This is dedicated to all the hackers and the crackers.
To the hackers and the crackers.
I see in binary, I speak source code.
Step on my toes, I'll post a million jpegs of you in a fag pose.
In your digital stance, getting firewalled ho.
Cause I'm riding the net in my six-fold.
I was a dick with my fifty-six.
Now with my cable, I'm able to get that stable.
On the out, my name is Ace and I'm a Leo.
On the digital highway, my name is Neo and I'm a hero.
In a flash, I'll school you on burning Dreamcasts.
You need some ISOs? Let me through my hard drive rifle.
Our exchange you could never stifle.
And a digital hug, you just caught the love bug.
I bootlegged your CD. I caused a fight between Un and Jay-Z.
Your CG, it's all gonna be free.
Whether we take it by force or we take it nicely.
You feel that rattle in your bones?
When I tell you we just hacked out Jones?
And NASDAQ leaves you flat on your back.
Cause I am he who loves to hack and crack.
This is dedicated to the hackers and the criminals.
Serial codes, source codes, ISOs, RANs, SIFs, SIFs.
This is dedicated to the hackers and the crack.
Yeah, so I'm talking to her and I'm like, listen, you haven't seen Googling skills until you've seen me and my Google.
Oh baby, you should see me Google.
I'm a Googling machine.
Oh, oh crap.
Oh shit, are we recording?
Yeah, hello everyone.
We'll edit that out later.
Welcome to Binary Revolution Radio episode 41.
I am StankDawg, the Google Meister.
And I am joined by a voice you may recognize, Rax himself.
The Google master.
You're a meister, I'm a master.
The meister, the master.
This is Binary Revolution Radio episode 41.
I think I just said that.
Coming to you on April 13th.
Tuesday, April 13th, 2004.
Only two days to get your taxes done.
And two days until Hack TV.
The debut of Hack TV episode one.
Let's get our priorities straight.
Taxes?
Yeah, right.
Oh, let's see.
Well, in case you hadn't guessed,
our topic today is going to be Google
and lots of good Google information.
But before we go into that...
Boy, I'm almost wanting to say Google for every verb.
I don't know how that started happening.
Yeah, well...
Before we Google into that,
let's Google the housekeeping section
and Google some emails, shall we?
First email I got was from someone's real name
who we don't read on the air, but they said,
Hey, first off, I'd like to say I love the radio show and Mags.
I know you probably hear this enough,
but I'd just like to show my likings for Binary Revolution.
I'm having a problem with my Orinoco Classic Gold PCMCIA card
and an antenna I bought.
The antenna plug and the plug on my Orinoco are both male.
It seems that all I can find are MC adapters for making the antennas.
Is there any adapter I can get to connect two male plugs?
If you could give me a little input, I would appreciate it greatly.
Thanks.
Now, we need a little bit more information than that
because we don't quite know...
You know, we need a little bit more detail.
What I can tell you is there's a site that I go to
and I've bought from before called FabCorp.
F-A-B dash C-O-R-P dot com.
And they've got a good selection of lots of different converters,
male to female, different size, stuff like that.
But, actually, Rax and I were talking about this a few seconds ago
and you had a good point and kind of a warning, I guess.
Well, yeah, there's...
You know, you can buy stuff any place, all over the place.
You know, buy it on eBay or whatever.
And you start mixing and matching.
Actually, I took some training on Cisco's fundamentals of wireless technology.
And you find out about a wave propagation theory and all this other stuff.
And, basically, part of the FCC regulations as stuff was getting set up for Wi-Fi,
there are different specs for polarities and everything else between different manufacturers.
And that was specifically requested or specifically demanded by the FCC so people couldn't mix and match things.
The idea being that if you start throwing all this stuff out there and, you know, putting antenna amplifiers
and, you know, big old antennas with, you know, whatever, 18 dBi gain and everything else,
you will get out of specification for what's called the ISM, industrial scientific medical band, that the 2.4 gigahertz is in.
And since that's more or less a public band, if you start having and start mixing and matching stuff,
you can end up with a lot of noise and putting out a lot of noise in that band
and be prepared for potentially, you know, if anyone ever wanted to give you grief and, you know, rat you out to the FCC,
you know, you could be looking at some pretty hefty fines there.
Also, any time, too, you're doing any kind of splice stuff, and this just goes with anything,
whether you're fiber optic or anything else, you're losing a lot of gain right there.
So probably the better, I know for the listener, he already has the stuff bought,
but for anyone else out there, you're probably better off doing your homework first,
finding out what you need and getting the exact thing to fit rather than having problems later on.
But is that a realistic possibility?
I mean, I'm assuming that he's thinking, you know, he's...
I guess I'm thinking that it's similar to what I have, and that's just a small antenna for the roof of the car kind of situation.
You know, I have an omnidirectional that I actually bought from Fabcorp.
And if he's just... it's just the adapter is the wrong sex.
I mean, it's... if it's a small antenna like that, is there really that much of a danger in...
If there's a small antenna like that, you're probably not going to get out of the spec.
I forget what it was, it was like 36 DBI was the total output.
It was another three-letter acronym, but from the point forward in the...
Basically, it's what you're emitting.
So you're probably not going to be getting out of that with the little war-driving mag-mount antenna on top of your roof.
But just kind of a cautionary mention to everyone else out there listening about that.
When you go to start getting this stuff, you need to keep that in mind.
So when you go to some of these sites, like this Fabcorp or Wireless Central, I think was another one that had some stuff.
Literally, they'll actually have kids for you and they'll have the whole shooting match.
And then the responsibility is on them for specing everything out.
Good advice. Very good advice.
So, yeah, check that site out.
And again, it didn't quite give us enough information to give you a straight answer
or tell you exactly to buy this model number or whatever from this.
But if you go to that site, Fabcorp, and what was the other one you said?
I think it was Wireless Central. I'll double-check that here.
Yeah, and we'll throw that in the show notes if we find that.
And you probably will be able to find what you're looking for.
Now, I have...
Boy, we've got a lot of emails coming up, so let me warn you.
We've got a large housekeeping section this time.
I got an email. Actually, this is the second email.
I should probably apologize, from Freaky mentioning his site.
He's got a new site called Hackwire.com.
Now, he sent me an email of this before, I guess maybe a couple weeks ago,
maybe even longer, that he put up this new site.
And I forgot to mention it on the show then I was going to bring it up.
So, I'm bringing it now.
If you go check out Hackwire.com, it's kind of a hacking news portal.
What I like about it was that it also has a news feed.
You can pick up their news feed and put it on your site.
So, I've even taken it and put his news feed up over on our FL2600.com,
site for our local Florida 2600 group, along with Root Secure's news feed and some other sites.
Don't forget to go check out RootSecure.net also.
But, yeah, check out Hackwire.com, give them a shot, see what you think about them.
So...
Also, in the meantime, I just looked that up.
It is WirelessCentral.net, but that redirects you to store.ybi.com.
And they have a ton of, just a whole boatload of wireless stuff there.
Hmm.
Well, we'll probably...
We'll put up the link to the main site in case it redirects somewhere differently next time.
Alright.
Um...
Got another email here from...
This one...
I like this one.
Very short email, but I like getting these.
It's from Insom.
And it says,
Dear Binrev,
I must say I'm against any form of hacking that's detrimental to someone else's way of life,
including use of exploits and trojans on corporate servers.
Just supporting your views.
I thought that was one of the best emails I've gotten in a long time.
Short, simple, to the point.
I don't know.
What do you think about that?
Well, it's...
Get me up on my soapbox.
Okay.
Hacking...
That was the point.
Yeah.
Hacking is not about breaking into things, okay?
Hacking is, if you go back and look at it,
it was like whatever in the 30s at MIT, the Model Railroad Club,
they came up with all these cool little ideas for things.
When the computer things and the artificial intelligence lab and stuff like that started happening at MIT,
they adopted that name.
And basically the idea, the whole original concept of that behind a hacker or a person who was a hacker,
is someone who has a lot of knowledge in an area, finds out a solution to a problem, a clever solution usually to a problem,
and shares that information with everybody else.
