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
and a fag pwned, in your digital stance getting firewalled ho, cause I'm riding the net in
my six-fold, I was a dick with my 56, 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 screw you on burning dreamcast, you need some ISO, let me through
my hard drive rifle, our exchange you could never stifle, in 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 rattling
your phones, 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, cause I am he who loves to hack and crack.
This is dedicated to the hackers and the crackers, serial codes, source codes, ISOs, RANs, SIFs,
SIFs, this is dedicated to the hackers and the crackers.
Welcome everyone to the last episode of Binary Revolution Radio for season 3, number 156.
We are coming to you on 7-11-2006, that's July 11th, not 7-11, your store that's open 24 hours
for gas.
And you are in for a treat this episode of the show.
Someone is joining me to co-host the show, who's been, and I keep blowing smoke here,
but one of my favorite co-hosts of all the three years that we've been doing it, and I've
really got a lot of great topics that I wanted to catch up on, so we have Ilanka on the show
with us this evening, welcome to you Ilanka.
Hello Stankdog, I am delighted to be back.
And we are delighted to have you, and we are going to jump right into the main topics of
the show as we do with our new format, so let's do that.
I don't really have anything in housekeeping.
Again, the final episode of season 3 that you're hearing right now.
I guess one minor, I don't even know if I should mention this in housekeeping, because I don't
know what's going to happen, but we do have a one week lag.
We're going to be doing the first episode of season 4, At Hope, which is in two weeks.
So I don't know what we're going to do for an episode next week on the stream.
So we'll have some kind of surprise or something for you next week in our normal time slot,
because it would be kind of weird to do the second episode of season 4, At Hope.
That just doesn't have the same ring to it.
So we're going to do the first episode, and we'll bring something different in next week's
time slot.
So keep on the lookout.
I'm sure it will be something interesting.
I just don't know what that interesting thing is yet.
But we do have some interesting topics on the show, and we're going to have to really
work to get all of these topics in, quite honestly.
So let's jump into the first thing, and this is one topic that was discussed in our forums
quite a bit, and I've been dying to get you on to talk about it, and that is the fact
that Cryptos, part two, was wrong.
It was incorrect.
What happened, Alonca?
What happened?
Well, what it was is the artist, James, okay, Cryptos, for any of your listeners who aren't
sure, just a quick coming up to date, Cryptos is a sculpture at the center of CIA headquarters.
It was installed there in 1990.
It was a challenge to the employees at the CIA.
It has four codes on it.
Three of the four have been solved, or so we thought.
And the fourth one has not been solved, and it's one of the most famous unsolved codes
in the world.
Well, the first three parts were solved publicly in 1999 by a California computer scientist
named Jim Galogli, and then the CIA came forward and announced that they had someone named David
Stein who had also solved those first three parts the year before that, in 1998, and then
the NSA came forward and said, well, we've solved those first three parts, too, but we're
not going to tell you who solved them, or we're not going to tell you when they were solved,
which is a very NSA thing.
Well, Sanborn, the artist who made Cryptos, he actually called me up on the phone in April
saying, oops, that in part two, which we thought we had solved, he said that there was actually
a small mistake at the end of it.
What we thought part two said, I'll just go ahead and read you what we thought was the
correct plain text for part two.
We originally thought it said it was totally invisible.
How is that possible?
They used the Earth's magnetic field, X.
The information was gathered and transmitted underground to an unknown location, X.
Does Langley know about this?
They should.
It's buried out there somewhere, X.
Who knows the exact location?
Only WW.
This was his last message, X.
38 degrees, 57 minutes, 6.5 seconds north.
77 degrees, 8 minutes, 44 seconds west.
I.D. by Rose.
Well, when Sanborn called me up, he said that I.D. by Rose part is wrong.
Okay, the numbers themselves were correct, though?
I'm sorry?
The numbers themselves, the latitude and longitudes were correct?
He said all of that was fine.
Okay.
Woo!
But the I.D. by Rose part was wrong, and he said that when he had heard people saying
the answer before, he had assumed that they weren't reading the answer, that they were
saying, oh, we've solved this part up through 44 seconds west, I.D. by Rose, and he thought
that I.D. by Rose meant this is how we solved it.
We put it into a Rose technique, and then we I.D.ed it.
And when he was working on something, he was working on some other project, and he was
looking at it, and then he thought, uh-oh, people think this is part of the answer, but
it's not.
So he called me up and told me it was wrong.
Now, he didn't tell me what it was supposed to say.
He just said it was wrong.
So I'm like, oh, my God.
Right.
Well.
And I sent an I.M. message to the co-moderator of the Cryptos group, Chris Hampson, and basically
the first part of our message is back and forth.
There's no words.
It's just punctuation going back and forth, like I'm sending him exclamation points, and
he's sending me question marks back, and gradually I share this information.
And so Chris and I tossed some ideas back and forth about what this could potentially
mean, and as part of that brainstorming, it was definitely both of us going back and
forth, I tried a different method and came up with, oh, instead of ID by Rose, if we
tweak the following thing, if we, Sanborn had said something about a missing letter.
So if I put a letter in a certain place, it changed the last part of the message to say
something else, which was instead of ID by Rose, it said X, layer two.
And I called Sanborn back, and I asked him, is this what it's supposed to say?
And he said, yes.
