say something else?
I, yeah, I mean, I don't know.
I, I think we're, we're all in a difficult position of trying to assess the validity of whatever the, this person resigning was saying.
We really have no idea what's going on in the company, what his intentions were, um, but perhaps his words, as you indicated, Emmanuel, maybe they had some kind of effects on Anthropic.
But it's, it's also often the case that people will resign in such a, uh, and create a public display around them, because they, they want to create some buzz for whatever they're doing next, right?
So that their name is in the news, that they're being captured, um, in media, like we're talking about it now.
Um, and, and it may have nothing to do with the company, or it could have everything to do with the company.
We, we really just don't know, and I think it's difficult for us to assess.
Yes, but I think what's right, though, is for us to assess Anthropic by its words and by its actions.
And they've stood by their words so far with their actions.
And that's what matters to me.
Yeah, and I think maybe we just look at the words and not try to assess this guy's whole background and, and, uh, way of thinking and things like that.
I think the words make sense, and it's something we, uh, we should pay attention to.
Something else, you know, I really think we should pay attention to, um, is, um, I'm gonna get all kinds of crap for this.
Twitter.
I think we should pay attention to Twitter.
You know, I, I get a lot of crap for still, uh, being on it.
But I'll tell you what, you know, every representative is on it.
Every representative is, um, is yammering away on there, saying some of the most vile things you could possibly imagine.
I'll give you an example, um, representative Randy Fine from Florida a couple of days ago said, Islamophobia is a lie.
Fear of Islam is rational.
This is an elected official from Florida saying this.
It might not surprise you, but there it is.
It's on the record.
And, um, something that, uh, even people of Florida are objecting to.
How about this?
Congressman, um, uh, Brandon Gill from Texas.
Uh, how many Americans have to get Al-Aqbar before we realize Islam is a problem?
You know, saying these ignorant things while Islamic countries are actually being bombed by Iran shows the height of ignorance and, and, and, uh, prejudice and hatred that many of our elected officials carry.
Have always carried.
But, you know, it's, um, uh, it takes events like what's been happening over the past few days for it to be unleashed, where they feel they can just say whatever they want to say with no consequences whatsoever.
You know, that guy, he kept talking.
And I think that's, that's brilliant to be able to, um, uh, you know, to let people keep talking because oftentimes they hang themselves with their own words.
He said, immigration isn't good just because it's legal.
So now it's not just the quote unquote illegals that they're going after anyone, anyone, it's not necessarily good.
Even if it's legal, we want to, we want to cut back.
And of course, you know, um, a lot of people, uh, on Twitter, and there are a lot of good people still on Twitter because I, I see what they say.
Um, they pointed out the very, uh, undeniable fact that his wife is Indian.
Okay.
So, um, what are you saying?
You know, just, uh, the privileged few are going to be okay, but you know, if, if we don't like your ethnicity, no, you're not coming into this, uh, this country at all.
Uh, another, uh, another elected official was saying how, um, uh, because, um, uh, the, um, the mass shooter in, um, Austin, I think he was from, was it Senegal?
Uh, said, there's no reason anybody from that country should have been allowed here saying things like that.
This is what's going on.
Yeah.
It's, it's a cesspool.
It's filled with hatred, but you know, you can't just pretend it's not there.
That's why I didn't leave.
That's why I'm still there and I'm still giving them crap right back to them.
It means nothing.
What I say, because nobody sees what I say.
I know that I'm not pretending that, uh, you know, I have any influence whatsoever, but they're still talking.
People are still seeing what they say.
It's a, it's a good shortcut into their brain to see just how they work.
And that's the best way to defeat that, to, uh, you know, to learn how to short circuit that brain.
You know, imagine this, imagine, you know, ISIS in your neighborhood, they're downstairs, you know, they're doing all kinds of things downstairs.
Do you just say, you know what, you're, you're evil people.
And I choose not to acknowledge your presence.
What good is that going to do?
They're still going to be there.
They're still going to be there and you will have accomplished nothing.
You might have a better day yourself, but all kinds of crap is still going on downstairs.
You know, if ice comes into my neighborhood, I'm going to confront them as will many of our listeners.
And that is what you have to do.
You have to meet them where they are and defeat them there.
Not wait for them to come to where you've gone.
That's just how I feel.
Alex, go ahead.
I don't disagree with that sentiment and that philosophy of getting in ISIS face, as Billy Bragg would say in his new, this new, uh, uh, song that came out a couple of weeks ago.
But, but, but, but why is there a, but why does it have to be a, but why couldn't you just end the sentence there?
Go ahead.
But, but, well, you know me, there's always a but, right?
There's like, we've all got buts, so they all come up.
Anyhow, they, um, the, the but here is the assumption you're making is that the people that are posting these things are real people.
They're not necessarily bots.
You know, there's, there's so much of this automated crap that's out there that is just so divisive and generated and designed to sow more division.
The, the other day I, actually, no, it wasn't even the other day.
Now I think about it, it was just a long day.
Earlier today, I was on Facebook and somebody had posted something about some ice activity on Long Island.
And I thought, wow, that's interesting.
I was pretty close to, to where I had grown up and spent a number of years of my life.
And so I, I said, let me look at the comments.
All the comments under this ice activity were, they were entirely pro ice and anti-immigrant.
And what platform were you on?
What platform were you on there?
It was Facebook.
Facebook.
That's why, that's why.
But yeah, you stay on Facebook though, because you, you, you see this and you see, but you know, what you're seeing on Facebook, those are just, you know, uh, um, comments.
Common people like us.
I don't know, but that, that's my point though, Manuel.
I don't know if these were actual people.
That's possible.
You're right.
It didn't seem, it didn't seem likely to me that all of the comments underneath this post that was anti-ice and, and noting that there was activity in this particular part of Long Island and Suffolk County, um, could be pro ice.
I don't think that, that, that, that's right.
I think it was astroturfing.
I think these were bots.
And I think, I think we have to be careful about engaging on these types of platforms as well, because there was just so much automated activity.
But on Twitter, when you see a Congress person who's got the little grade check, uh, it's likely to be coming from that office.
And if it's not, they will say that somebody is impersonating me, but yeah, you're right.
When it's just individual people, you know, see if they, if it's a real name or whatever.
Um, but, um, uh, that could, that could easily be, um, a bot of one sort or another, by the way, you mentioned ice activity in Long Island.
I just want, since you brought it up, uh, today, March 4th, Hempstead, uh, Hop Hog, Central Ice Slip, Uniondale, uh, Central Ice Slip again.
A lot in Hempstead, Huntington Station, uh, Roosevelt, uh, these are all the places that ice has been active today.
And that means they'll probably be active in those places tomorrow because they, they tend not to move very far in a couple of days.
So, yeah, it's important to know these things.
It's important to let people know about these things.
Rob, go ahead.
I mean, so far as the, uh, you know, members of government being there on Twitter, you know, we were, we were all, I think most of us were there on Twitter in the early days when it was, you know, this fun little curiosity.
And then people such as members of government started going over to Twitter when they realized, hey, this is where people are talking.
And there are members of government who have moved on from Twitter to other sites like Blue Sky, even Mastodon, um, and, uh, are still doing their thing there.
But, uh, Twitter in itself, I'm going to continue to espouse the position that it's a lost cause.
It's a crap hole and it, uh, I think staying on there, um, where it is now this, this, uh, stewing pot of just people throwing the most vile things back and forth at each other, people and bots, but they're all validating one another.
They're all granting one another the confidence to be even worse people.
And I think continuing to, um, lend your legitimacy to it is not a good thing.
I think, uh, I think it's, it's something that should be left behind.
Um, it used to be a social media routine that a site would be cool for a while and then get left behind.
People would party somewhere else.
And I would like to see a world in which that's going on again.
I would like to see a world in which it is not one place or two places on the internet that everyone is expected to be.
And when those places on the internet are not profiting from the engagement fuel and the trolling and the clickbait and the ragebait that now fuels what Twitter is today.
Yeah, I agree with most of that.
I agree with, you know, not, not following the trolls and the, you know, the, the ragebaiting and all that.
But when it's people that are elected officials and that's where they're speaking out, I'm not going to wait for somebody to tell me what they said.
I want to see it the moment they say it.