When people started using computers to commit crimes, the media looked at that and said,
well, what are we going to call these people?
What are they calling themselves?
You know, oh, they call themselves hackers.
Okay.
Well, so we'll call them hackers.
And so now there's, probably from now until the end of time, the term hacker will be stigmatized.
And to quote Emanuel Goldstein from 2600, they have a name for people who commit crimes with computers.
It's called criminals.
Okay.
So the term hacking, and this guy is right on with the thing, you know, it's about sharing knowledge,
it's about gaining knowledge and sharing knowledge.
And like anything else, it's an absolute value.
Knowledge is an absolute value.
You can use it any way you want.
You can take Taekwondo lessons, you know, to learn for self-defense.
You can take Taekwondo lessons and find some random people and just beat the snot out of them, right?
So it's all of what your intention is.
You can use an airplane, right?
You can fly people around the world.
You can fly into a building, blow it up, and take buildings down.
It's all back to your intent.
So when people are doing these nasty, ugly things and, you know, oh, it's so lead, it's so cool, it's so lame.
I mean, come on.
Find things out.
Share the knowledge.
Share the information.
Absolutely.
Knowledge is power.
But doing all that other stuff is, you know, it's just BS.
It's just mental masturbation, you know?
If you're going to be a criminal, you're going to do whatever you can to be a criminal.
You're using various tools.
You know, that's your choice.
That's your karma.
But hacking is not about crime.
End of soapbox.
Right.
Well, I'm going to, I'll play a little devil's advocate here because I do think there's a fine line to be careful of here and that is, it's not only intent.
Intent is an enormous part of it, and absolutely everything you said I agree with completely.
But let's go with the virus, for example.
This is an impromptu debate we'll have here on viruses, for example.
To me, and this is just my personal, do not speak for DDP, hack radio, et cetera, et cetera.
I don't really fault so much, in every circumstance anyway, the people who write a virus.
I fault the people who use the virus and release the virus intentionally.
Again, it comes back to intent, into the wild.
So I know a lot of times, you know, I just want to be careful that someone may sit on that fence.
Someone who develops viruses, to me, is not necessarily a black hat hacker, a bad hacker, a criminal or anything like that.
There are perfectly valid reasons to research and look into this, and most of them being to point out weaknesses and flaws in systems.
I mean, do you think Microsoft will be patching Outlook and fixing these problems if somebody wasn't pointing them out?
But then there's a very fine line, like I'm saying, of where you do actually intentionally release that to damage something or...
Am I making any sense there?
Okay.
Do you disagree?
I was waiting for my opportunity here.
Okay.
First of all, I think that there's probably very few virus writers that write it just for the sheer joy of writing the virus.
I think they write them to release them.
I agree with that, but there are a few.
Well, very, very few, I would think.
You know, why else would someone do that?
It's not to say, how am I going to prove how powerful my virus is?
Look at Robert Morris Jr. in The Internet Worm back in the 80s, right?
You know, he wrote that.
He was researching it.
It's actually a whole side story.
We could talk about that sometime about Robert Morris Sr.
Actually, his father, who used to work for the NSA and various other things of that ilk, he was actually responsible in some respects for the virus culture, if you will.
But I think, really, people are writing viruses to release them.
How else are they going to see them?
How else are they going to get their jollies?
How else are they going to feel, you know, good about themselves saying, hey, you know, I took down X amount of things or, you know, I caused this much damage or whatever.
So I think, really, that they're written to be released.
Next, for those people who have, and there have been some instances within the last year or so even, where there's supposed to be, you know, good viruses that go up and clean exploits and clean, you know, patch holes and things like that.
Right.
And I'm sorry, but I maybe call it, you know, one bad apple spoiling the whole bunch, but I'm not going to trust my security of my system to someone else to let them go in and do that for me.
You know, shame on me if I don't have it patched, but, you know, I'll be damned if I'm going to let someone else, you know, wittingly, knowingly condone that kind of behavior.
Well, that's just it. You're not knowingly and wittingly do it. They're using that same method of destruction to rebuild it for you without your knowledge.
Yeah, and then, you know, there's, you know, again, maybe their intent is good with it, but I forgot about the other point that you were talking there, Stank, but anyway, yeah, I think they're being done to specifically do something.
And now we're seeing the viruses and Trojans and worms and everything else being written for spammers and, you know, the virus writers and the spammers are working together or they're, you know, they're one and the same person, what have you, that I'll write a virus, it'll install on your system, and it'll put an SMTP server on your cable modem or DSL system or your dial-up, but typically, you know, the always-on connections.
Now I'll harvest that address because, oh, by the way, when it installs itself, it'll send out a little message, you know, it'll pop something up on, you know, some anonymous page on angelfire.com or something.
I'll go harvest that address. Now I have all these IP addresses around the world of sites I can use to send out spam.
You know, and actually, that's a good point. We're going off on a little bit of a tangent there.
Well, that never happens. We never do that.
Yeah, never. But it kind of bugs me when I hear people talk about, see, to me, there's, I'm trying not to go too far on the tangent, but basically, you hear the word sellout when it comes to hackers.
If a hacker gets a job in a security company or doing security for a company, they get labeled a sellout.
To me, the real sellouts and the true sellouts are the ones that are in bed with the spammers and selling and giving their viruses and their trojans, et cetera, to the spammers.
Those are the real freaking sellouts, if you ask me.
Well, it's like my, when everyone sees on April 15th here, when you see the intro for Hack TV, my T-shirt says it all.
I'm not a hacker. I'm a security professional. And it's just that fine line that people from Loft Crack looked at each other.
You know, Munch looked at, you know, Captain Purple Cow or whatever the other guy's name was.
Dude, we could make a lot of money if we just sell this in the corporations and, like, cut our hair and, you know, give ourselves a real name and a real website.
And you get to that at some point, you know, at some point in your life and some realization.
So, you know, there's nothing wrong with making money. There's nothing wrong with making a living.
You can carry that too far. Let me give you a two-syllable example, Bill Gates.
But, you know, there's nothing wrong with making a living with what you're doing.
Unless it's spam.
I think even Richard Stallman, you know, has said that there's nothing wrong with that.
However, you know, there are other various degrees in there.
But when it gets all back to it, again, hacking, the true intent of hacking, at least in my book, is, you know, getting knowledge, finding out solutions, and sharing that.
It has nothing to do with criminal activities.
Or destruction.
How do we do that? Do we bring it back to the original?
That's exact. You know, I agree 100%.
I agree 100%.
I do try to give a little bit of leeway, I guess.
A very, very small percentage is probably accurate, but I still believe in innocent until proven guilty.
So, someone writing a virus could purposely have done that for a class, for research, for...
Well, I tell you what, what about this question?
Does it matter what the payload of said virus, trojan, or whatever is?
Are there degrees of severity and degrees of intent?
For example, you know, something like...
First degree murder, second degree murder?
You want to have first, second, and third degree hacking?
Is that it?
Well, not so much that.
More like, is...
Well, I'm just posing a question here to see where...
Like, is there a difference between the stoned virus and bugbear?
Is there a difference in those two viruses?
Because to me, they're two totally different things.
One that doesn't do anything but pop a message up on your screen, it's an annoyance.
And another one that can cause damage and delete files and shut down servers.
Should those be treated differently, or are they all...
I'd say hang them all.
String them up, it'll teach them a lesson.
Yeah, right.
The old...
I love the old line, it says, anyone for capital punishment should be shot.
Yeah.
Well, you bring up an interesting question there, and we've seen...
Me?
An interesting question?
No.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, even...
You know, what do they say?
Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn every now and then?
But...
Sorry, man.
I just had to...
Slam!
Burn!
But it brings up an interesting point, because again, now we're starting to see in this post-9-11
world of the Patriot Act and all this other stuff.
By the way, I've slapped my own wrist for saying the Patriot Act.
It's the USAPA, right?
It has nothing to do with patriotic.
It's just a very cleverly termed marketing scheme.
But anyway, so with the USAPA in this kind of environment, they're saying now that if someone's
doing this illegal activities with computers, you know, do not cobasco, do not collect $200,
go straight to jail, go to the big house, you know, become someone's wife, because now,
you know, this little pencil neck geek that did this, you know, whatever alleged computer
crime is now a felon.