So I'm like, ah, I better write a press release.
And then it was just all hell broke loose.
It was international media attention.
I should also mention that when we saw the words layer two, it was like we've seen these
words before.
And what it was is that last fall in the cryptos group, there's a lot of brainstorming
going on all the time.
And someone else in the group, a woman named Monet Friedrich from Canada, had been playing
with something else in part two where she was doing what's called crypt dragging, and
she was moving a key word back and forth, trying to see if the text changed, if she put the
key word in different locations.
Because part two, it uses a system where the message, each ciphertext letter can change to
a different plaintext letter based not only on what it is, like is it a C or a D, but
where it is.
So that if you even move it to the left or move it to the right by a single location, that
can change what it decrypts to because of the kind of method.
It's called a polyalphabetic cipher system.
So Monet was playing with this crypt dragon where she was moving other things back and
forth, and she came up with words, player two, at the end of part two, and she presented
it to the group, and someone said, hmm, player two, well, and we didn't know at that time
if it was something real or if it was something that was, there's all kinds of like statistical
oddities that we're always seeing about the sculpture, and like, okay, is this something
important or is this just kind of an interesting observation?
And someone else said, player two, well, I don't know about the words player two, but
that layer two, L-A-Y-E-R-T-W-O, lines up exactly with the words ID by Rose.
I wonder if that means anything.
And a few other people in the group also kind of jumped in and were brainstorming about it,
and then it kind of got filed away as something that was interesting, but we didn't know what
to do with.
And then when Chris and I were brainstorming and we came up with those same words, layer
two, in that same spot, I'm like, aha, okay.
So I want to make sure that Monet also gets some props for this.
So Sanborn said yes, and then the press release went out, and it just got huge media attention.
When we saw the Cyrillic projector, it did not get the kind of attention that it did when
we said, oh, but there's a mistake.
It was on just dozens of countries around the world, including on AOL.
It was the number one news item on AOL.
I was like checking my web traffic and seeing the spikes.
Oh, well, here we got slash dotted, and oh, okay, here we got stumble upon, it's doing,
oh, wow, oh, wow, AOL.
And just thousands and thousands of people coming into the site.
And NPR did a segment on it as well, which was, that was the moment that I went most into
fangirl mode.
All through the NPR segment, I was sitting at my chair, and I was hanging on to my desk,
and I was white-knuckled through the whole segment because I was like, oh, my God, I'm
being interviewed by Melissa Block.
I was in complete fangirl mode.
More so than some of the television and other interviews and stuff that you've done.
Yes.
The NPR was, it just made my heart go pitter-pat.
Now, just, that's actually a good segue into something else I wanted to mention, but before
we do, I just want to remind our listeners that this cryptos group that you keep referring
to is not some secret society of whatever.
This is a Yahoo group that if someone is interested, I mean, it's open to anybody to join, am I
correct?
Absolutely.
All they have to do is send an email to cryptos-subscribe at yahoogroups.com.
We currently have over 1,000 members from all over the world, and some of them are regular
cryptographers, and some are hobbyists, and some people are just interested in it.
They don't play with codes at all.
They're just interested in following the process.
All we ask is that anyone who joins the group, they have to introduce themselves, and they
have to stay constructive.
We also have an agreement which was, started from Gary Worson, who was the co-founder of
the group with me, the late Gary Worson.
He actually passed away from a heart attack last year.
We say that if you're in the group, one thing you have to agree is that any solution that
we find has to be announced as a group, and that we're trying to encourage the process of
brainstorming where everybody can come in and everybody can participate, and we're trying
to avoid that situation where one person has information and doesn't want to share it
because they want to be the only people that get credit for whatever it is they're doing.
Right, right, something that we also encourage on the BINREV forums, and then a lot of the
projects that we do as well.
And yes, I'm a member of that group myself.
I fall under the interested people hobbyist category, I guess.
Thanks to you, you were the one that turned me on to joining that.
And actually, oh man, I don't know if I should bring this up on the air, but I'm going to.
We can edit it out if we need to.
But I had left you some voicemails and sent you a couple emails because there was some
spam coming from your account.
Do you remember that?
Oh my God, yeah.
Somebody was spoofing my email address.
I think it was coming out of India.
Is that what it was?
Yeah, and it was just, what I did is I put myself on moderation.
It wasn't coming from me.
It wasn't one of my systems that was infected.
Right, obviously.
It was just something somewhere that was spoofing my address.
And it was coming in like just dozens per day.
It was really annoying.
And it was obvious spam that was being sent.
It was obvious that something was going on, that something was wrong.
And actually, Booter's the one that pointed it out to me.
And then I tried to get in touch with you.
So yeah, it looked like you got it squared away.
But I've been meaning to ask you that.
I don't think I ever asked you whatever you found out.
But it turned out it was something from India, huh?
That's our best guess.
I know a few people that are fairly technically literate.
They were kind of tracking down the headers and stuff.
And that's where it seemed that the majority was coming from, yeah.
Okay, well, good.
Glad that got settled out.
And because you were a moderator, it went straight out automatically, no approval, et cetera, et cetera.
Right, right.
It was like, you know, this message does not need to be approved.
It's from Ilanka.
Exactly.
Yeah, so that's one of the problems with Yahoo is that it doesn't check.
There's no IP tagging, to my knowledge.