I'm not there all the time, but if I happen to see them post something, I've, I've seen them within a minute post something hateful.
And, uh, you know, that needs to be spread around.
You can't wait for them to come to Blue Sky or to Mastodon.
I wish they would, I'd like it to get a list of how many elected officials are actually there.
But the fact is, uh, most of them aren't the vast majority or not.
If we can get them to go over there, but I don't see how you're going to get the hate filled ones to go to a different platform where their words won't be as accepted.
So, you know, it's important when you fight a war and this is a war, you fight on your enemy's turf and, you know, I would, I would spread that to a true social, invade that, tear that down, make it unpleasant for them there.
I know it's not pleasant for us.
It's, it's, you know, you're seeing a lot of ugliness, but it's not going away.
And these are people that are running the, the, the country and want to run the world.
It's, uh, it's, it's horrible.
I, I, I know.
But a place like Truth Social has a very active moderating staff that, uh, quickly zaps the accounts of anyone who dares speak opposite to how they want the, uh, conversation to go.
And, um, one of, one of the reasons Twitter has become what is it, what it is, is because their ownership and their leadership decided that, you know, you see this, uh, you see this end of the crap that's going on.
We're just going to go ahead and let that keep happening.
And there's the old example of a Nazi bar.
You know, you think you're running a regular bar, you're a bar owner and people come in and they enjoy your bar.
But then one day, one of the guys in the, up at the bar is a Nazi.
And then the next day he brings a couple of his friends and then they bring their friends.
And before you know it, you're running a Nazi bar.
And, uh, you know, there's nothing you could do about it at that point.
And I think Twitter right now is a Nazi bar.
Isn't there room for another analogy?
Because every time I have a conversation about Twitter, it turns into something about a Nazi bar.
You know, a phrase I never heard before, but apparently that's, that's, that's the way to defend against not, not, not, uh, not even, uh, you know, acknowledging their existence.
Look, I get what you're saying, but I just, I, I, I wouldn't have been able to read those quotes had I not been watching.
And I, you know, you don't have to engage, you don't have to, you know, go back and forth, but be aware of what's being said, what these people are doing, because, you know, the next thing they're going to do is, is implement what they're saying.
But also the value of these quotes you're saying is that it's showing you who these people are.
But I think also as members of government, they're on the record showing everyone who they are by what they're doing and how they're voting.
And I think, uh, that, that in itself is probably enough to tell someone is a butthole.
I'm sorry.
It's not, it's not because saying that legal immigration is not good.
They're not saying that in legislation.
They're testing that out.
They're seeing how people react to it.
And, you know, it's important that, um, we know the second they do that.
Kyle, go ahead.
Uh, I just want to observe, uh, I, I hear both of the things that are being said.
And I think it's two different things, although they're, they're interrelated and, um, there, I, I would just say that historically there's a discreet, distinct reason that government officials and, uh, celebrities and other people are on, uh, Twitter because that was used to gain, uh, more users, wider appeal, all of that.
It was, uh, it was, uh, an effort to, uh, increase the user base as that application grew.
Um, so that, that's the reason that it was, uh, integrated and is so widely used.
And that's sort of, uh, that led to the government sites being captive to this app or this, uh, uh, platform bar, as Rob put it.
Um, uh, even as the ownership has changed, it's just too cumbersome for so many official accounts to move.
Now, it doesn't mean that, uh, good people haven't moved to other platforms like blue sky or like, uh, uh, federated stuff, uh, that, uh, is akin to Mastodon and, and self-hosted platforms and many other types of websites.
All of which is great and, and, and, and should be more interoperable than it is with, uh, all of themselves necessarily, uh, but that is a separate art, uh, argument altogether.
The, the point being though, uh, that it, it is, uh, it's, it's important for us to, um, monitor and observe and understand that what you're getting there is what you're getting.
Uh, we can't be unaware of what official accounts are saying.
And sure, we'd love for them to be on our, our platform of choice for our own personal activities.
And we should be able to create community wherever possible, but, um, that's, that it, there is, there are ways that good journalists and other people on the platforms that we like that are also observing these other platforms.
They're just necessary evils, at least in so far as us being an informed pub public.
The fact is many of these people won't go somewhere else because they're comfortable where they are.
And I feel it's important to make them uncomfortable.
Um, FCC, uh, uh, uh, commission chair, Brendan Carr would like a word, uh, with us, with all of us.
Uh, he's urging broadcast media to air patriotic pro America content, uh, as part of our 250th anniversary in this country.
Uh, Carr and the FCC announced the pledge America campaign, uh, encouraging broadcasters to run programming that emphasizes the country's historical accomplishments from our founding through the Trump administration today.
What do you think guys?
Can we, can we, uh, show Brendan Carr how patriotic we can be?
You know what, Brendan?
I think we are being damn patriotic right now by questioning everything that this corrupt administration is doing, uh, and, uh, and, and, and talking about the history of this country, good and bad.
I mean, isn't that something that, uh, you know, what patriotic American would do?
Well, Alex, I think dissent is very patriotic.
And I think WBAI is synonymous with dissent for its entire history, which is a reason why you need to continue to support this particular radio station.
WBAI give to WBAI.org.
As a patriotic act, do that.
Absolutely.
It absolutely is.
Dissent is patriotic.
Resistance is patriotic.
This country was founded through an act of resistance to a monarch.
Don't forget that.
Yeah.
Kyle, go ahead.
Yeah, it just, it feels like it's, uh, it's not quite the year yet.
Maybe there, there's, um, there's more to unfold and it just might just be a, an off by one situation, uh, where we, we just have to wait it out and then it'll feel right.
Uh, but these directives, yeah, they should be in the mix with all kinds of other stuff.
The ultimate act of patriotism is election day.
And you better believe, Brendan, we're going to show up for that.
We're going to make you proud because we are going to make some changes, some real changes.
We're going to show you what people power is all about, you know, and I, I think that's something that, uh, can inspire us all.
So thank you.
Thank you for the motivation.
Uh, Rob, I believe you have an announcement for us and then we got to go.
We have overtime.
Overtime is at eight o'clock on YouTube.
Go to the, uh, channel 2600 on YouTube or go to the link on 2600.com.
Go ahead, Rob.
And, uh, this Friday, 2600 meetings are happening all over the world.
Go to 2600.com slash meetings to find one near you or start one in, uh, near you here in New York City.
It's at the city group building 53rd and Lexington in the food court this Friday evening.
And you can get a listing of all the meetings, 2600.com slash meetings.
There are a couple actually that aren't on Fridays, but they have little symbols that tell you when they are because, uh, the, it's, uh, you know, some, some, uh, some people,
some, uh, some, uh, countries can't make it.
In fact, uh, we have Qatar meetings now.
Can you believe that?
Or Qatar?
However people say it.
Anyway, we're out of time.
Uh, overtime starts at eight o'clock.
Uh, you can call us and be a part of things.
O-T-H at 2600.com is our email address.
See you next week.
Good night.
Wow, babies, I will tell it to you one time.
Here come the sound of the hypocrites and getting right.
As I would say, wow.
You carried my name.
With all you just do it in vain.
Hypocrite, where will you run tonight?
Hypocrite, you will get hurt somehow.
Hypocrite, I know the tide will tell on you.
Time will tell on you.
Give me this, I'm going over there.
Wow, I'm skimming away the over there.
I thought you were smart.
But man, you've got a wicked, wicked heart.
And though you're just being used.
When you're through, your will be reduced.
So, Hypocrite, where will you run tonight?
Hypocrite, you will get hurt somehow.
Hypocrite, I know the time will tell on you.
Time will tell on you.
Why do you have to be here with me?
Why do you have to be here with me?
Well, I beg your pardon, what did you say?
Then I watch what you do each and every single day.
Wow, baby!
I'm coast to coast, I'm feeling the force.
Want you to know you should never ever try to brag our balls.
Wake the town and tell the people that, yo.
Hypocrite is in the area.
Want you to know you have to watch what you do.
So, don't ever jump by roll and screw.
I thought you were smart.
But man, you've got a wicked, wicked heart.
And though you're just being used.
When you're through, your will be reduced.
So, Hypocrite, where will you run tonight?
Hypocrite, you will get hurt somehow.