And he's spending, you know, hard time, you know, next to the guy who, you know, I don't
even want to say what kind of unspeakable acts he did and how many people he murdered and
burned houses and everything else.
So, you know, we've carried too far that way.
So you bring up a great point with, you know, just, you know, should everyone be a felon
and, you know, be a felon for life if you write a virus, right?
Throw them in jail, let them rot.
You know, it'll cost us $50,000 plus a year to keep that person in jail, but doggone it,
we got them off the streets.
The Internet, the world's a safer place.
Meanwhile, drug dealers are getting away and going back out on the streets and murderers.
You know, you spend five years in jail for murdering someone.
You get out with good behavior.
You've learned a lot of new techniques, you know, in the can, and now you're going out
and doing bigger crimes.
You know, that would be something that I would like to see personally.
I would like to see a movement to reclassify and further define hacking crimes or technology
crimes, excuse me, let me correct myself, technology crimes and levels thereof.
If there are going to have all these broad levels of non-technology crimes, like you said,
manslaughter one, manslaughter two, murder, first degree, second degree, et cetera, why is
that not the case for Internet crimes or computer crimes?
Well, you know, someone who may be working in that regard, and I've heard her speak at,
I think both at DEF CON and the last HOPE conference, and I call her a white hat lawyer,
because I generally don't like lawyers, but Jennifer Granik.
EFF?
Works for Stanford Law Institute, the same place that Lawrence Lessig works, so, you know,
and she was bringing up all these issues that related to the USAPA and stuff, so.
But, yeah, so like Emmanuel said, people who commit crimes with computers, they're called
criminals.
Yeah, I mean, a thief with a computer is still a thief.
Got it.
So, anyway, well, see, that was a lot of good, that was a lot of good discussion over a two-sentence
email.
So, thank you, Insome.
We appreciate the words, and we're glad that some people get it.
And getting an email as simple as this sometimes really makes me rededicated to realizing that
there are people out there who get it.
So, thank you again for that.
Now, I've got another email I just got in from 813, and he says, well, I love the new
apps.
Really love that default app.
I was crying the whole time from non-stop laughing.
By the way, learn phone number rhythm.
6-2-4-5-0-1-8 is really hard to write down.
Okay, back on topic.
On episode 40, you talk about referrals from P&G, Freaks and Geeks, he's referring to.
Well, I got into this whole scene from Freaks and Geeks.
Was reading up on web design stuff when I found some Unix docs and Hacking 101 docs.
Went through a few links and then found Freaks and Geeks.
I read every article on the site and went through most of the scans when I noticed the forums.
That was the best link I ever clicked.
Very smart, helpful community.
Just thought I'd share.
Well, thank you, 813, again for the kind words.
Default Radio, I was on a couple weeks ago, and I thought it was just a great time.
Three hours of just non-stop hilarity.
It's just such a fun show to do and to listen to and stuff like that.
So that was definitely very fun.
And Icon and the Freaks and Geeks over at freaksandgeeks.com have been, you know, we've been closely allied from day one, you know, and hopefully continually will be.
They've been very good to us, and we try to be good to them.
They're one of the few non-DDP sites or DDP member sites that we're hosting on our server.
So we definitely support them wholeheartedly.
So check them out, Freaks and Geeks, and obviously they're, you know, so much so, I trust Icon so much so that he is, has full control over the Freaks and Geeks forum at BinRevForum.
So, you know, he's got everything, you know, we think alike.
We think alike, we get along real well, and I guess that's all there is to be said about that.
Except that I can't spell the word one in my show notes, but that's a whole different story.
Now, I got one, I saved this one for last because this one could get a little long, too.
This was an email, actually not an email, this was a private message I got from White Raven, an old friend of ours.
And he says, I finally got to listen to BinRev40 without interruption, and a very good reason for the human XML that you are missing would be for mediums that do not support emoticons or even the sighted.
Through this abstraction layer, one could allow the same input and environment data to be accessed through different applications such as voice synthesis technology and next generation virtual reality applications.
Who knows, we may need this once we are able to plug into the matrix, as it were.
The first draft may be flawed in your eyes, but there is a way for this to be useful.
Just thought I would let you know my thoughts.
Okay, first of all, yes, there is a very good point here, but let's clarify exactly what human ML, human markup language, which is what it's officially called, which is a substandard of XML.
Human markup language, isn't that known as tattoos?
Yeah, yeah, we could go into a whole, I've got a great tattoo story for you, another episode.
But XML is, basically it's a form of output, of input output I guess you could say, that can be used in any number of ways.
By setting a standard format for it, you can set it up so that if you have a substandard within it, which is what the human markup language is, and applications can support that substandard, then they will be able to apply and use them for whatever intent of reason, whatever intent or reason I guess I should say, was meant to be used for.
Now, I admit that I completely overlooked the possibility of using this for someone that was visually impaired or anything like that.
So, I actually sat down and tried to rethink this through with that application in mind.
And I still don't see where someone who is not sighted would really benefit much from this human markup language.
This thing envisions models and avatars, visual aspects, visual items that you can see that require sight.
I don't know what point it would be to have human markup language saying, you know, somebody winks or is laughing or smiling or these definitions of, you know, how the other person is reacting and showing those emotions and stuff like that without sight.
Maybe it could do things like, you know, as voice synthesis technology gets better, it can change the inflection, the rhythm as we're saying things.
Think about it, you know, if I'm kind of laughing and I'm joking and, you know, the speed and the cadence and things like that, you know, so maybe that's a possibility.
Absolutely is. However, let me pose this question to you then, and this is what I mentioned before.
What's to stop me from lying? What's to stop me from saying that I'm laughing when I'm – obviously there's a difference in me going, Rex, you're a complete asshole.
And me going, Rex, you are such an ass.
Those are two different things, right? When you're laughing with one, it makes it a little bit different.
Right.
How do you know if I wasn't still calling you an ass in the second one? I just put in a fake human markup language saying laugh when you call him an ass.
Well, what's to say you couldn't do that when you're looking at me in the eye? And, you know, people are doing that all the time.
Absolutely, which brings me to the second point that I mentioned before, too, was why do we need this?
Why wouldn't you be on the phone with somebody verbalizing this or face-to-face with the person?
It seems like a wasted – another excuse to hide from human contact, which I don't want everybody to go into their shells and stay – we're always telling people to get out from the matrix once in a while, go out into the fresh air and stuff like that.
And secondly, how is it necessary to form a standard for this?
Why can't we just put in there the actual raw text? Do we need a tag, a standard tag?
That, by the way, does it sound that complex? It sounds like I could develop this in a couple weeks, if that.
I thought that was part of XML is that you can define the tags basically on the fly.
Exactly. So they're spending years trying to develop this whole thing.
And I really don't see – I mean, the voice synthesis technology, if it's good enough to try to do inflections and things like that, but it seems to me like it would take a lot of tags.
And the inflection is not in sentences. Inflection is on individual words.
And that would be a lot of code and doubling the size of things to put the inflections on the proper words and the right emotions around each sentence or each word and phrase.
And it just seems like a whole lot of work for something that is just not dependable, reliable, or frankly, I still don't see that it's real useful.
I just don't think – the most use that I would see out of it would be visual.
If you want to put an avatar or like – remember a few years they had VRML, virtual reality markup language, you know, where you can have a 3D avatar and look at people face-to-face, something like that.
I could see it being applied. I still think it's kind of a dumb kind of a waste, but it's visual, so it's still – I'm not quite sure I'm seeing – I could be missing something.
I completely admit maybe I'm missing something on this, but to me it still seems like it's just – there's so many other things that people could be doing studies on besides this.
Well, the other thing is, taking the counterpoint to this, is that first of all, ASCII is very flat.
And, you know, we do little things like, you know, we put – as we're typing plain ASCII text, you know, we put some words in capitals.
You know, those of us who respect other people's eyes and don't want to abuse them, you know, we don't type entire sentences or entire messages in capital letters, for example.