It doesn't say, did this letter really come from one of the IPs that is associated with this account?
They just look at the from address and go from there.
All right.
That is absolutely a bug in Yahoo Groups.
That's a problem.
But anyway, so...
To Yahoo Groups' credit, it seems like they are increasing some of their spam filtering or spam fighting techniques.
When I was looking at the group earlier today, I saw that on the group webpage that they've just added a category for spam now.
So that is, we're reviewing messages.
And I'm not sure how it's working yet.
I just noticed that they've added that.
But my guess is whatever happened with the cryptos group was not unique to our group.
I'm sure this is a problem that they've been having all over the place.
Probably, probably.
And actually, I guess that could be a topic for another show, but Yahoo's been doing some really cool stuff lately in general.
So they're really, really putting out a lot of cool things, and they're really fighting to stay on the cutting edge of a lot of, I guess, popular memes, for lack of a better word right now.
Some popular offerings to people, and I've been using their beta version of their webmail client for quite a while now that they've bumped up their storage to compete with Google's gigabyte of Gmail or whatever.
However, they still offer, I think, a lot better features and filtering and whatnot.
But I digress.
Back on topic.
Wait, which do you like better, Yahoo Mail or Google Mail?
I like Yahoo Mail much better.
Really?
Okay.
Mostly, honestly, it's mostly because I still like the folder metaphor.
I don't like that whole starring and tagging and labeling.
I know it kind of can work the same.
I agree.
I have trouble with that as well.
And if you're using the beta, it's all JavaScript.
It's all Java-based, so you can drag and drop as though it were like a normal Outlook or a normal local mail client,
so I can still drag and drop the folders, which is easier than tagging however many individual ones and then click move to or whatever.
Okay.
What about the contact list?
That's something that I always – every email program I use, I tend to crash it in terms of just sheer quantity of contacts because I know so many people.
There's hundreds and hundreds of addresses, and I'm always filtering and searching and sorting, and Gmail has – it's got some features I like that make it very, very easy for me to find different contacts,
and I like the way that I can put different labels on things, but the interface is still a little bit clunky.
How does Yahoo work for that?
Honestly, I don't think I can speak too well to that.
I do have maybe 100 or 200 contacts on there, but quite honestly, I don't play with them a whole lot.
The only thing I use them for is autocomplete.
Okay.
It'll automatically look up in my contacts and fill out someone's name when it's in there, and that's pretty much all I do with it,
so I wouldn't purport to have tested any of the in-depth features of it.
I truly use it for, you know, web mail on the go when I don't have access to my real box at home.
I try to use everything through Yahoo, so.
All right.
But they also –
In email, since they're new, I've been playing with their contact list, and I'm constantly sending them bug reports on different things.
So here's one of my rants about their bug reports.
This is when I send them a bug report, and I send them so many bug reports, and I don't get an archive copy of the report that I just sent.
So they may send me a letter back saying, you know, thank you for your bug report, and it doesn't tell me which one it's referring to.
Or they've written back saying, oh, thank you for this bug report.
Can you please send us more information?
But, again, they don't quote my bug report at me, so I have no idea.
Well, because –
And I wish – I sent a bug report on their bug report system.
See, that's good.
Well, it's because, obviously, it's in your sent items folder.
It's thrown in with all the other stuff, so you can always look it up in your sent items.
Actually, it's not.
No?
No, they have – it's a form-based system where you want to send – yeah, and so it's very irritating,
especially if I've just sent this really lengthy report, and I forgot to archive it on my own.
I mean, I should have just kept it in Notepad or something, but I send it like, oh, damn, it's gone forever,
and I know I'm never going to get a copy back.
And if I don't keep a record, then I don't know – I can't remember which bugs I've reported, so I may have to re-report some other bugs.
Gotcha.
There's one other thing that they've added to Yahoo.
Since this has turned into a little webmail review, let's go with it.
Let's go with it.
I actually – the latest version of something they added fairly in the last month or two in the Yahoo Mail Webmail beta is when you do – it used to just be one – a window on the left with your folders,
or excuse me, I guess you should say a frame on your left with your folders, and then on the right with the actual whatever you're doing,
whether it's reading a mail, whether it's composing a mail or whatever.
Well, now they've gone to a tab-based thing, so I can actually open up and start composing a mail, and sometimes I'll be doing this and working on something else,
and I get sidetracked and I'll have to step away from it.
Well, I can leave that tab open composing but still open up another mail.
If I do a search, it automatically opens into a new tab, so I don't lose the composed mail that I was in the middle of typing, et cetera, et cetera,
so I can have multiple tabs open within the window as well.
That's something I find tremendously useful because I multitask horribly.
Yeah, on Wikipedia, and I know we're going to be talking about that later,
but I'm always opening up new windows to deal with different articles on Wikipedia at the same time,
and after a couple hours of doing this, I'll look down at my taskbar and I'll see I've got like 50 different browsers all open,
and then I have to like close a bunch of them, and sometimes I wish I could close them like five or six at a time,
but apparently I can just like close the entire group or I can close them one at a time.
Oh, no, no, Ilanka, Ilanka, no, no, no, no, please don't make me say this.
You're not using Internet Explorer.
I use both, actually.
I tend to use Internet Explorer and I use Firefox because there are some things that just don't work with Firefox
that still work with IE, and there's other things that won't work with IE that only work with Firefox.