Now, Hypocrite, I know that time will tell on you.
Time will tell on you.
Hypocrite, where will you run tonight?
Hypocrite, you will get hurt somehow.
Now, Hypocrite, I know that time will tell on you.
Time will tell on you.


And welcome everybody here on channel 2600 on YouTube.
Is Manuel, Kyle, you okay here? You may get into YouTube.
Yes, hello.
And Rob, Gila, Alex, you all here?
I am here.
All right, and are we on YouTube?
Still waiting for the delay to catch up.
The van just appeared on my screen.
Oh, there we go.
If the van shows up, then we're going to pile out of it at some point.
Okay, we are on YouTube. We sound good.
Cool. All right. Alex, you have something to say?
Go ahead.
Yeah, I mean, one caveat. I'm here. I don't know if I'm going to stick it out the whole time.
You know, you can't do this every week.
Every week you go to a foreign country.
Yes, it is. Every week you go to a foreign country, and you use the time as an excuse,
because it's later there for some reason.
At least I'm here when I'm in a foreign country.
I can only imagine what you would have pulled in India.
What would you have done then?
You would have said, oh, no, we're a day ahead.
Would have been the morning. I would have been fine.
I would have woken up. We had a cup of coffee in there.
But, you know, it is late.
I'll stick it out to whatever extent I can.
All right. Well, you might not want to stick around either.
You know, we have things we have to do, too.
Exactly. Yeah, I know.
But one thing I would say is, I think we should take phone calls earlier.
I mean, that's the most fun part of overtime.
Really? Just talking to us isn't fun enough?
I just had an hour of that.
I'm done. I'm done with you guys.
Wow. Okay.
I've had my fill.
Lay the cards on the table there.
Wow. All right.
Get rebel over with early.
Well, as long as we're being honest, Alex.
I have something that I'd like to say, too.
Yes.
Well, you know, candor is a virtue.
And listeners, anything on your minds, feel free to unleash it on us,
because we're here tonight for that.
Are we having festivists in March right now?
Yes, we're airing the grievances.
So you guys have a different microphone or something, don't you?
We do.
You definitely sound different.
Yeah, we had a bit of a situation this morning.
There was a rainstorm overnight and apparently a leak in our ceiling,
which happened to land on the keyboard on my computer workstation here.
We trashed the keyboard, and my previous mic was plugged into the USB slot on the keyboard,
so that, too, was fried.
Oh, damn.
The computer's fine.
Everything else is fine.
But we are using a backup microphone, which we actually inherited from my late father-in-law.
And so we're sounding a little different, but it's something we threw together to replace what broke down.
And it seems to be okay.
I mean, do we sound worse?
You sound a little tinnier, but, you know, I can live with it.
It's much better than the way Alex sounds a lot of the time when, you know, he can barely understand what he's saying,
or he keeps cutting out, or he freezes, and then you find out he wasn't frozen but just, like, staring at you.
You know, it's less dramatic and all that.
I would like to know what the frying egg thing is in the background, though.
Yeah, I'm terribly curious myself.
There could be any, I don't know what sort of, like, if you could describe the noise a little more, because we don't hear it.
Yeah, I was going to say, it's like, I can't do that for as long as it went on for.
It's like releasing steam.
Yeah, something like that.
Do other people hear it?
I mean, do listeners hear it, or are we the only ones that hear it?
I mean, Alex, do you hear it?
You hear it.
Okay, then it must be coming from something in this apartment, but I don't know what it could be.
I don't know what it could be.
We're a studio apartment, so we're kind of close to everything that could possibly be making noise.
It's weird that you don't hear it.
It's weird that you don't hear it.
But I'll tell you what, if it happens now, right, we'll say it's happening.
Can you switch to YouTube and hear a few seconds later, and then you can hear what we hear?
That's a great idea.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Thank you very much.
All right.
Plan of attack.
All right.
It's going to confuse the hell out of us, I know, but it'll be fun.
It'll be fun.
We'll let you know.
Yes, Alex.
One thing I want to say, usually Gila is the person that reviews the chats and says what's going on,
but I wanted to ask the people in the chat here, of which there are a good number now,
somebody made a reference to Chummer, and I want to know if that's a Shadowrun reference.
Somebody made a reference to Chummer, and generally Chummer was basically slang for something like buddy or friend or mate or something like that.
If you were a runner or a hacker back in the Shadowrun RPG days, and I'm just wondering if that's the reference that this person was making.
I have no idea what you're doing.
It was.
Wow.
I'm very impressed.
Okay.
Or it could have just been a typo or something, but either way.
I don't think it was.
All right.
As long as we're talking about things that most people don't understand, if you tune to 7910 kilohertz on shortwave,
you might hear an Iranian number station that just signed on the air a couple of days ago.
So, yeah, get your old shortwave out.
Or, gosh, I don't have the URL to that site.
You know who I'm talking about, the Dutch site, Kyle?
I do.
Yeah.
Do you have the link?
You can get the link?
Wow.
There's nothing you can't do.
We'll give that link out.
It's a long link, so get your pens ready.
And then you just tune to 7910 and wait.
And you'll hear somebody in Persian giving numbers out occasionally.
You don't know when they're going to sign on.
I don't know how people find these things.
There must be people all around the world just tuning to particular frequencies and waiting for something to happen.
Because I just heard about this.
They said it signed on a couple of days ago.
How do you know that?
How do you know when it signed on?
Weird.
It's amazing what people are up to, how dedicated they are.
7910.
8010 is the frequency.
But we need the URL more than we need the frequency.
Oh, you're playing it now.
Okay, well, that's the sound of static, which means they're not doing numbers.
I mean, it's not going to go on for long.
It's going to be on for a few minutes.
But the important thing is you can use your computer and listen to a shortwave radio in the Netherlands and tune it.
Tune it to your desire.
And, yeah, listen to all kinds of things.
It's upper sideband, too, by the way, USB.
So you have to make sure that's clicked.
Okay, so we want to take phone calls.
Is that what I'm hearing from people?
No?
I'm not hearing anything.
Sorry.
We think it's a great idea.
It's radio.
It's a fun idea.
Yeah, I had my head turned.
Okay, let's see.
Okay, so who wants to give out the phone number?
And on the last digit, that's when the phone becomes active.
So if you dial it now, you're not going to go anywhere.
All right, I'll do it tonight.
All right.
It's 802-321-4225.
Okay, and the phone is now active.
Right.
And if you call that number, you will reach us.
And the number is ringing.
But Kyle's tuning a shortwave radio, so he can't pick up the phone.
Just be patient.
He's going to get over there.
He's multitasking.
He's got...
Wait, that was only one ring.
Yeah, oh, that's somebody jump-starting.
Somebody having a laugh at us?
They're warming up their gear.
The site that we like is a web SDR host.
Okay.
And they're hosted at University of Twent.
Twent.
Yes.
T-W-E-N-T-E, I believe.
You can just pick that up and put it on hold.
And we'll get to them.
Done.
It's web SDR, W-E-B-S-D-R dot E-W-I dot U-T-W-E-N-T-E dot N-L.
There's more.
No, there's more.
There's like a port that you have to give out.
Yeah, dot 8901.
Yeah.
Or colon 8901.
Colon 890.
If you don't do that, it's not going to work.
So we'll give that out again.
And the frequency, once again, I believe I have it right, is 7910 kilohertz.
And you have to listen to upper sideband.
If you're not listening to upper sideband, you won't hear it.
Or you'll hear something that, you know, sounds like a fighter in Star Wars.
Maybe the static won't be that loud.
What?
I can't hear you.
Yeah, it's really loud.
It's louder than the frying eggs in Rob and Gila's place.
All right.
Shall we take this first phone call?
Let's bring it down to about a quarter of that.
We'll hear if they start talking.
I could go for some frying eggs right now.
That's fine.
All right.
Let's take our first phone call.
Good evening.
You're on Off the Hook Overtime.
Go ahead.
Yes, Emmanuel.
It's Rebel.
What a surprise.
Yes.
Did you get my email of the great idea I had for your non-profit?
You have a good slogan for it.
I have a very sophisticated filtering system as far as emails go.
So I haven't seen it yet.
Not to say I won't see it at some point, but it hasn't got to me yet.