But, you know, we put, like, the asterisks around words or sometimes we put an underscore in front and, you know, in front of a word and behind a word to add a little bit of emphasis.
But ASCII is very flat. It's not rich at all.
And the human language and human communication is so rich, and because of that and the inflections and the cadences that we're working with things that we're trying to bring that – it sounds like we're trying to bring that into these other mediums.
So I don't think – I don't see that as a waste.
I actually see that, you know, a lot of times you have a solution before you have the problem.
Case in point is the data CD-ROM.
It was out for years and years before people actually started using it.
One of the first things I can remember that had a useful – one of the first things related to the technology that had a useful application for a CD-ROM,
other than, you know, music CDs, which no one was really buying back then.
Everyone was still in the cassettes, and the diehards were still holding on to their 8-track tapes with, you know,
take it out of my cold, dead hands.
But one of the first things that I saw that was of really good use for that was in CorelDRAW.
CorelDRAW came with, like, maybe one CD of clip art.
Because, after all, you know, we had hard drives at the time where, like, you know, 30, 40, 50 megs maybe.
Who would need – who would ever need 600 megs worth of data?
That's insane.
I have a whole operating system in every document I've ever written, you know, on a 32-meg RLL hard drive.
So who needs 600 meg of data, right?
Well, nowadays, look at our hard drives, right?
You know, I've got 200 gig online here, and I don't have enough space.
So sometimes you have the solution to the problem before you actually define the problem itself.
So if we put that work in here ahead of time and those things are developed, again, since XML is, you know,
an on-the-fly kind of definition of those things, rather than being like HTML, which all the tags are predefined and everything,
being – generating that type of thing on the fly, I think that's – I think that's good because it gives us room for growth.
And if – you know, as long as it's done in kind of an open environment, and listeners may have heard me say – use this quote before,
but Isaac Newton said, if I see farther, it's because I stand on the shoulder of giants.
So if people are working on doing these kind of little rudimentary types of things now,
who knows what they'll come up with, and they'll base those things on the future.
Well, I guess any progress, I guess we have to say, is good.
So maybe I shouldn't be laughing at it so much, but I still, still say that I just – there's an opportunity cost involved here.
And I guess that's a business term, but an opportunity cost of – I'm assuming, and maybe I shouldn't be,
that they're getting funding from this.
This is through a university.
They have a group of people.
So I'm assuming they're getting some funding, and even if they're not, they're spending human resources, time,
and energy on something like this, when, frankly, we still need a cure for cancer.
We still have –
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Let's take it.
All right.
Now, the monetary resources absolutely could be used, but the people who are going to be developing, you know,
this human markup language are not going to be the same people, you know, researching,
doing genetic research on cancer.
Well, fine.
I'm using an extreme example.
You want a real example?
These are intelligent computer people that could be using – trying to solve the spam problem,
trying to increase bandwidth.
I mentioned on a couple shows ago about this new BitTCP protocol to enhance the speed of sending stuff over the internet.
This is research that is good.
This is research that will benefit everybody.
This is not research to make a better smiley, and I think that's wasted.
So, yes, could it be used for some good things?
Possibly down the road.
But, I mean, me comparing it to cancer is kind of like you comparing it to CDs.
CDs has so much possibilities and so much endless – even though you say there was an answer before a problem came out.
There were so many possibilities that could be done with that that it's – you know, it was mind-boggling.
I mean, human markup language, we're sitting here struggling trying to think, well, we could use better speech synthesis.
Again, you know, we're just standing at the edge of a shore wondering what's on the other side.
You know, we're on the edge of the ocean wondering what life is like on the other side there.
Yeah, I guess you're right.
And you know what?
I probably shouldn't be so negative, but, gosh, it just gets frustrating when you see other problems out there that could be – people could be working on.
But I guess everybody can't work on the same thing.
That would be bad, too.
So, point taken.
Anyway, we are well over halfway into the show, and we've still got Google to talk about.
So, before we do, let me just talk about some stuff I've been working on lately because we mentioned last week that Hack TV will be coming out April 15th.
So, I've been putting a few finishing touches on that.
And another video that I've been working on, kind of a fun thing that I'll put up online, probably over on StankDawg.com soon.
And I've been working on some more articles and doing some Perl scripting, which is not my forte.
I have little or no experience in that.
So, In Theory has been helping me with that a lot.
And actually, for work is actually the reason.
I don't like trying to teach myself something without a goal in mind.
So, when I found a problem at work that some people were working on, and I thought to myself, Perl would be great for this.
So, In Theory has helped me a lot to work on a program that I actually can use for something.
And on the totally opposite end of the spectrum, I've been playing a lot of Gunbound.
So, if anybody wants to play Gunbound sometime, hit me up in the forums.
We'll hook up online, and I will blow you away.
Actually, not, because I really suck at that.
But, anyway, what's been going on with you?
Well, this isn't...
I'll take it from the other end.
It's actually not a hacking-related one.
But a year ago today, I got back from my trip to Ireland.
And for the last couple of weeks, I've been taking Irish language classes.
Let me tell you, I want to pronounce all the words.
But when you have five letters that are all silent at the beginning of the word, it's kind of hard.
So, cut us a tattoo spank.
True.
False.
Aside from that, I've been delving into crypto a little bit more lately.
Thought, T-H-A-W-T-E, thought.com is giving out free personal S-MIME X509 email certificates.
I encourage everyone to get that and start using it, even if you don't go through the full process of getting it all authenticated and becoming a notary yourself.
If people started using it, first of all, it gives you the integrity.
You can encrypt with that, so you get the confidentiality.
And if enough people actually start using personal email certificates, you can say,
I'm not going to accept anything from anyone unless it's digitally signed.
And then you have non-repudiation.
And then the son of a gun, those spammers don't want to, you know, they're like cockroaches.
They don't want to see the bright light of day.
So, I think that can help cut down on spam.
And aside from that, I've been doing training classes.
I've been training other people, instructors, how to train students in security, IT security stuff.
So, that's what's been going on with me.
Well, you've got your work cut out for you.
Oh, yeah.
Very much.
All right.
Well, like we mentioned at the top of the show, this is the Google episode.
I'm sure there will be more in the future.
But we have several Google – as a matter of fact, I don't know that we're going to be able to cover all of these topics today.
So, let's jump right in first of all.
Where should we start?
With the mail or – I guess let's do the answers quickly and then talk about the mail.
Because I think the mail thing could go on and let's see how that goes first.
So, let's do the first thing that I wanted to – is that okay with you?
I was going to say we should probably even just touch briefly for someone who's maybe been living on another planet and, you know, just listening to the show for the first time.
Just a little bit about Google and their background.
Well, do you want to do that?
Okay.
Google – and there's actually – I was thinking I were talking before the show here.
I think there's a potential lawsuit coming up here for – there was a cartoon back in like the 1920s called Barney Google.
It was spelled the same way.
So, I think whoever still owns that maybe is planning this big old lawsuit against Google, the search engine.
But basically, again, a search engine, right?
It's going out, it's looking on webpages across the Internet, finding information, building indexes on that.
And I believe it was two either professors or grad students from one of the California universities that set this up.
They're using – of course, you know, they've developed a lot of their own software.
But I believe they're using BSD-based systems.
They have a ton of white box computers, and they have them all, again, running like a free BSD or something is what I believe they're using.
They cluster them together.
They basically have a supercomputer with all the hardware they have, and they have tons of bandwidth, obviously, for all the searches.
But it started kind of slow, and it's something that's interesting.
I was reading today, getting ready for the show, is that Google really hasn't spent on advertising.
You know, we have Yahoo advertising on TV.
You know, you've got these little guys yodeling and all that type of stuff.
Google is relatively new in terms of Internet usage.
Yahoo – I remember going originally to Yahoo when it was akebono.stanford.edu.
Right.
And it was the name of a – for those trivia buffs out there, that was the name of the first U.S. Japanese national sumo wrestling champion.
And so the Jerry Filo and Jerry Yang, I believe, were both engineering students at Stanford when they started that.
And I emailed them about some things when it originally got going, like in 95, and they emailed me back.