That's true.
So I've done the tabs on Firefox.
One of the things I don't like about Firefox is the way that the Google toolbar interfaces with it.
I like the Google toolbar better on IE than I do on Firefox.
Hmm, don't they make a separate Google toolbar for Firefox?
You're talking about the one that's built in in the upper right corner of Firefox by default?
Right, like sometimes I want to just search on the current site and I don't want to do a mass search.
Or I like the word highlighting feature on there.
Okay.
So, yeah, I agree with you on that one too.
But having all those tabs instead of 50 open windows is so much more convenient to me.
But, yeah, there are still quite a few sites that only work in IE.
But I've also, there's a great extension for Firefox, excuse me, called Open in IE.
Open this page in IE.
And if you do go to one of those pages that doesn't work, you right-click and say Open it in IE,
and it'll fire up your browser just so you can do that one page.
So you can still stay in Firefox for 99% of the time and go to something else.
But, anyway, we'll get off that soapbox.
Yeah, I still use Internet Explorer for a lot of stuff.
But for the most part, I open up Firefox first.
Yeah, I've got different computers and I keep going back and forth.
On some computers, I default to IE.
On others, I default to Firefox.
And I get confused sometimes as to, okay, which is my home page?
And why am I looking at this page when I open this browser?
Right.
And a lot of work, school, computers, et cetera, they only have Internet Explorer.
So you've just got to be able to adapt.
But, anyway, I think before we got – so there's your mini webmail review.
That's a bonus.
That's a bonus topic in this episode.
That was fun, though.
But I think what I was going to tie us back on was you were talking about all the media coverage from the mistake in cryptos.
Well, that's not the only media coverage that you've been involved in lately.
You also – and let's see, how will I approach it?
You also had a new book that came out recently, right?
Right, right.
The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms in the United States.
And in the U.K. it had the title The Mammoth Book of Secret Code Puzzles.
Okay.
Why did they rename it differently over there?
They have the same English –
You know, it was just the publisher.
They looked at their respective markets, and the publisher made the decision saying that they thought one title would play better in the U.K.
and another title would play better in the U.S., and I bow to their wisdom on that because they sell more books than I do.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Now, what is this book, like $70, $80?
See, that's a little trick.
That makes a nice bit of royalty.
That's a nice little trick I post.
It's, I think, $15, $14 in the United States and, I think, eight pounds in England.
See, I set it up saying that it's $70 or $80, that little trick.
But that way, when you say that it's only $15, wow, wow, what a great bargain that is.
Actually, that is – I actually looked at the book on Amazon, and I really was surprised at $15.
I mean, I really was expecting that to be more than that.
That's actually not a bad price at all.
Are you going to have some of those with you at DEF CON?
Oh, yeah, I'll definitely have some.
There's also an interesting scam that I noticed on Amazon when my book started being released,
which is that on the first day that it was released on Amazon,
I started seeing a whole bunch of used copies showing up.
Right, right.
And I was thinking, how can there possibly be used copies already?
And evidently what it is is that there's some resellers who, when a book comes out,
they will buy the book and then offer it used, seemingly offering it at a lower price
than what Amazon is selling it for.
But they've got this extra $4 shipping and handling on top of it.
So when you go to Amazon and you see the price of a new book,
and it looks like there's a used book that's for a lower price,
if it's only lower by a few bucks, you're probably still better off buying the used copy.
Am I making sense?
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
And Amazon is not going to let somebody undercut them too awful much, willingly.
Amazon is, if they've got the free shipping, they're sending to these resellers,
and they're putting big notices saying you are not allowed to buy books in order to resell.
But I think that that's what these resellers are doing,
is they'll buy the new book, they'll offer it, and they get their discount,
and they don't pay any kind of shipping and handling fee.
And then they offer it at a seemingly lower price,
but then they're basically getting, they're kind of skimming a buck off of each sale.
So whenever I'm on Amazon now and I see a new book that costs like 12 books,
or, I'm sorry, a new book that costs $12,
and a used copy that costs maybe $10,
I'll probably still stick with buying the new copy.
It's a $12 because it's going to come out cheaper.
Right.
If I'm not paying the shipping and handling.
Right.
But don't you have to order $50 or more to get the free shipping?
I haven't ordered from Amazon in a little while, a few months.
Yeah, there is some, but I normally order my books in batches.
Yeah, same with me.
So every two or three months I'll order a batch over $50 and get it for free shipping.
The book is selling well, I understand it then?
Did you say you're in second printing?
Yes, and there was actually some good timing there because there was a big news story,
a different crypto news story that broke, that had to do with Dan Brown and the Da Vinci Code.
He was in the middle of a big plagiarism trial in England.
And it was a funny story, and my phone was ringing off the hook with reporters calling me about this code.
But Dan Brown was being sued by the authors of, two of the authors of the book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail,
who were claiming plagiarism, that he had stolen some of their ideas for the book, The Da Vinci Code.
So the trial was going on this spring, and Dan Brown, he won.
He was cleared of the plagiarism charges.
And the judge, Justice Peter Smith, he wrote a trial ruling.
It was a 71-page trial ruling document.
Well, in the trial ruling, the judge hid a code.
Oh, what?
What he did is he italicized certain letters throughout the trial ruling,
which was a similar method to what Dan Brown has done in some of his codes
and also something to do with the Priory of Scion hoax.