It's going through.
Well, I mean, I don't know.
Shall I say it on the air?
You're free to say whatever you want because we're not even on the air.
We're on the Internet.
Well, I'll tell you what it is.
All right.
Everybody get ready.
Everybody sit down.
You know, copy it and say that, oh, I made this up that, you know.
Put down the breakable things that you're holding, folks.
Okay.
And all right, Rebel, we're going to give you the floor here and tell us this great idea
that you have.
Okay.
So it should be hope, you know, with the slogan, the logo that you still have.
And the slogan should be helping people understand technology.
H-P-U-T.
H-P-U-T.
No, no.
I don't know.
I mean, hope is still there, but I'm saying the slogan should be helping people understand
technology.
But it should spell hope, shouldn't it?
Isn't that the whole point?
No, it's the slogan.
Oh, the slogan.
Helping people understand technology.
Well, I mean, yeah, I guess that is what we do.
I like where you're going with this.
I will say it, I don't know if it encapsulates it entirely.
It definitely is one asset.
It's definitely aligned with the message of hope, I would say.
It is.
It is.
Many things are.
That's definitely one part of it.
I don't know if you can summarize hope in one slogan, you know.
It's a really weird thing that they've, in certain, you know, worlds, and especially
with this type of organization, yeah, they tend to want to be able to sum it up, like
what's your mission, that kind of thing.
So, I love the idea.
Let's keep them coming.
Yeah, what do you guys in Signal Land think?
Now I'm wondering if, you know, H-P-U-T, would this be a better name for the conference?
We could, you know, say, come down to H-P-U-T and, you know, check out what's going on.
Are you mocking this, Rob?
It sounds like you're having a bit of fun.
Well, I'm always having a little bit of fun, but there is, I appreciate the sentiment that's
being espoused here.
Tell us the thought process, Rebel, that brought you to the age point.
Well, I mean, there's non-profit, I mean, there's organizations that have these, you know,
like all organizations that help children and help, you know, homeless people and all
organizations that help different people, you know, in different realms.
I thought, you know, a non-profit, an organization that's the goal of the mission of this organization,
I'll pack a simple one of those, is to help people understand technology.
Basically, that's what it is.
Yeah, it's true.
I mean, I won't say it's not, for sure.
It's certainly one of the goals.
It's one of the, I mean, we have a bunch of goals, but that's definitely one of them.
It is good to do this stuff because it helps people keep the spirit of something over time.
And it's a way of encapsulating a sort of institutional memory.
What is hope to you?
And I think that's something we've been very thoughtful about.
And those types of sentiments are very much aligned with it.
In the sort of academic way that people give talks, the way we're about sharing information,
teaching people stuff, that is, it is all in furtherance of an understanding of specific types of technology.
I think communications, telecommunications is a big part of it in a specific way, historically and now.
But there may be other attributes that you're thinking of.
So I like the sentiment there.
And speaking of which, the speaker submissions are open for hope.
We don't have a definite place at this point.
This is the month, though, where we are going to figure it out.
I can say that with some assurance.
And stay tuned and we will definitely give you more info.
But if you're interested in giving a talk and you think you'll be able to make it to New York in August,
then there's no reason you shouldn't start working on your talk now.
And you can send your summation of what you'll be talking about and a brief bio to speakers at hope.net.
We'll have more information posted on the hope.net website.
And if you go there now, you'll find out all about the organization, the new nonprofit status, how you can help, how you can get involved.
It's going to be fun.
It's going to be really interesting.
We're basically taking a whole new route to this project.
And it's going to be fun and enlightening.
And your slogan, Rebel, is a good one.
Yeah, but I like to, because it's geared toward the, I guess, the corporate realm of people who, like, get, you know,
who have these data breaches and, like, how I remember you mentioned, like, well, if, you know, they have backups
or if maybe they shouldn't do this or that, you know, that's what it's geared toward.
And that's what our new 15-second private commercial spot is.
Okay, let's listen to it.
Wow, nice.
That was pretty smooth there.
Okay, let's listen to it, whatever it is.
Okay.
Data breaches can happen to anyone.
If you have a data breach or something technological that doesn't, well, I don't know, maybe I should have wrote that down.
Rebel, what's with the voice, Rebel?
What voice is that?
You know, you don't need, you don't need to, okay, we have one of the directors, what do they call those things?
We got a clapper ready.
A clapper.
We're going to take two.
All right, take two.
Go ahead.
Okay.
Ow.
All right, let's use the, okay.
Okay.
All right, all right, all right, all right, all right.
Data breaches can happen to anyone.
You should be prepared in case of a data breach to prevent it.
So, tickers on planet Earth can help you understand the technology behind what happens and how to not talk.
Okay.
You sound like the operator from Laugh-In.
What the?
No, no, the other.
No, no, no.
The other comedian.
Don't trash talk Lily Tomlin like that.
Actually, I wasn't thinking of Lily Tomlin.
I was thinking of the other, the one that inspired Lily Tomlin.
What was her name?
Bruce Buzzy?
No, no, no, not Laugh-In.
It was a comedy duo.
The guy lost his dime.
It wasn't.
Oh, oh, oh, Nichols and May.
Nichols and May.
That's it, yeah.
Sound like her, the operator in that sketch.
And if you haven't heard that sketch, it's from the 1960s.
I think Gila will find the name of it.
On it right now.
Okay.
I'm thinking of, like, the stop motion holiday specials.
Oh, yeah, right.
You know, like, Frosty or somebody.
Yeah, Frosty and the year without a Santa Claus.
But I love it.
That's good.
We need more stop motion.
In fact, I'd like many people to stop motion.
Stop motion, hope, advertisement.
Rebel, you up for take three?
You want one more?
All right, this is the last one.
One of them has got to work.
All right, Kyle, you count down.
Go ahead.
All right, three, two, one.
Take three.
Ow!
Why?
Diddy breaches can happen to anyone.
As Hackers on Planet Earth, we have people who know how things happen and how technology works.
If your company is unsure of technology, hackers can explain things to you in a way that you can understand.
Oh, boy.
Yeah, that's brilliant.
I think we can use that.
All right.
But is that the closing line?
You want to send it home?
Yeah, I think we got what we need, Rebel.
I think I'm going to write it down, and then by next week I'll have, you know.
It's part of the process.
It's part of the process.
It's how it works.
We piece it all together, and at the end we have magic.
That's show business.
I can't do it off the top of my head.
I have the idea, but I just...
All right.
Closing thought, Rebel.
Do you have a closing thought?
Let's see.
Yeah, because if you want to know how to...
Like, I learn things about Hope.
Like, when I was playing with Wi-Fi, I was wondering, let's say, why does so many Wi-Fi hotspots come up when I click on a Wi-Fi on a computer?
And not the Wi-Fi that...
And I went to the Hope Talk, and they explained it.
Things like that.
Yeah, that's what I learned.
Okay.
Yeah.
Cool.
Yeah, learning stuff.
Absolutely.
Learning is fundamental.
Sometimes just, like, kind of general, the basics.
We're all about, like, making complicated stuff approachable.
Because the telephone system, early stuff, it was complicated, but we wanted to distill it, and we're still doing that.
And I think that's a great kind of thing to remember.
Everyone listen to Evan Doorbell.
There's a YouTube channel called Evan Doorbell.
And he has eight...
Back in the 70s, he recorded each phone sound and told what it did and why it sounded like that.
I mean, I was confused about why, like, you know, a register sender is, you know, that's the sound of this and this, and this is the way the cross-brush sounds.
And, you know, I mean, I learned a little bit about, you know, how things work.
Because back in those days, I always wondered why the phone sounded, you know, metallic and, like, what did it make those rattles?
Well, it was what brought us in.
What brought so many of us in was just all the different sounds.
And actually, Rebel, do you know where people can hear the Evan Doorbell recordings?
Because there's an awful lot of them.
Yeah.
Go to YouTube.com.
On YouTube.
We're on YouTube.com right now.
We're all on YouTube.com.
Oh, Evan Doorbell.
Just type Evan Doorbell.
All right, but don't leave Channel 2600, so be careful.
No, I mean, after the show.
Yeah, wait a respectable time after the show.
And then type Evan Doorbell.
And then you can listen to your heart's content.