I should have saved that email, I guess.
But anyway, so Google is relatively new in terms of things about, what was it, 97, 98 that they came out.
And they have – they're very powerful search algorithms.
They have caches of this information, the data that's available on websites.
They basically have replicated on their servers.
And if you ever do a Google search, you may notice on the last line of the little summary, most of the pages say cached.
And if it's not available online, you can sometimes go click on that cached version of that page and find something that's been taken offline already.
So that's very powerful.
So Google has this – it seems originally kind of like a grassroots type of growing thing for search engines.
And it replaced – outpaced, I should say, AltaVista.
AltaVista was majorly huge.
It was very cool technology.
AltaVista has been sold a few times now, and it's practically nonexistent.
So Google is one of the big players in search engines.
And millions and millions and millions of people – sounds like Carl Sagan – billions and billions of stars.
People are going to Google and using it as their resource for finding things.
And even as we were setting up for the show, I forgot how to disable – how to defeat call waiting on my phone here.
They call it Stank.
So I went to Google, I typed site, colon, quest.com, space, call waiting, and the asterisk.
And bingo, it was quicker doing that than going into Quest's site and trying to find things.
So it becomes such a part of our lives, such a part of our online lives that – the various terms, Googling.
You know, you Google for yourself.
You go searching.
You know, we don't search anymore.
We Google for things.
And one of the articles – there was a link back out through Slashdot – is putting forth the supposition that Google and Yahoo
and any of the large search engines like that are actually becoming virtually a desktop in and of themselves.
So the operating system is becoming less relevant, whether you're running Mac or whether you're running Windows or Linux or BSD or what have you.
So knowledge is power.
Information is power.
Google lets you tap into that power very easily.
It's a very seductive kind of approach.
So based on that, Google is doing like Yahoo and other places that have before.
Google is developing itself into more or less a portal.
So not only are you able to do search engine searches, you're able to do image searches, and you're able to use Frugal, which is looking for best prices for things.
Now there's Google local where you can – it writes out a little cookie, which we'll probably touch on later, but it asks you your address, and you search for, I don't know, Pizza Hut, and it'll tell you the closest Pizza Hut to your house.
And news groups?
And the Google news groups, yeah.
Basically, you can search on the Google news groups.
Good point.
You can search on the Google news groups.
You can find Linus Torvald's original post about Linux, the Linux kernel.
You can find Richard Stallman's original post almost some 25 years ago about the new project.
Well, let's be careful of the terminology here.
It's not Google's news groups.
It's actually an archive of Usenet, an ongoing archive of Usenet news groups, which actually was originally owned by Deja News.
Formerly owned by Deja News.
And Google bought it out.
Google bought it out.
We can search and see, again, how pervasive Google's become.
I'm calling them Google news groups.
But it stinks exactly right.
It's that archive was taken, is put online, and it's searchable through there.
So Google is doing all this stuff, and I was listening to the Motley Fool on NPR today.
Google's getting ready to do an IPO to go public and make even more money.
So I just wanted to kind of lay a little bit of background, a little bit of background on stuff before we got into it a little more deeply.
So take it away, Spank.
All right.
And actually, another little bit of trivia was you mentioned the sumo wrestler name for their server.
They actually – I don't know if they still do this, but I know for several years as the site grew, they started adding more servers, and they started using names of several different sumo wrestlers, not just the one original.
They named all of their – and I don't know if they ran out of them at some point or if they still go with that today.
Okay, so that's another little tidbit of trivia, and I also wanted to interject, and let's – maybe this can be a little topic of debate.
Why is – you mentioned AltaVista.
Now, I'm almost – I'm pretty confident to say that AltaVista still, believe it or not, has almost as many indexes, pages, as Google in its engine.
Why is Google so more widespread, so much larger and more powerful than AltaVista, considering they both have the same or close to the same number of pages in their engine?
There's actually also another search that – another search engine that was using a different kind of algorithms called Tioma, which I guess is supposed to be an Irish word for expert.
I'll have to look it up now that I'm taking Irish language, but – and that was bought out by Ask Jeeves.
So there are – and there's Dogpile, and there's all the web, and there's all these other places out there.
So, again, that begs the question, why does Google have such a mindshare?
And don't forget InktoMy, and my – the one I've been using more than anything recently, I mentioned on the show, is Vivissimo,
which is not actually a search engine in and of itself, but it organizes results from all the other search engines, which I thought was kind of neat.
Well, and yeah, that is the question, is why is Google the one – I mean, I have to say, first of all, the ease of use factor.
I mean, let's be honest.
You go to Google, and you get a search thing right then and there in front of you that's very simple, yet at the same time can be very, very powerful.
So AltaVista is kind of the same way, too, but like you said, they changed hands a few times,
and each one wanted to add more advertising and pop-ups and stuff like that to it, and I think that's what killed them, believe it or not.
And they were bought and sold a number of times.
I think DEC, Digital Equipment Corporation, originally had AltaVista, and Compaq acquired that when Compaq took things over.
It's been bought and sold a few times since that point.
Yeah, my bookmark was AltaVista.Digital.com.
Yep.
You know?
So now, as you mentioned, Google's turned into a portal, and let's also back up.
Yahoo has a lot of those same features, too.
Right, and I was also going to mention, too, until recently, wasn't Yahoo using Google's search engine?
Yahoo stopped using their own search engine technology a long time ago.
They licensed AltaVista's search engine when they were popular.
They licensed InktoMy for a little while.
Then Google hit, and they've been with Google for quite a while now.
They actually bought, like, last year, they bought some other search engine technology company, and they've recently dumped Google.
Yeah, I think they're in the process of redeveloping their own, which may have been based on something they bought,
which is ironic considering where they came from as well.
So, interesting stuff.
Comes full circle, I guess.
Now, a couple of the things that we wanted to talk about in regards to Google are a couple of their features,
a couple of their functions, and they have been in the news lately.
You know what?
Let's jump and go straight to the Gmail, because I want to see how this is going to shake out first
and see what time we have for some of the other topics.
We may have to do a part two.
We may have to do another episode next week to finish all these topics, because we're going pretty long already.
But we've got time to talk about the Gmail, which was announced.
See, quite honestly, I'm still not convinced that this is not an April Fool's joke.
Well, that's the trouble when anything's released in April Fool's.
You have to wonder if it's really, if it's for real or not.
Absolutely.
I'm still wondering, and it's, from a logistical standpoint, is my reasoning for it.
And we'll come to that later on, but...
Well, there really is a Gmail.com site.
Gmail.google.com.
Well, you can go to Gmail.com.
Oh, there is?
I don't know that I've ever tried that.
That's a good...
And now, interestingly, if you go to, this is an extra little gem for you.
There's a great, for doing who is stuff, there's a great website called whois.sc.
Right.
If you go to whois.sc and look up Gmail, they point back and show the records.
And it was alldomains.com, probably one of those domain squatting type of places, isn't that?
But they have the screenshot from January 15th that's showing this company called NetConcept.
And DNS stuff is all NS1 through NS4 at google.com and so on and so forth.
But kind of an interesting little thing there.
And then, if you go to this NetConcept, I looked up the NetConcept site, went to there,
and they have a link that actually points back to a private IP address, 192.168.1.1.
And so when you click on it, if you have one of these home routers and you use the default setting...
And you happen to use .1.1.
Yeah, right.
And you use .1.1, it pops up and asks you for a username and password.
So it was really kind of bizarre.
But, again, so if you go to whois.sc and look up Gmail, I don't know how long this will still be there.
But we should maybe take a screenshot and pop that up on the site related to the show notes here.
Yeah, after the show airs, it might be discovered and taken down quickly.
Right.
So, but anyway, so Gmail was announced April 1st, which, again, you always have to take with a grain of salt.
The idea was that you can have a lifetime email address for free,
and you can have one gigabyte of data storage, one gigabyte of message storage.
Well, yeah, actually, before, let's, let's, there are, there's four things that I, I cut and pasted this out of.
There's four things that they list as the main features.
It's right on the main page.
And, yeah, the hunt, the, the, the 1,000 megabytes or one gigabyte is one of them.