But the judge hid, I think it was a 41-character code in his trial ruling.
Well, it took kind of a couple weeks for people to figure this out,
and then one of the attorneys, I think he was a legal consultant for one of the British papers,
who's noticed this and wrote to the judge about it, and he wrote a story about it,
and it just all hell broke loose.
From what I hear, the entire London legal community ground to a halt
as everybody was trying to crack this code.
And I had Associated Press reporters calling me saying,
Ilanka, we know you're into codes.
Have you cracked this code yet?
And I was like, what code?
I hadn't even heard about it until the reporters started calling me.
And then I talked it over with Chris Hanson, the other cryptos group co-moderator,
and I said, well, it's Da Vinci Code.
We have a lot of Da Vinci Code people in the cryptos group.
How about we put together a task force to see if we can crack this code?
And we were working out, full out on this thing for about a day.
I mean, it was us in the group.
It was the London legal community.
It was Internet discussions all over the place.
Wikipedia articles were sprouting like mushrooms about this code.
And we did crack it.
We were not the first to crack it.
The first man to crack it was a London attorney named Dan Tench who had actually gotten a lot of help from the judge.
But that got a lot of media attention, and then the reporters were calling me and asking me for more information.
And that was actually my first time on national news programs.
I'd been mentioned, like, on CNN before, but I hadn't actually been on them.
And as part of that story, I was actually on MSNBC with Olbermann.
One of his correspondents called me up, and they had me go to a local PBS television studio.
And then they set that up as a feed to MSNBC, and then they recorded a segment and then displayed it later that evening.
And the code, since your listeners are probably going, well, what did it say?
Did somebody actually figure it out?
It said Smithy code, and that was a very easy part of the code, and that was based on the judge's name, Justice Peter Smith.
And then it went into a much more difficult system, which was a polyalphabetic system, which was actually very similar to what's used on cryptos.
And that system, when it was decrypted, came out to the message, Jackie Fisher, who are you? Dreadnought.
And what that meant was Jackie Fisher is a naval admiral.
He's, like, the second most famous admiral in British history, the most famous one being Lord Nelson.
And the judge was a huge fan of Jackie Fisher and was actually kind of upset that there's all this attention to Lord Nelson
and not as much attention to Admiral Fisher, who was an admiral around the 1900s.
And so as a way of raising public awareness of this admiral, the judge decided to put a code about him into the legal document.
So Jackie Fisher, he was behind the launch of the first major modern battleships, the Dreadnought.
The Dreadnought, right.
And the first one of which was launched in 1906, and it was launched almost exactly 100 years ago to the day as the Da Vinci Code trial.
So since 2006 was the 100-year anniversary, and the judge was a big fan of Jackie Fisher.
In fact, if you read the judge's who's who biography, it actually says right in his biography that he's a big Jackie Fisher fan.
So he kind of did this as a whole homage to the guy that he's a fanboy for.
Well, I think that's great.
I think that's a great story, and that's an interesting thing.
I wish people would slip that in more often.
I will slip in a few things into my code sometimes when I'm actually writing programs and stuff.
I'll stick some little hidden things into my – or even some little encrypted codes into my comments and stuff like that,
or use them actually as part of the code sometimes if I can get away with it.
But was there any fallout or anything from that?
Because it sounds like a cool idea, but technically that's a legal document.
I mean, I hope he didn't get in any trouble for that.
No, and other judges have done odd things with legal documents.
It's, for example, I think there's some judges that are into sports,
and I think one judge wrote his entire ruling in couplets, in poetry.
And one thing that can be said about the trial ruling is by him putting a code in it,
it actually made a lot of people actually read it.
Well, yeah, that's a very good point because most people probably wouldn't,
and that's going to be kept in public document for history.
I mean, that's going to be able to be researched and looked up for years down the road,
plus the publicity that it's got is going to keep it a little bit more in the public eye, I guess, so to speak.
Yeah, he will have gone down in history as writing one of the odd rulings.
And he will be –
And weird facts of judicial history. This will probably get mentioned.
And probably to his great appreciation, I'm sure, he will be forever tied to the person,
the general that he wanted so closely that he had so much respect for.
To Admiral Fisher, yes.
All right. Well, good stuff.
Now, I did not – I had briefly – I had heard something about Dan Brown in a plagiarism lawsuit.
Now, is this – and you refreshed my memory when you mentioned it.
It's something to do with the fact that – I guess about the plot and the Holy Grail and the whole –
I guess let's not get into too much detail about it on this hacking show,
but something along the lines of the biblical undertones of it and some of the theories or ideas behind it.
Right. And I could go into great detail because I actually just gave a talk about this in Wisconsin,
about the whole Priory of Zion.
Basically, a lot of the controversy around the Da Vinci Code, yes, it's a fictional novel,
but at the beginning of the book, he's got this big statement that says,
Fact. The Priory of Zion is a real organization that was founded in 1099.
All discussions in this book of rituals and architecture, everything is based on fact.
Well, it's not.
Right. Yeah. See, that's the problem.
And the Priory of Zion, which Da Vinci Code states is a factual society,
well, Da Vinci Code got its information from this 1982 book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
And it's a speculative book. It's not fiction. It presents theories.
But one of the things in the book is they say, well, we're hypothesizing this and we're theorizing that.