All right, Rebel, thank you so much for calling and for all the work you've been doing.
Okay.
All right.
See you next time.
Yeah, write your script.
You know, I've been thinking, and maybe you guys know this, maybe you don't.
For some reason, I've been thinking of a number one crossbar.
And you might be surprised to hear me say that.
But I was just thinking, you know, when I used to call my relatives in New York City.
And does anybody know what a number one crossbar sounds like when it rings?
No?
Hmm.
I'm just seeing blank stares.
You can say no.
There's no shame.
I mean, I don't know what a number one crossbar is.
That's the one with the chocolate and the raisins, I think.
I was going to say, isn't that like when you're on a bike?
No, make your jokes.
Go ahead.
It's fine.
I'm over it.
But look, there were different kinds of switching systems.
Everything now is digital.
But back then, well, there was step.
That was really old.
But for the most part, crossbar was what people used before they converted to ESS, electronic switching systems.
And it's weird because, you know, in major cities, you tended to have number one crossbars, whereas in the suburbs, you tended to have number fives.
And they had a different sound to them.
They had different rings.
You know, the amount of time of the ring was about the same, but the sound was very different.
And the thing is, people today who are not around, say, in the 80s or before, might not have any idea what that sounds like.
So I'm going to try and find audio from that and see if I can share it.
But, of course, those people would be familiar with switching systems from an era that they grew up in.
For instance, the DMS systems and other systems that were deployed in their locales.
And a lot of the systems, even the digital ones and the ones that changed from those systems, had their quirks and idiosyncrasies and things that you noticed.
And it got a lot harder with mobile systems and different voicemail schemes and things like that changing over time.
And, as you said, becoming more and more digitized with basically synthesized ringing and call setup stuff.
Well, you know, it all sounds the same.
And that's always been something that I've been against, is having everything sound the same.
Because back then, you could tell where your call was going.
You could hear it route through different places.
You could recognize sounds.
And now it's, you know, it's all the same.
I mean, if you call overseas, the ring sounds different.
But imagine that, you know.
I don't know if people make overseas calls.
But the ring, Alex, you obviously must know this.
The ring sounds different.
In England, for instance, it's a double ring.
But also, the sound that you hear over the phone is a different sound.
And, you know, I just worry that that kind of history could be lost, you know, if people don't.
It's funny.
I'm looking at online.
And what do you think is coming up?
Evan Dorbell videos on YouTube.
Exactly what Rebel was talking about.
And, you know, it kind of worries me.
Because does it come down to just one source of history?
Because, you know, that might be what we're looking at.
I will find it, though.
By the end of the show, I will find it.
So, we have another phone call.
And good evening.
You're on off-the-hook over time.
Go ahead.
Hello, guys.
How are you?
It's a guy from Queens with a dog.
You know, you have a name.
You have a name.
My name is Howard.
Hi, Howard.
And I called to talk to you about a couple of things.
But I first say, when you call a crossbar 5 office, the difference between crossbar 1 and crossbar 5 is you have more of an electronic ring.
The ring was made up of two frequencies.
440 and 480 with a 20 hertz time base.
And what was good about crossbar 5 is if you had decoders on the other end, you could tell if the phone was ringing.
And if you listen to the three beep, the last beep would tell you that the number was out of order.
And they had different tones.
Based on those tones, you could tell if the phone number was disconnected, if it was the wrong number.
How about this?
In one call, we get a guy who knows so much more about this than I do.
So that gives me hope that there are people out there that still remember and recognize this.
Tell me something, Howard.
Do you remember you've lived in Queens all your life?
Oh, yeah.
I live in the 380-591.
That was a crossbar 5.
Before that, it was a crossbar 1 or a mechanical office.
And we got a new office.
Our office came in around 1966.
It was on, I won't say where it is.
They don't know where I live.
But that office was built just for the World's Fair.
And when the World's Fair left, then they gave it to everybody else.
We got it.
We used to be OL7, Jamaica.
And then we came 380-969 and all of those numbers.
Do you remember when the 718 area code was actually the 212 area code?
Yes.
And I actually do remember that.
That's a whole story in itself.
Yeah, that was around 1983-84.
They decided to give us 718.
They started breaking up the area codes, which was a mistake.
What they should have done is kept everybody on it and just laid over a thing.
But the FCC had rules.
I did call about something else.
But if you want to continue on this, but I would like to talk to Alex
because I want to tell Alex what I think about something.
Let me try and play this one source of audio to see if maybe this is the number one crossbar ring.
It's quite possible it's not, but I'm going to try it anyway and see what we get.
Hang on.
Well, that's a ring, but that's not what I was thinking of.
Well, I can't even hear it.
Imagine hearing that when you call somebody instead of the ring you're used to.
But that's not the ring I'm looking for.
By the way, you can call people today.
You won't even hear a ring.
You can hear music.
But why I know so much about this, one of my first jobs was in 1982.
I worked for a guy.
I designed an auto dialer.
And we used two rings.
We used the busy signal in places where everything was standardized.
Oh, I found it.
I found it.
Hang on one second, Howard.
I'm going to play the sound of a number one crossbar.
Listen to that.
Listen to that deep ring.
You know, you hear a click.
At the end of each ring.
That's a relay.
You're hearing actual relays.
And in the distance, you can hear dial tones, busy signals, all kinds of crosstalk.
And when I would call people in the city, that is the ring that you would hear.
I mean, that's a phone ringing.
That means something.
Somebody, somebody's 500 series or Centrix or whatever is ringing with a bell and demanding attention.
And people are obviously not, in this case, running across a room to get to the phone.
And you could ring a phone for days.
You know, it would never disconnect.
And in fact, this, this one, thank you, Elmer Kat, whoever you are.
Um, this is over an hour.
Wow.
Okay.
So there are people out there who really care about this.
And that, that makes me feel good.
You guys okay if I just leave this up for a little while?
It's, it's.
It's oddly soothing.
It's comforting.
It really is.
All right.
Howard, I hope this isn't too much of a distraction for you.
No, no distractions.
If you can hear me, I'd just like to say something to Alex.
I want to discuss something.
Alex, I agree with you on the Constitution, but things have changed.
I know you guys don't like what Trump has done, and I can agree.
But, you know, if you look at, I have friends who are Iranians, and they say, look, he had no choice in a matter.
But when you're killing 32,000 people, just like we could not turn our heads away from what happened in Germany,
and if we had got involved in earlier in Germany, we would not have had that problem.
And today, yes, yes, you should go to the, to the Congress.
But if you went to Congress, everybody would know your plan.
So sometimes you have to do things.
Times are different.
When this Constitution was written, it was written for a time where things took days or months to happen.
And now things happen in microseconds.
My problem, and I think what Trump did is somewhat okay, as long as you keep it under control.
We had to do something.
You can't have anyone killing 32,000 people for no reason.
You can't even go, you can't even walk down a street in Iran if you're a lady.
If you show you're here, they're going to kill you, or they're going to stone you.
So what do you do in that case, Alex?
I know that you're a lawyer, but sometimes it has to be practical.
Should we just turn our eyes and say we're not going to get involved, or we're not going to try to change things?
I'm sorry, but war is a dirty business.
And we've had other presidents have done worse, like Johnson, after Kennedy was killed.
Johnson went ahead and thought of Vietnam.
And look at what happened.
Vietnam was not a justified war.
Sometimes you have to do things.
Sure.
And, Howard, I think you bring up really great points, and I appreciate you bringing them up.
And I don't necessarily disagree with you whatsoever, in many respects here, too.
I think you're absolutely right that we need the element of surprise, especially if we're going to target an autocratic, impressive regime like Iran.
I think it's incumbent upon the president to have to act unilaterally in order to do that.
You can't go and brief Congress.
Information is going to get out.
I think you're absolutely right.
But what I disagree with is that Congress shouldn't act as a check on the president here, right?
You know, this whole vote on the War Powers Act was really about Congress doing its job.
The president has a lot of latitude to, as the commander-in-chief of the U.S. Armed Forces, to engage in this type of activity.
But historically, in the Constitution, it definitely anticipates that it should be with the advice and the consent of the Congress in order to effectuate a real act of war here.
And so I think Congress has to be involved here.