But I thought we'd talk about each one of these real quickly.
Just shoot down this list.
And the first one is, is search, don't sort.
Use Google search to find the exact message you want, no matter when it was sent or received.
And that actually leads directly into what you just mentioned.
And they, their feature list says, don't throw anything away.
1,000 megabytes of free storage.
So you'll never need to delete another message.
Keep all your spam forever.
Yeah, I, you know, besides the spam aspect of it, which they claim they're going to try.
Yeah, so does, you know, Hotmail tries it.
Yahoo Mail tries it.
Every other mail, you're not going to stop it, you know, as long as they're working on human markup language.
But I digress.
I, I, this is the main reason I still think this could be, I'm still not giving up that this is still an April Fool's joke.
I still am not giving up on this because, let's, let's, let's follow this train of thought here.
Do you know how much web space, how much storage disk space it would take to give a gigabyte of storage to everybody who asks for it or wants it?
Do you know how cheap a gig of storage space is?
Yes, and it's not a matter of cost.
It's not a matter of cost.
It's a matter of logistics.
It's about 50 cents.
First of all, first of all, if they've got that much space, archive the web.
They make a cache copy of some things.
Pretty much do already now.
No, they make one cache copy.
Go to archive.org and look at that project.
That is archiving the web.
Right.
That is how it could, should be done, but again, space.
So.
Well, should we get through the other, the other two points here, the other two bullet points?
And you want to, and come back to it?
Yeah.
Okay.
Their third one is keep it all in context.
Each message is grouped with all of its replies and displayed as a conversation.
Okay, that's threaded viewing.
They've had that in mail clients for a while now, and just like their news groups have set up,
they might even have based it somewhat on the technology they use to display the news groups.
As a matter of fact, I can't, now I'm interested to see it.
I bet you it will look very much like they organized the Google news groups.
And the fourth thing is no pop-up ads, no banners.
You see only relevant text ads and links to related web pages of interest.
Now, they still have ads with 1D.
They still have advertisements, but just not pop-ups.
So, these ads are really what I think you want to go into in a moment, and this is really a very valid privacy concern.
But before we go into it, let's go back to the logistics of this space that they're going to take up.
First of all, one gigabyte of space, I mean, imagine what you can do with that.
Imagine how many ISOs you could upload.
Put up a Linux distro, save it, store it on your email, mail it to yourself, mail it to everybody you know.
Right.
Now, here's the thing, we started talking about that at our 2600 meeting this month.
Okay.
And there's techniques they can use when you, and there's counter-techniques for this as well.
And that actually gets back to the old, like, use net days.
But if they could put limits in saying, all right, first of all, attachments, you can't have no more, nothing larger than,
let me arbitrarily pick a number, 100 meg.
Right.
So what you would have to do then, you start losing the convenience factor when you have to start making, you know,
breaking that 700 meg ISO down into chunks of 100 megs.
They could also say that they won't store, that they won't give of that gig of disk space.
It's mainly for messages.
They could say out of that gig of disk space at any one time, you can only have 500 megs of active attachments, period.
So then you would have to go to a scheme.
So here's, like, the counter-banding thing, right?
Then you'd have to go to, like, a UUN code scheme that we used to do back in the day where you're converting all that 8-bit ASCII to 7-bit ASCII
and putting that as part of your message.
And, yes, for those technical people out there, I do realize that all e-mail is converted.
It is actually 7-bit ASCII as it's transversing through the things, and it's MIM headers that take care of that.
But when you start taking that convenience factor away from people doing this,
so there's several mitigating techniques that Google could use to help reduce that.
But those same things are what was trying to control Usenet, which we mentioned earlier.
And UUN code, or Unix to Unix encoding, is still alive and used every day by people in news groups and the alt binaries and stuff like that,
and the binaries news groups out there.
And it gets broken apart.
It is plain ASCII text.
It's not an attachment because, like you said earlier, we know that the data is going through there as ASCII text.
We know that it gets put back together on the opposite end to look like a, quote, attachment.
There's not really an attachment per se.
Right.
You know, it's text, and they're going to have a tough time distinguishing.
Well, not really.
Think about it because something has to decode it on the other end.
So you look for, you know, you look for the patterns, you look for the signature, you look for the MIM header,
and they could just simply detach that.
Okay, what if I put up a fake MIM header in front of my real plain ASCII text message?
Right.
See, that's, again, when you start doing that type of thing, you start taking away the convenience factor.
The next thing is, and this brings up a, and this relates to my privacy issue,
but what if you encrypt the message and you encrypt the entire message,
and now you can't tell that it's a UU encoded attached message.
Right, and I was getting ready to say that exact same thing.
So there are ways around things.
It's the old story.
You can't ever make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious, right?
So, you know, it'll constantly be a battle.
You know, they'll turn off some feature.
They'll disable something, and people will hack in the true original sense of the word.
They'll find a clever solution and will work your way around it.
Right, and, you know, frankly, when you offer up that carrot of one gigabyte of storage, people are going to use it.
They're going to try to use it, and they're going to try to figure out ways to use it.
For every hurdle that you put up there, they're going to jump over it, crawl under it, or go around it.
They're going to try their best.
When you dangle that one gigabyte of storage out in front of them, they want it, and they're going to try to use it.
Don't offer it if you don't intend on allowing people to use it easily.
And that gets back to the link.
The story's up on April 11th if you want to check it out on Slashdot.
It's called Google's Next Steps, and it links off to an article at USA Today, and, again, I touched on this,
saying that Google is trying to position itself to be the desktop.
Because if you can get to your e-mail and if you can have your, you know, your word processing documents and other things there,
it doesn't matter what computer you're using to get there.
That becomes marginalized.
The data is the key.
Data is king.
You know, you can go down to, you know, any store, virtually anywhere in this country, and, not any store,
you can go to a lot of stores, you can go practically anywhere in this country and buy a computer.
Some places, more easily than others, I realize, but you can buy the operating system,
or you can download the operating system.
If you're using a free operating system, you can buy a copy of Windows.
You can bootleg a copy of Windows.
You can do whatever you want.
You can get the data.
I mean, you can get the operating system.
You can get the programs, right?
That's becoming marginalized.
That's becoming a commodity.
What you can't get is that information.
So, now, if you can start storing your information, or you have links through search engines like Google and Yahoo
and all the others we've mentioned, if you can get to that easily, it doesn't matter what operating system you're running.
And Microsoft obviously hates that issue, and that's why Microsoft is also looking at becoming a big player in the search engine business,
but kind of getting slightly off track there, but Google is in a very good place,
and they're positioning themselves very well to become this portal, and portals more so than, you know,
we had portals a few years ago where, you know, we had the news feeds,
and we had all this other garbage-y stuff that we didn't really necessarily need.
But Google is positioning itself very well for that.
Well, and I'm sorry, if I can interrupt for just a second, since you mentioned Microsoft.
There was, and I should confirm this, but I'm pretty sure Microsoft actually made an attempt to buy Google in fall of last year, fall 2003.
They made an attempt to buy Google for $10 million and got turned down.
I think Microsoft attempted to buy every company.
Microsoft tried to buy Intuit to make it quicken years ago.
So Microsoft, not many people know this, back probably in the mid-'90s, Microsoft tried to buy Novell,
and Microsoft, you know, tries to buy anything.
So I guess it's a good sign when, first of all, they try to buy it.
It's a better sign when you say no thanks.
Yeah, and that could have been a devastating combination for exactly what you described.
However, it's also scary because I don't remember where I've read this article at.
I remember it being somewhat reliable, but they actually got, Microsoft got a little bit offended, upset that their offer was refused,
and supposedly lit a fire under them, to use a metaphor.
They decided that they were going to refocus on their own search engine technology
and develop their own new system to try to knock Google off the top spot.
That's Microsoft's typical M.O.
Yeah, absolutely, but let's be honest, they frequently succeed by sometimes questionable means, but...
Oh, yeah, I mean, they're very successful at that.
They're very... look at all the... I was reading another article relating to that,
but, you know, you basically, when you're a hardware company in Silicon Valley,
you want a company like Cisco to come and buy you,
and then you take the golden parachute and you're, you know, fat and happy for the rest of your life.