But one of the things that we know for a fact is that the Priory of Zion is a factual organization.
Well, the Priory of Zion is not a factual organization. Where did Holy Blood, Holy Grail get its information from?
They got their information from a set of medieval, two sets of medieval documents in France that turned out to be forgeries.
They were created as part of a hoax in the 1950s, starting in 1956 by a man named Pierre Plontard,
who was trying to, it's basically this huge social engineering alternate reality game.
So Plontard, with some of his buddies, and they were members of this group called the Surrealist Movement in France,
they were trying to make a case that Pierre Plontard was descended from French royalty and should therefore be made king of France.
And as part of this, they were planting these alternate reality documents in these different locations.
So they created this big set of documents called Les Dossiers Secrets, the secret documents.
And they planted them in the French National Library.
And then another set of documents, it was really clever how they did this.
There's this tiny little village in the south of France called Rennes-le-Chateau,
and it's got a population of like 150 people.
And there had been rumors in the 1800s about a local priest who had come into a lot of money,
and so there was all kind of speculation about that.
And a guy who bought a hotel in the area, or was trying to launch a hotel in the 1950s,
he decided to build up these rumors, sort of like if you want to get people to come to your hotel, make a ghost story.
Well, he started making these stories about how this priest had found a hidden treasure in the local area.
And then this information got expanded upon by Pierre Plontard,
where he and his buddies, they decided to write a book about the hidden treasure of Rennes-le-Chateau.
And in the book, they said, and here are documents which the priest found in the 1800s.
But these documents were forgeries.
They weren't real documents.
And so they reproduced the documents in this book about the treasure.
And in the documents, they hid coded messages.
And they didn't say what the messages said in the book.
But then someone else came along and read the book and said,
Aha, I found one of the coded messages.
And it said, like, Dagobert II, King Dagobert II, and to Scion, does this treasure belong?
And he is there dead.
Well, one of the guys who found the coded message, his name was Henry Lincoln.
And he had been a writer for some Doctor Who serials in the 1960s.
And so he thinks he's found this secret message.
And so he pitches it to BBC and starts doing a series of documentaries about these secret Scion messages
that are in these medieval documents that are in this book about Rennes-le-Chateau.
But the whole thing was a hoax, again, that was started by Pierre Plontard.
And then Lincoln got together with two guys named Bajan and Lee,
and they wrote the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and said, Priory of Scion is real.
And then Da Vinci Code came along, and it went from Holy Blood, Holy Grail,
and said, Priory of Scion is real.
And then things went on from there.
And then, you know, Rod Howard makes a movie.
Well, and speaking of which, let's move into that.
Have you seen the movie, Da Vinci Code?
I have seen it twice, yes.
Oh, you saw it twice? It was that good.
No, but I have to see things twice when I'm going to debunk them.
Oh, okay.
So, well, hey, far be it from me to stand in the way.
Let the debunking begin.
I'll admit, I have not seen the movie,
and I didn't really have too much of a desire, to be honest.
Yeah, the movie, it had very mixed reviews.
I think the Ebert and Roper gave it two thumbs up,
but the Rotten Tomatoes, I think it's running around 20% or 30%,
so mostly rotten.
I found it okay.
I found it disappointing.
It follows the book very closely in some places,
not very closely in others.
I found the movie a little too defensive for my taste.
There were some dialogue scenes that kind of dragged on and on,
where it seemed that it wasn't the characters actually discussing something.
This was Ron Howard making the characters discuss things to argue against the people
that were opposed to the movie.
Right.
And it just didn't gel together.
The things that were supposed to be big emotional scenes didn't come across.
Well, that was going to be one of my worries was that, you know,
by the time this movie came out, there was a lot of drama, I guess,
and politics and all that stuff mixed into it,
and I just thought to myself,
I know they're going to end up putting little jabs in there
trying to claim this and, you know, jabs against the attacks
and people that are making these claims and whatever
because they're making it into a big,
well, anyway, we won't go there again on a tech show,
but, yeah, I was worried they would do that,
so it's kind of a shame to hear that that's what they did.
Now, what about Tom Hanks?
Was he good for the character or?
I thought he did fine.
Audrey Toto, who played Sophie Neveux,
I was disappointed.
I'm actually a fan of hers,
especially from the movie Amelie,
which I just loved.
I thought that was an amazing movie,
but I thought her performance in Da Vinci Code was kind of wooden,
and I didn't much care for it.
A couple interesting trivia things for the movie,
for those who like such things,
Dan Brown can be seen in the movie,
in the early book signing scene.
He's in the background near Tom Hanks in at least one shot,
and I believe his wife is there with him.
Also, Dan Brown, before he was an author,
was actually a songwriter.
He's actually got four CDs out.
Wow.
And one of his songs is actually part of the movie soundtrack.
So if you stay and you read the credits,
it says that one of the songs was written and performed by Dan Brown.
Hmm.
Yeah.
I'm a big fan of reading credits.
Do you watch the show Lost at all?
Are you a fan of Lost?
Funny.
Actually, let's...
Yes, but let's hold off on that,
because I was going to bring that up,
and actually our whole separate segment coming up later on,
on Wikipedia stuff.
Okay.
Um, but speaking of reality shows, if I may...
Okay.