Otherwise, we will run the risk of having some kind of autocrat in power that just unilaterally decides with whom and when we're going to engage in some kind of wartime operation.
That's scary to me.
But I do totally appreciate your points.
And the other points that you made are very, very valid, which are that there are many Iranians, many Persians in the diaspora here in the United States that are applauding these particular acts.
And I know plenty of them that are.
And I don't disagree whatsoever that the effect of what the president has done here with respect to Iran may have beneficial consequences to many, many Iranians, as well as beneficial consequences to the Middle East.
I think the Middle East will be a safer place without this autocratic regime in place.
There's no question in my mind.
But we're not a nation that justifies the means.
I'm sorry, that justifies the ends.
I'm sorry.
I'm trying to make the Machiavellian point here.
But the damn ringing in the background is a little bit distracting here.
We're not a nation.
I asked.
People said it didn't distract them.
I asked.
Okay.
Yeah.
We're not a Machiavellian nation here, right?
The ends for us don't necessarily justify the means.
We're a nation of laws.
We're a nation of due process.
And I think that that's something that we ultimately have to respect no matter what the beneficial effect is going to be for a domestic problem or a foreign problem like we're dealing with right now.
And that's the point here.
But I really very much appreciate you bringing up these issues and appreciate you listening very closely.
Yeah.
The only thing that I'm going to say is this.
Most of you guys don't like Trump.
Okay.
I happen to like him.
There are certain things he's done wrong.
By the way, Alex, I'll just say this as a sidebar.
I think the Supreme Court did the right thing on the tariffs.
He had no right.
But I actually think the tariffs were better.
As you know, the Federal Reserve came into being, and that's why the IRS came into being.
But that's a whole discussion for another point.
But the question is, do you think, forget about the Constitution, do you think Trump is evil because he attacked Iran the way he did?
Because we can go back in time and look.
I wish we just would look at him honestly.
I can tell you other presidents, look at what Truman did with the two nukes, the atomic bombs in Japan.
And you can look at why he did it, because he wanted to shorten the law.
Did he really?
Or was it because he wanted to keep Russia out of Japan?
So we can look at motives.
I mean, there have been other presidents who killed much more people than Trump has.
Johnson killed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, and we also lost 50,000 people in Vietnam.
I grew up during a period of time when people were protesting.
I was 14 years old.
I was born in 55.
So, yeah, I have a good idea.
But I'm saying is this.
How do you handle this?
Is he bad for wanting to do this?
Is it evil?
Maybe he's not going about it the right way, but I think he's trying the best.
And I wish people wouldn't just demonize just for the purpose of demonizing because he's Trump.
You know, people, all I know, a lot of my friends, if he were to cure something, they would hate him.
So they're always taking the opposite side.
That's the question.
Is he doing the right thing?
Are there really 32,000 people that have been killed?
I mean, what those people are doing to their own people, Iran, is a crime against humanity.
Yeah.
Look, and just to respond very briefly, and then I want to let you chime in here, too.
I think doing the right thing is different from doing the right thing according to the right processes as well.
I think we can all agree that the end result could be very beneficial.
But the ends don't necessarily justify the means here.
And that's my point here, is that if we begin to be a nation that says these types of things,
that, oh, we can get away with doing these things because the result is beneficial without necessarily following the process,
then we're not necessarily a nation of laws anymore.
You know, there are processes.
There's the Constitution that you have to follow,
and we have to make sure that we don't centralize too much power in the executive branch.
The executive branch has been consolidating power for so many decades now,
and it's become a very, very dangerous situation for us.
If you think about this in terms of hacking,
this is like somebody taking over the root account on a Linux system that's connected to critical infrastructure,
critical infrastructure being nuclear weapons in particular.
So I think we have to have...
You know what I'm really scared about is this.
We're still able in this country to be able to talk about this without...
We still have freedom of speech.
We have the First Amendment.
You know, I'm worried that either Trump or somebody else will come in and take that away.
That's the scary part.
All right.
We're going to move on.
But thanks for your call.
Gila, I know you had something to say, but go ahead.
Yeah, we're getting significant chiming in from the chat, and I agree.
Oh, my God, it has to stop, or I might show something through my eardrums.
Well, okay, but it stops from us getting in the streets and, you know, basically voting the bastards out.
I mean, you know, it doesn't happen overnight.
Right.
No, I understand.
Yeah.
I think you're willfully misinterpreting what I'm saying right now.
Willfully or willfully?
A little bit of both, honestly.
But I'm about to throw my headphones through the window, so if you could please, please, please stop the ringing.
Oh, the ringing.
Well, you know what?
Okay.
Is that what people are saying in the chat?
Yes.
Can you read me one comment?
We've gotten someone into that phone.
I agree.
The ringing is really annoying.
That's all I wanted.
They know it's ringing.
This is the sound of ringing.
Think about that.
That's what ringing used to sound like.
So, yeah.
All right.
The point has been made.
It's over when the phone stops ringing.
I did ask before if it's okay.
You did, and I don't think any of us realized it was going to go that long.
Well, that's how it worked back then.
Phones could ring forever.
So, yeah.
Yeah, I know, but if the phone had rung that long, and I was trying to call someone and the phone had rung that long,
I would have said, oh, they're not answering, and hung up the damn phone.
Or if you were me back in the day, you would have known that your neighbor was away and called their number and left it ringing so you could hear it ringing from their place and just be terribly amused by letting that go on for an hour.
I was reading a fun thing in a book I was reading.
I'm reading Nevermind the Happy by Mark Shaman, which I'm assuming does not appeal to pretty much anybody, but he was talking about trying to cockblock someone, and he knew that this guy was going to be going to his workplace to hook up after hours.
So he went to a payphone, called this guy's place of work, took the phone off the hook, and drove away, knowing that the ringing, he couldn't answer the phone because that would have alerted people that he was there after hours.
And this successfully kept this person from hooking up, which I very much appreciated.
That's fun.
Tom Mitchell.
Tom Mitchell.
Stop it.
What?
You realize that makes no sense to anybody that's not privy to your little chat there?
I do.
All right.
Why not tell the person in the chat to stuff it, rather than drag however many people are listening to this now and in the future?
Because anybody who's listening to it now and in the future, the chat is happening.
Is it?
The chat gets rerun along with it.
The chat reruns, yeah.
It takes about 24 hours to reset, and then the chat runs live.
Not if they're listening to the archive from 29600.com.
That is true.
So, I will say that we have someone who is in the chat pretty regularly, who attempts to be an edgelord and attempts to, oh, what's the word I'm looking for?
Provoke.
And...
I'm not in the chat, so if you're saying that, that's what I do.
Okay, because...
I'm not saying you.
I have been told that I have that effect.
We do have a phone call.
I am not saying you.
Okay.
You don't think I provoke enough?
I could do more.
I'm not talking specifically about you right now.
That's all.
All right.
Okay.
Well, do we have another phone call?
Yeah, we have another phone call.
We have another phone call.
So, let's not keep them waiting.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook over time.
Go ahead.
Hello, everybody.
First of all, props to you guys with a 1,000% improvement on your phone call quality.
I'm hearing everybody perfectly.
Hopefully, you're hearing me the same way.
So, whatever you did in fixing your phone system, props.
Well, Kyle gets all the credit for that.
He spent hours working on this and fixing it.
And, yeah, it works great now.
Okay.
First of all, what I'm calling about is listening to the numbers station in Iran.
For those people who are interested in shortwave monitoring all around the world and don't have a shortwave radio, there is an interesting site on the Internet, which you can access literally 100 or more shortwave receivers with various antennas located at various locations around the world.
Really?
You might want to, okay, go to websdr.org, websdr.org.
That is a portal that can take you to literally 100 or 150 shortwave radios, including the VHF and UHF scanners as well, all over the world, so you can really get a sense of what's going on out there if you go down that rabbit hole.
The very first one is the one that we gave out the link to.
So, wow, they have many, many more.
That's amazing.
About 100, and anyone can set up something like that.
Just the SDR dongles are relatively cheap.
The software is, I think, free or open source, and you can literally, if you've got the timer inclination, you can set one up.
Do you know how many people can tune the same receiver at the same time?
It depends on the bandwidth available to the specific receiver.
However, some have limits, some don't.