When you're a software company, you hope you don't get too big to be noticed by Microsoft
because Microsoft will basically eat you alive.
And if they don't acquire you, they will eat your lunch.
They will... Microsoft has enough money, the $40 billion in the bank,
that they could basically give Windows away and give all their stuff away
and pay most of their employees for the next five years
and not charge a single dime and still come out okay on the other side.
And, by the way, that is in Robert Kringley's latest article, if you want to read more about that.
So, but, you know, Microsoft is just this huge behemoth
when they set their sights on something.
You know, they can get it done.
They have enough resources.
They have enough talent, despite what you may think of their programmers.
They have enough talent, resources, and money, mainly, being the main resource,
that they can do these things.
However, as we try to, you know, we're using other things
and as people are getting more and more dissatisfied with Microsoft
and their business practices, having alternatives is good.
Now, that having been said, any kind of monopoly, any kind of huge thing like Google
has tons of potential opportunities for doing bad things.
And there's a site I want to point out to everyone.
If you haven't seen it and you've used Google, you should know about this site anyway.
It's called google-watch.org.
Where a lot of this information comes from.
Exactly.
Google Watch will give you, they have links and lots of analyses on things.
They look at Google's evil cookie that doesn't expire for 35 years.
And they have an anonymous Google ad-free proxy that you can surf
and it'll pass the information back and forth and you won't, you won't,
Google won't be tracking you.
Right.
But, so, so Google is not, I mean, let's face it, they're, you know,
they're in it for the money too.
And again, there's nothing wrong with making money.
And if you have, if you do something, well, you can make a lot of money.
That's great.
But now we start getting into the more nefarious sides of things.
All right.
Well, you know, let's hold up here for just a second to let you know we're at an hour and going.
So let me make this one point and then step aside
and let's talk about the privacy aspects of this.
We've got maybe 15 more minutes we can go with this and still make it.
So speaking of, this kind of relates to the money factor
and how much they're going to have to invest, especially with this Gmail.
This is not a small undertaking.
This is a very huge thing.
And like I mentioned earlier about the logistics of this, let's, let's use an example.
Let's, let's keep the numbers close to home for a second here.
We have 600 people, close to 600 people in our forums.
And if each one of those people is assigned a gigabyte of storage
and I don't know what they're, how they're going to handle allocation and stuff like that.
They're going to give you a gig outright.
I don't know how that's going to work.
We don't know yet.
But 600 gigabytes, that's a lot of space already.
That's, you know, three 200 gig hard drives.
They make bigger than 200 gig, I'm pretty sure.
But, you know, that's three, at least three big hard drives.
Probably mirrored.
So you're going to have duplicates.
You're going to have some kind of backup process in there, something like that.
Now, that's just for our tiny little corner of the web.
Take into account, I met, I looked this up on one of the show notes from one of our previous episodes
on when we talked about the single sign on a Microsoft Passport.
Microsoft Passport has 200 million users.
And the majority of those are Hotmail users.
They kind of go hand in hand.
200 million.
200 million times one gigabyte of storage for each person.
It's not so much the money and how cheap it is per gig or per meg, et cetera, et cetera.
I don't know that that much hard drive space was ever created in all of time.
From the day that hard drives were first manufactured to now, I don't know if that so much storage exists.
Oh, sure.
Think about it.
Those 200 million people, most of them probably have larger than a one gigabyte hard drive on their computer.
So it definitely exists.
You know what?
That's a fantastic point.
You're absolutely right.
There is.
But that's still a huge logistical nightmare.
And then, like I said, you're going to have backups and stuff like that.
So you're going to then, I won't say double it, but essentially double it or at least come up with some kind of good RAID backup plans for the whole system.
So there's going to actually be more than that, not to mention all the application driving end of it and interface end of it and graphics, et cetera, et cetera.
So that's a lot of space.
And that's still to this day why I'm questioning whether or not this is real or not.
If it is, wow.
That's all I can say.
Wow.
If you've got that much space, I'm saying archive the Internet with it instead of creating a million e-mail addresses with gigabytes of storage to me.
It seems kind of...
Well, I signed up for getting one.
I wanted, you know, as soon as I heard about it, I signed up and wanted to get my name on the list there to see.
So it'd be...
Well, it's because you wanted to waive your privacy, obviously.
Well, you know, I can be very selective at what I put on there, too.
Right.
They want to investigate.
I mean, that's kind of what I always see in my role in things is to be that pioneer and investigate these things.
And I'm absolutely the same way, and I'm dying to see what...
I can't wait until they open it up so I can start playing with it and see what it does.
But, you know, again, you mentioned earlier about how they're going to not let you do this.
They might put a limit on file size.
They might not allow you to upload binaries.
They might let you, et cetera, et cetera.
Well, then, doesn't it seem kind of counterproductive to giving you a gigabyte of space?
What else would you use a gigabyte of space for?
All of your email messages.
All of your emails?
That's their intent.
Their plain ASCII text?
Yeah, plain ASCII text, maybe with a limited amount of things.
I'm just going to go take a look on my system here as we're talking.
Okay.
I may not be an average user here, but I'm just going to take a look and see just how much space I'm using on my hard drives for my email.
Now, what email application are you using before you go there?
Well, I've switched over the years.
I've got, you know, several years' worth of email that I've worked on, and I'm currently using Thunderbird, Mozilla Thunderbird.
Right.
That's exactly what I'm using at home.
Okay.
And this is with my attachments, with all my various boxes in that.
It's 760 meg.
And that's over several years.
And if I take off all my attachments, which is about 260 of that, you know, I'm using maybe about 500 megs.
I'm using half a gig already, not in counting attachments.
And spam.
No, no.
That's definitely not spam.
Right.
I've got tons of filters, and for those few that do, you know, come through, I zap them right away.
So that's not counting spam.
Right.
Spam is going to be a factor on these new servers, though.
Oh, on there, absolutely.
You know.
But, you know, also looking at it, as we're talking here, I think probably that Gmail was kind of a clever, multi-layered entendre,
because it's Google, it's mail instead of email, but it's also a gig that's Gmail.
And as Stank knows, like my handle, Rack, there's about 10 levels of meaning for that, depending on which angle you're coming from.
So I thought it was kind of funny.
You know, and there's actually a good point here, too, in why would they do this?
And there's a very clear, easy explanation that I think you and I both know, but maybe some of the users hadn't thought of this.
Why would they do this?
Why would they give you a thought?
What's in it for them?
And obviously it's advertising.
You heard the expression, it was a movie, it's all about the Benjamins.
It's all about the Benjamins.
It's all about the advertising Benjamins, the advertising money.
Now, they mentioned they're not doing pop-ups and things like that, no banner ads, big deal.
They've still got their advertising, and everybody's seen their Google ads.
They're fairly text-based.
They're not all that intrusive, I guess.
There's some questions about how you get higher on there and how you can buy keywords in it,
and I think that's a topic for another time because we're definitely going over it.
But they're going to have this email interface for you to look at your email.
That's fine.
In a ratio like you mentioned earlier about how little it costs for disk space,
that visibility of every single page is going to have ads on it
and the possibility of you clicking through them customized to whatever the content of your email is.
And I think that's what we're going to talk about right now is how they're designing those ads
and how they're going to deliver those ads to you.
But from their perspective, from a business standpoint, they want that visibility of the advertisements.
And every page that you view, and this is true of any online email, whether it's Yahoo, whether it's Hotmail,
you see all the ads that they put on those.
They may not be pop-ups.
They may not be whatever, but you'll see several ads on one page.
It's all about the visibility factor, and that's how they make their money.
They can justify spending.
What did you say earlier, 50 cents?
50 cents a gig is about the street price of a drive now.
50 cents a gig.
50 cents a gig?
A meg.
No, 50 cents a gig.
A 20 gig hard drive would cost $5?
No, you're getting like a 200 gig drive.
You know, after rebates and stuff and that on sale, you get for about $100.
Okay.
Anyway, for the cost of storage versus what they would make by giving someone to click through those ads,
it's more than worth it to them from a business standpoint.