...since you've opened the door,
and this is a little bit more on topic with the cryptography,
there is a new show that is obviously,
obviously designed and released with perfect timing
to coincide with the movie,
called Treasure Hunters.
Uh-huh.
Or, as it was called the first time,
uh, uh, what is that other show?
It's a copy of, um...
Amazing Race.
It's the same damn show.
Yeah.
Oh, come on!
It's an obvious Amazing Race ripoff.
Yeah, that's all it is.
Which, I like the Amazing Race, don't get me wrong.
Well, sometimes, depending on...
Yeah.
I love Amazing Race.
It's one of my favorite shows.
Yeah.
I like that.
The edit...
The more recent editing tends to bother me.
I don't like...
I don't like some of the changes they've made in the show format.
Yeah, well, like, one of the things is they purposely will cut back and forth to teams.
Like, they could be two hours ahead of another team,
but they purposely make it look like they're right neck and neck.
I hate that.
I absolutely hate that.
It's just to increase the drama.
We all know it's the drama.
They want it to make it look like a real race when it's really a blowout.
I mean, yeah.
Yeah, I would rather see the real story of what's going on.
I would rather see time stamps at the bottom of every scene so I know who's where
and how far they are and what time it is.
And when they're solving a puzzle, whether it be on Amazing Race or in Treasure Hunters,
I want to see the process of how they're solving the puzzle.
I don't want to see, oh, they had a puzzle, and oh, they have it solved.
I find that very, very frustrating.
Right.
Well, and that's one of the things...
All right, so Treasure Hunters, it does have a better premise.
Because I expected it to be, first of all, I think how pretentious it is that there's
a team called the Geniuses, but I won't even...
I digress on that.
Bunch of morons, but anyway.
I want to know how they came by that particular title.
Oh, they explained it because they have, between the three of them, they have seven majors and
five minors or something like that.
That's it.
That's their only excuse.
Agreed.
Yeah.
Well, they're...
I don't know if they've gotten them.
I think they're in progress.
That they've declared them.
They haven't even gotten them.
I don't believe, but...
So, someone with a college degree is a genius?
Apparently so.
If you have multiple majors and minors, apparently you're a genius.
I don't know.
Uh-huh.
Yeah, exactly.
Okay.
Exactly.
But the show...
See, the thing is, the show, when I first heard about it, A, again, I knew it was obviously
a rip-off of Da Vinci Code, and I'm like, you know, that could be a horrible thing.
But on the other hand...
Amazing race.
No, well, no, but I mean, I'm sorry, inspired by the Da Vinci Code.
Okay.
And they were obviously doing a treasure hunter and codes and stuff, and on the commercials,
they showed a...
And I know I'm going to mispronounce this, a vinagery, vinagery, what is it?
Vinagery Code or whatever.
Oh, Visionaire.
Visionaire.
There you go.
What?
You know what I mean.
They used one of those in the commercial, and I'm like, oh, this is actually going to
be challenging.
It's actually going to be something where they...
It's not just who can drive the car fastest and run to the flag fastest.
It's going to be something intellectual.
That's what had me excited and interested to watch.
And, boy, those hopes were dashed immediately.
Like, in the very beginning, the first thing they had to do, if you remember, was they got
a message coming in with their instructions, and it was basically a Morse code message being
played over and over again.
Now, they pretty much gave the...
Everybody went and grabbed a Morse code book and looked it up and translated it.
And I was kind of hoping that maybe they would have picked people that might have been
able to figure out the Morse code.
Even if they didn't do it, like, because they knew it, but if they sat there and figured
it out by the series of beeps and dots and dashes and the pauses between them, figure
out which one was most common, use cryptography methods like, you know, the most common would
be, like, the S's and the T and the N and things like that and work backwards, they didn't
do anything like that.
They went and grabbed a Morse code book.
Well, disappointing, but okay, fine.
Go on with that.
Then later on, there was one where they had to come up with a combination to a little
safe or a little box or something like that.
Do you remember that scene?
Yeah.
One person figured it out and the rest copied them.
Right.
Come on.
That's horrible.
There's no fun in that.
Yeah.
Yeah, I wish they would show more of the puzzles.
I mean, I watch all my shows off of TiVo these days.
It's very rare that I watch live television.
Same with me.
And I wish that when they had a puzzle, if they would just show the entire puzzle and
give maybe the audience a chance to work it out for ourselves, I'd actually pause it,
you know, TiVo it, and work it out.
Instead, it kind of goes by, and they sort of give, like, sort of half the information,
and they're like, oh, they've solved it, and then they move on.
And I hate that.
Right.
Well, the only one that I liked was the one at the lighthouse where they climbed up at
the top to look down at the stone patterns and figure out that it's Roman numerals.
The Roman numerals.
That one I liked.
That one I kind of liked.
Even though...
But they never said what the actual combination was.
They didn't?
I...
I don't remember.
Yeah, I saw the number.
They had, like, 53 and 9, and...
But I didn't even know, like, how many wheels were on the different combination locks.
Was it that they had to randomly mix the different numbers, or...
They never explained that.
Right.
No, I didn't even notice that, actually.
And it was also kind of funny that some of them didn't know the Roman numerals.
Yeah, like what was an L.
Yeah, and they had to figure out a lot of those, and some of them were cheating on that as well.
That's what I'm finding more than anything, is there was a lot more cheating going on than
I had expected.