It depends purely on the bandwidth that's available, but many receivers have seen 15 or 20 people tuned in at the same time, and there doesn't seem to be any degradation.
Wow, this is amazing.
It's all over the world in the United States, South America, and that's really handy if you're looking for a particular broadcaster that comes in better in those locations.
Yeah, exactly.
Go to websdr.org, and that's a nifty site to keep in mind.
Bookmark that, and you're golden.
I'm doing that right now.
Wow.
Okay, I'm going to be spending a lot of time now doing this, so I won't be doing anything else I promise to do.
I'm not doing that anymore.
Oh, boy.
I got one more kind of a trivia thing for you guys since you were talking about the early history of the phone system, et cetera, and the different area codes before.
I know Howard from Queens mentioned when the 2-1-2 merged, brought in 7-1-8, et cetera.
You folks probably know this, but I'm going to just toss it out.
Do you folks know why the original area codes were assigned to specific cities?
There is a specific engineering reason for that.
I'll take this one.
It was particular cities that were very populous.
They wanted less time spent actually twirling the dial, so 2-1-2, 2-1-3, 2-1-4.
Those were big cities, 3-1-2, 3-1-3, 3-1-4.
If you look at the biggest cities, you'll find that they have the lowest numbers, whereas the ones where you dial zero in the middle or nine, those tended not to be as populated.
Also, a zero in the middle indicated that it was one area code for an entire state.
A one in the middle meant that there were multiple area codes in that state.
Did I get it right?
You get the gold star.
Cool.
Okay, that's about it.
That's all I got from here.
You've got a great show.
Thank you very much.
Thanks for calling.
Oh, by the way, one other thing.
How's Bernie S. doing?
I do not know, but I assume he's doing well.
Okay, because I thought, because I haven't heard him on the program for a while, of course, and I know Bernie S. through various radio groups that I'm involved with and so on.
Just haven't talked to him in a while.
Wow.
Well, get on the radio.
Maybe you'll find him that way.
Yeah, probably.
Okay.
Good enough.
You have a good one, okay?
All right.
Take care.
Okay, bye-bye.
And our phone number, 802-321-4225.
We're going to take one or two more phone calls.
So, yeah, you know, Alex, I'm glad you had the conversation about Iran, not me, because I'm worn out.
I said what I had to say.
You know what I was thinking?
You know how there's an Internet blackout in Iran, right?
Dial-up still works, though, presumably, right?
It's just hard to find another modem to which you can connect on the other side.
But how difficult is it for us to dial Iran?
How difficult is it for us to communicate with them directly through voice?
I don't know.
Is it like Albania back in the 90s where you couldn't dial it?
No, it's not blocked at all.
In fact, there's recordings of us calling Iran back in the hostage crisis, so we got right through.
It's not hard to do that.
I'm just not sure you'll find very many people in a talking mood, but I don't know.
You know, communication is important, and showing support is important, too.
The thing that worries me is, you know, knowing Trump.
And, you know, I don't criticize Trump because he's Trump.
I criticize Trump because of what he does.
And that's really the only reason.
And I don't just stop there.
I criticize the people around him, too, because they do stupid shit as well.
And in this particular case, I don't know if it's an exception because what they're talking,
the way they talk to the press or answer questions is so defensive.
People who are that defensive generally don't have confidence in themselves.
And that really worries me because it's easy to go bombing a country into submission, even a country like Iran.
Iran, what do you do next?
Because that Revolutionary Guard is still there.
You know, the infrastructure is still there.
And, you know, the best case scenario is that you have a lot of people competing to be the leader.
And then you have a civil war because of that.
I mean, you know, Iraq was supposed to be a cakewalk, and that sure lasted forever.
However, Iran is much bigger as far as military and population.
So we've opened up the floodgates, and it doesn't seem to be well thought out.
But, you know, I would like to be proven wrong on this because so many lives are at stake.
Rob?
I'm also curious, Alex.
If you could, who would you call in Iran right now and say,
Hi, I'm an American.
Want to have a chat?
I would just call anybody.
I would literally call a random number.
I mean, back in the red boxing days, I used to just try to call the numbers that were farthest away in the continental United States,
and that was either 808, numbers in 808 with an exchange, or 907, 808 being Hawaii, 907 being Alaska.
And I remember specifically that there was 907 in Anchorage.
There was a 243 exchange.
And I used to just call random numbers and random people in Alaska and say hello.
And sometimes I found it interesting.
Sometimes I didn't.
I always found it interesting because I was sitting at a payphone with a red box in a shopping center.
And I was, you know, 15, 14 years old at the time.
So, you know, those are the good old days.
But I do think it would be quite interesting to just try to give them a ring.
By the way, I used to call information operators from the payphone in my high school.
It was weird.
I remember a bunch of us would gather around and we'd call operators because it used to be free to call information anywhere in the world, actually.
So, you know, we'd call, say, 514-555-1212, talk to an operator in Montreal, and ask how the weather is.
And it was the biggest thrill in the world to hear somebody say what the weather was like in Montreal.
I don't know how I was able to share that with four or five people gathered around the phone.
But we were all that interested that we would do that.
And, you know, that was a magical moment there that you could just connect to somebody and it sounded far away.
You could hear that hiss.
It sounded kind of like, you know, what Rob and Gila have every now and then with the egg sound.
But it was, you know, it was more serious.
It was just, you know, this is far away.
This is long distance.
We called people in Alaska, operators in Alaska, because that was free.
And then occasionally we'd make collect calls to random people, sometimes even accepted, but you would always be able to hear them, even if they didn't accept.
So that was that was part of the magic of telecommunications.
And I got to say, that's what that's what drew me in was that magic, just being able to hear distant voices and realize, wow, there's people there, too.
And what kinds of lives do they lead?
I totally agree.
I even before I got into phone freaking or hacking in any respect, I remember being in eighth grade and starting to learn Italian.
And I used to try to figure out how to make collect calls to random numbers in Italy just to hear how they would answer the phone.
Yeah.
I mean, it was fascinating to me.
It just it drew me in that you could do that, that you could connect to somebody on the other side of the world.
And they spoke a different language.
And it was a different time.
It was really was mind blowing.
You're part of this network and connected to people.
It was it was really extraordinary.
There you take it all for granted.
There's one example, a particularly fun example that we did on a really old radio show from, oh, I don't know, 1981, 1982.
We would have just a part of the show called Voice of Long Island, where we we just call operators and talk to them.
And it's a it's a great way to hear what the phone system used to sound like.
But there was one particular case where an area code popped up that wasn't listed.
It was the 706 area code.
And it wasn't in the phone book and operators didn't even know what it was.
I don't know how I found it.
I knew it was going to Mexico.
I knew it was it was it was some kind of weird Mexican shortcut.
But I would call I this is all documented.
In fact, you can you can find it on 2600.com radio section.
And look for Voice of Long Island and look for the 706 area code.
It's in there somewhere.
But we got Mr. Pinto.
I remember Mr. Pinto was the operator.
And I was asking him, where is 706?
He said, well, we don't have a 706.
And then, OK, bye.
And then I called 706 on the air and you heard it ring.
So then I called another operator, except it turned out to be Mr. Pinto again, who was
rather peeved that, you know, we are calling him back and not believing him the first time.
But eventually he figured out where it was.
Things like that.
That was just that was the fun of the phone system of exploring, of being mischievous and
learning new things.
Gila, and then we have a phone call.
Tim in Connecticut tells us that his first piece that he said, I think my first red box
call was Tokyo time and temperature just to see if I could do it.
Wow.
Awesome.
That's that's a that's a high, high bar there.
All right.
Let's take the phone call.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook over time.
I don't think you should give Twitter that much slack.
I mean, it's been around.
I mean, it's been around longer than this poor management has been.
You know, it's run by a Nazi.
But, you know, what are people going to do about it?
You know, you have all these people signed up onto this network that has been taken over.
But, you know, it's it's still useful.
I mean, you can still use it to reach out to people.
And, you know, maybe if your platform isn't liberal politics, it could still be quite useful
in getting your message out.
I use it.
I used to shame big corporations.
You know, it's when they do something wrong, they're almost always on Twitter.
And by the way, I love the fact that we've just called it Twitter and nothing else.
But they they will respond.