That's really what I'm trying to say.
That's what's in it for them, and that's why they're doing it.
But those ads themselves, I know, is something that you wanted to talk about.
So please, I won't interrupt.
You go ahead and...
Well, you know, sometimes, actually, believe it or not, I don't mind ads sometimes.
Sometimes, like in technology magazines, I'm flipping through.
You know, I'm interested in, let's say, like security, which I am.
I get several computer security magazines, and there's advertisements, printed advertisements,
in those magazines that are for security products and security topics.
And because I'm interested in IT security, I may be interested in those products as well,
which is great, and that's the traditional advertising model.
So sometimes ads aren't a bad thing, and sometimes when I'm searching for something,
sometimes those ads are okay.
Sometimes it helps me find the things that I want, or it gives me more information, or what have you.
And as Stank said, they're fairly inobtrusive.
You know, they're not the blinking animated GIF, you know, that's blinking at a fast enough rate
to give someone a seizure, as we've seen on so many of these other types of bad things.
So, you know, advertising, again, necessarily, in and of itself, isn't bad.
The thing that I take exception to, and the thing that I know a lot of people are questioning,
is that privacy.
So now I send Stank an email about,
Stank, I just, you know, got this great new DSL modem.
You know, it's made by, you know, XYZ Company.
You really ought to go check it out.
Well, Google is, or Gmail, is going to search through that, index that name,
and when Stank is reading that email on his Gmail,
there's going to be a little ad on the side that is for that company,
or is for half a dozen different stores that are selling that particular product.
Or worse yet, and I just thought of this with, when you made up this example,
worse yet, a competitor to that company.
Right, and I thought you said you weren't going to interrupt me.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
Go ahead.
Okay, sorry, I was just messing with you.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, yeah, worse yet, a competitor.
And there's been, you know, all kinds of stuff about that,
like, you know, companies buying other companies' trademark names and...
Keywords.
Products, yeah.
So, like, in other words, imagine this.
If you're searching for, you know, information about Coca-Cola,
you want to find out who the founder of Coca-Cola was,
and Pepsi-Cola bought the keyword Coca-Cola, or bought for that search,
and all the advertisements on the side were for Pepsi instead of Coke.
So that's that issue.
And that sounds like it could be a potential lawsuit.
I mean, there already is discussion in copyright and keywords for Google.
They're already in some discussion about that now,
but that could be much more, could be much worse now that you're customizing it to people's e-mail
and driving it to them a little bit more.
Right, right.
That's dangerous.
Now, getting back to the privacy issue, so Google is going to, or Gmail,
which is still Google, is going to be able to read my messages.
And any time I'm sending someone a message about whatever, let's say I'm a bird watcher, let's say,
and I'm sending that, well, on the side, when that person reads their mail through Gmail,
there's going to be an ad for them, Amazon.com, for, you know,
Field Guide to the Birds by Roger Torrey Peterson.
Yeah, I used to be a bird watcher when I was a kid.
Okay, I'll admit that.
So the fact of the matter is...
Come on, let's be honest.
You were a pterodactyl watcher when you were a kid.
Oh, dude, thanks, man.
You're going to pay for that.
You said I'm old?
Burn!
That's a payback burn.
You're back to the bitch.
Okay.
So now, as we're looking at those kinds of things, right, we...
It in and of itself isn't bad, but let's say, oh, some three-letter governmental agency
wants to find out about certain things and people who are searching for certain terms.
As a matter of fact, if you go to that google-watch.org,
there's links and information out about that, that, you know, people searching for certain terms.
You know, if I was...
Let's say I was searching for information about the Koran, the Holy Book of Islam.
So if some three-lettered governmental agency wanted to find out about people who are interested
in the Islamic faith, for example, Gmail could be used, you know, under subpoena or whatever
else in that, but Gmail could be used to find anyone who's ever mentioned anything about
Islam or about the Koran or about Allah or about Krishna or about Buddha or about Jesus
or anything else.
So we run into these huge, huge privacy issues, and that, fellow listeners, is, I think, the
biggest issue that we're going to have with Gmail.
Now, I have a one-word answer for you that may solve this, but just as easily as Google
can disallow certain types of email attachments, they could circumvent this solution.
And that word is crypto.
Right.
If I encrypt my messages, and as I'm sending them to Stank, Stank receives them.
We could do PKI, public key infrastructure, like with PGP or GPG, or we could do, like I
mentioned earlier, these email certificates, the X509 certificates, like from Thought or somebody
else.
And now they're encrypted.
And Google, Gmail, cannot read that.
But just as easily as they could disallow something that is an email attachment, they
could disallow things that don't look like plain ASCII.
Well, so giveth Google, so shall Google taketh away.
Exactly.
And I think we're going to have to go on that, because we're way long.
Huge issues, folks.
Again, tons of resources checking it out.
I like that Google Watch.
Again, they have that anonymous proxy you can use as well.
Links out there about Gmail.
Please check it out.
Read it on your own.
We have lots of other stuff to talk about Google, don't we, Stank?
Yeah.
And how do you feel about a part two next week?
Yeah, we can do that.
We can finish up this thought.
So anyone out there, if you have any thoughts about Google or Gmail, what's the address
they have to send it to, Stank?
Send it to radio at binrev.com, and we are going to continue this next week.
If you're available, go to Gmail site, gmail.google.com, and read the rules and the privacy aspects
and stuff like that.
That's your assignment for next episode, because we're going to talk more in depth about that.
I knew we'd run long.
Plus, we have a couple other Google topics, so this is definitely going to be a Google
part two next week.
So come back to hear more on the Gmail as well as some other Google things.
And, ah, man, we are, this was a good, every time we have you on, we have a good show.
Oh, thanks, man.
Every time we have you on.
It's so great to have you on.
Um, let's jump out all this other text I have in the show novels, and jump down to the end
here, and go for some shouts.
Why don't you take some shouts, because it's been a while.
Why don't you give shouts out to anybody you're thinking?
Oh, boy.
And, um, shouts out to my mom.
She's, uh, moved back down here to Arizona, moved out of the cold climate.
So, uh, she's, unfortunately, she doesn't listen to Bin Rev or other types of things
in that, but, uh.
Well, you'll have to start her.
There you go.
And, um, you know, all the folks at the AZ2600 meetings and, uh, and or the, uh, the DEF CON
meetings, because we kind of run it all together.
So, shouts to everybody in that crew.
All right.
And I'm going to give shouts.
I mentioned earlier to In Theory, he was helping me doing some plural scripting.
So I got a crash course in that earlier this week, which was very cool, and learned a
phenomenal amount from it.
And I just mentioned a second ago, but I'll reiterate, radio at binrev.com.
If you want to email us about Google, about any concerns you have, or any of the topics
we've talked about, follow-ups on, um, even human ML or any of that kind of stuff.
Um, any, any suggestions or ideas you have about it, by all means.
Um, and, again, I'm going to say articles at binrev.com.
If you want to send articles for their binrev 2.2, um, send them in any, any time, and we'll
take a look at them.
Check out PAC-TV episode one.
Hack, episode one, April 15th.
And we'll put up information on the hacktv.binrev.com site.
Um, we'll probably put up a BitTorrent.
Um, maybe have some direct downloads and some mirrors.
It's going to be pretty big.
It looks like somewhere around 200 megs in DivX formats.
Looks like we're going to try to go the most universal we can.
So, um, look for that on the 15th.
And don't forget to get your taxes out at the same time.
Uncle Sam wants his cut.
And we're going to close out with another track from Brad Sucks called
Understand, Understood by Your Dad, excuse me.
And that's going to do it.
So, again, Rax, thank you very much for being on the show.
And we'll try to do it again next week.
Same hack time.
Same hack channel.
But I don't, you know, a place that I will go to be
Understood by your name, yeah
You can hear my face with a ball and a chain
I can show them the blood of fucking straight to my brain
You can hear my face with a ball and a chain
I can show them the blood of fucking straight to my brain
You know, you know, a place that I will go to be
Anyone that you wish would
I don't, you know, a place that I will go to be
Understood by your name, yeah