Here's a here's another caution, though.
Sometimes when they respond, it's not them responding because there are all kinds of
of con jobs on Twitter.
And this is one of them where accounts pretend that they belong to the company and then they
get your personal information.
So be wary of that.
But oftentimes you will get the actual customer representative from that company.
I've had things fixed that I couldn't get fixed over the phone.
I wish I wish they were on the other platforms.
And, you know, I I'm always trying to get people to go to the other platforms, but I can't fool
myself and say they are.
They're not.
We need to obviously fix that.
But it's not we're not there yet.
Anyway, what else is on your mind?
I mean, there's people on there who obviously don't care, maybe from foreign countries.
And like, how do you how do you connect with them?
You know, not all people can figure out how to go on to Blue Sky or Fetageverse because
it's also fragmented, in particular with the Fetiverse.
You know, you have to pick, you know, what kind of instance you want to go to and all
that.
You know, it's not something that some people may be able to figure out.
I agree.
You know, every everyone you're saying that about, though, got onto Twitter somehow in
the first place.
And, you know, getting onto something else is basically that that that easy, I think,
for the most part.
Maybe the Fetiverse is a little more complicated, but that's always being worked on.
But like Blue Sky, you sign up for an account and you're there.
You know, other platforms, you sign up for an account and you're there, just as you did
when you got your Twitter.
And I agree.
Twitter used to be very useful for contacting.
There was there was a broken stair on my local subway stop and I tweeted at the MTA about
it and they fixed it.
And that I felt a sense of accomplishment about that.
But, you know, I probably could have also just called them on the phone and told them.
Wow.
Right.
I mean, it's still useless for some things.
I still use it.
Fortunately, I mean, people are going to use it as long as they can.
Okay.
Yeah, you can't you can't stop you from using things.
That's that's one thing we've learned.
This this is true.
But like for my for my own well-being and mental health, I have used it as long as I can.
And I stopped using it quite some time ago.
And I understand.
I respect that.
I mean, yeah.
It's all a decision people have to make on a case by case basis.
Yeah.
Respect the decisions people make.
That's all I ask.
You know, we shouldn't be shaming people because they use this and not that.
You know, I see wars between Macedon and Blue Sky.
That's stupid.
Don't do that.
Oh, well, so anyways, I was kind of surprised this wasn't gotten to on the show.
But California enacted a new bill, the Digital Age Insurance Act, Assembly Bill number 1043.
And there's been all sorts of hoopla in like the open source community, you know, open source operating systems about, you know,
how are they going to implement age verification on their operating systems?
You know, Midnight BSD, you know, it's a BSD fork, BSD being the Berkeley version, Berkeley Unix.
You know, they just put in their license.
Hey, if you're from California, don't use this because we can't put in age verification.
We can't comply with this law.
So don't use this.
Or come from somewhere else.
Come from a different place.
Just don't come from California.
It's easy.
Yeah, that's my question.
Like, the licensing specifically says, if you're in California, don't use this.
But I don't think the system actually has any taste to that.
And, you know, it's not going to stop you from, it's not going to check to see where you're from to try and stop you.
It's just a legal thing.
The thing is, we can't let something like that become normal, where, oh, I'm in California because I can't do this.
It's like, oh, I'm in California, then I'll use this method to do this.
You know, it's far more dangerous to restrict people in that manner than for a child to have access to something they're not supposed to have access to.
There are other ways to deal with that problem without screwing up the entire net for everybody.
Yeah, and there's the Linux people who are actually right now trying to figure out how to implement this into different distros on, like, an API call level, putting up different things.
And it's, I mean, there's a bill that's severely brain damaged, and to a smaller extent, the people who actually want to comply with this.
Yeah, I can't imagine why they want to comply with this, because it's just such, you know, it's such a level of control that you're giving away.
And I don't, this is, I don't think this is even enforceable.
And, you know, I mean, the bill specifically, well, first of all, the bill says, you know, it says, if you're a publisher of an operating system, you have to put in age verification into your system.
And then, well, now you have to define what an operating system is.
You know, there's all kinds of different operating systems that may be used not on a desktop computer that a child might have.
I don't get it. I don't get the mentality. I mean, how are you supposed to even use a computer?
I mean, there's Linux distributions for servers, real-time operating systems, industrial control systems, all those different system software that could technically fall under the definition of an operating system.
Are they going to have to implement age verification, too?
You know, if you're trying to set up, like, a rack-mount server or something, and it says, you know, please tell me how old you are.
And that's the other thing.
You know, what if a child just says, yes, I am 18 years old, just lies about it, just presses the other button?
You know, it's a...
Is that all it takes, or do they want some kind of proof?
I, you know, I don't know. I've got the text in front of me.
I don't know the answer to that question, but it seems to me that that's what it's all about.
You know, just...
One of the key points of the Internet is the ability to be anonymous.
You take that away, you might as well just destroy the entire net, because that is what it's founded upon, that ability.
We can never let that go.
But this isn't specifically about Internet. It's about operating systems.
Right, but they're related.
I guess, but, you know, think about it.
You know, if you're trying to set up a server, are they going to... server operating systems?
Are they going to have to set up age verification, too?
You know, you're in a factory working in a Simon's industrial control system that runs a real-time operating system.
That's going to have to implement it, too. It's really, really...
Why, in God's name, are we upset at a seven-year-old setting up a distribution of Linux?
I don't see what the harm in that is.
I don't think... I mean, yeah.
What else was I going to get to?
You know, what is my point of all this?
I mean, this is very, very brain-damaged.
It's people who don't understand technology making the rules about technology.
I think that's been long-running.
Yeah, it is.
But they're getting more power now.
And, you know, I think we're kind of so tired of it all that, you know, we're just not fighting as hard as we should be.
I think the answer is to get more people fighting, obviously, to educate more people.
And this bill doesn't do anything for the two major operating computer operating systems, macOS for Macintosh and Microsoft Windows.
Because those both put in, you know, as part of the account setup, when you first set up one of those systems, you have to put in how old you are.
And, you know, through that, I'm pretty sure they put in different age gates for what kind of applications you can install from, you know, that system's particular software repository.
You know, this is only wreaking havoc in the various, you know, Unix and distributions.
And, you know, I even saw somebody was making a firmware for, like, for calculators.
And they had to put in notice, if you're in California, don't use this.
Because, you know, even though this is like a thing for a desktop calculator, it still falls under the definition of an operating system.
And, no, I'm not going to implement age verification on a fucking calculator.
How would you do that?
Are you just typing your date of birth on the number pad?
All these things have to be challenged, I mean, to, you know, so people see how ridiculous it is.
And, by the way, you're hissing again, Robin Gila.
I just stopped.
I think this is...
I don't hear it on the phone.
All right.
Do you hear it on the speakers, though?
Um, no.
Well, I'm not sure.
Don't listen now, because it'll get very confusing.
But this is practical.
But this bill is practically unenforceable.
It is.
I'm not sure why people are trying to comply with it.
Because people like to control things that they have no clue about.
That's the only answer I can come up with.
But, anyway, we're going to head out of here, because it's late, and we've got other things we've got to do.
But thanks for your call, and for letting us know about that.
All right.
I think that's pretty much all I can remember to say.
Thank you.
All right.
Take care.
And that's our last call for the night.
All right.
But we did follow your idea.
And when you told us the hiss was happening, we clicked over to the YouTube feed with the delay and checked it out there.
And now we hear what's going on, and I have no idea why that's happening.
I don't think it's something happening in the apartment.
It must be something happening maybe in my sound hardware or something.
But, yeah, it's strange, and we'll look into it.
It's weird.
I'll tell you why.
It's weird.
Maybe Carl needs to check out Queens for a little bit here.
He doesn't do house calls.
Yeah.
I know.
He seems to be the only person who can fix these things these days.
You know.
We fix one problem, and just another one pops up.
I mean, this is just life imitating art, I guess.
We will investigate.
There it is.
Yep.
All right.
Well, write to us, OTH at 2600.com.
Don't forget, 2600 meetings in the vast majority of places on Friday.
And look on 2600.com slash meetings for a full listing.
Anything else?
No?
Good.
All right.
We will see you next week.
We'll be back next week.
Same time, same place.
Good night, everyone.