One or two teams figures it out, and everybody else copies or follows along with them.
One thing I like about the show is the whole American history angle.
I like that they're trying to portray that, and that there is some actual knowledge of history.
There's that certain educational aspect about the show, and they're not just totally manufacturing new puzzles.
I agree.
I have some respect for that.
Yeah, I agree.
I like that as well, and that it's ongoing, and that they have to pick up all these different
clues along the way, and if they keep going along that path, and it ends up being that
all this kind of ties together, that will be some salvage, some saving grace at the end
of the whole thing.
One of the other things that I found interesting was in the very beginning, we thought there
were only five teams, or excuse me, they only thought that there were five teams involved,
and they come to find out there were five teams that started in, was it Antarctica, and then
five other teams that started in, I don't remember, Hawaii or something, I don't remember,
some tropical climate, and they all brought them together.
And then they all came face to face.
Yeah, that was a great scene.
The surprise on their faces, I enjoyed that scene.
That was definitely a good scene.
And it gave it a tone, too, of, you never know what to expect, or what's going to be
around the corner, that sort of thing.
I like there's one team on there that's, well, that was on there, I should say, called
the Wild Hanlons, or Wild Hanloons, or something like that.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, these guys, they were taking the game way too seriously.
Now, I wish almost that the game was that serious, because they were doing weird things,
like they would go, they were going to, I think there was one where they went to Mount Rushmore,
and the clue was telling them to look, look for, I don't even remember what it was, quite
honestly, it was to look for something, look, see where you can see two faces, or something
like that.
Right.
These guys are digging through trash cans, they're looking under rocks, they're pulling
bushes apart and stuff, when it was so not that detailed, and not that low level.
It had to do with looking up at the faces from the right angle, the faces on Mount Rushmore.
But these guys are like climbing, looking on the roof, looking at every little piece
of paper on the ground, and digging through trash, like it was a hide and seek game, or
something like that.
It was, I don't know, they just did not seem to get it.
Yeah, it's hard to tell sometimes with these shows and the ways that they edit them, because
they obviously have sometimes days worth of material, and then they'll edit out a lot of
stuff, and we'll only see bits and pieces.
And that's one of the things that I found frustrating about Amazing Race, is that I feel
like when the show first started, and they didn't have the teams doing as many different
things, the show would show more of the process of what the team was doing, what they would
think about a clue, how they would talk about it, what their decision-making process was.
And then as they added in more and more different tasks for the teams to perform, the editing
got choppier and choppier, to the point where you don't always see what the team is thinking.
It'll be like the team will, you know, team, I don't know, Brown family or someone will
be driving along a highway, and then in the next scene it's like, oh, you know, they're
four hours behind everyone else, and here they are coming in late.
And I'm like, wait a minute, why are they four hours behind everyone?
Where did they turn wrong?
I don't want to just see the result of the bad decisions.
I want to see the process of making the bad decisions.
Oh, and actually that is one other good thing I did like, speaking of bad decisions.
They give them some, they throw some red herrings out there.
There was one scene, you know what I'm talking about, where it's the one where they're supposed
to be going to Mount Rushmore.
Right, right.
And the drivers were told, the teams were told that if you tell the driver a destination,
he's only going to take you if you're correct.
And if you tell him something that's not correct, he's not going to take you there.
Well, the truth was, the driver had two, they had set the clue up so that it could mean
two possible different things.
One was right, and one was wrong.
And the driver was told to accept either one of those answers.
So the team thought they were going in the right direction, and the driver was taking them
there.
When it turns out, it was not the right thing at all.
And they ended up being way off course and having to catch up.
Yeah, that's an interesting thing about treasure hunters, is that some of the puzzles are so
hard and so time-consuming that the teams are getting spaced out more by hours, rather
than Amazing Race, where they'll all be really, they do things to force all the teams to be
within just a minute of each other sometimes.
Right.
And I do, some of the puzzles in Treasure Hunter do seem really hard, and the clues are really
obscure.
And I'm just amazed.
But they hand them.
They hand them to them.
They needed to search through this house, and they needed to find a bullet in the house.
And the way they showed it in the show, it's like the teams come in and go, oh, look, here,
we need to rip up these floorboards, and here's a bullet.
It seems to me that if I was just faced with a house, and I needed to find a bullet, I'm
not going to go straight to the hole in the floorboard.
Well, see, now, that's where the Wild Handlings might have excelled in that one, because they
would have been looking under every floorboard, and behind every painting on the wall, and
all that kind of stuff.
But yeah, I thought that was a good one, too, to have to find something obscure like that.
But then there was one, oh, we could talk about this forever.
But let's cut this short.
But it does have some good points to it.
It also, and it's one of the things I didn't like about Amazing Race, and this one I'm not
going to like if they do this, where they, if a team excels and gets ahead, I think they
deserve that, and they should be able to keep some of it anyway.
This bunching them back up and making them even again just for the drama aspect, I don't
like that.
That's not fair.
Like they'll all arrive at a pit stop, and they'll be like four or six hours apart, but
they'll be told, oh, well, tomorrow morning you're all on these boats that are 15 minutes
apart.
Right.
And it's an artificial way of getting them to clump again, and I agree that I find that
annoying.
Yeah.
Or they all race to get somewhere at night, and then they get there and it says, oh, it
doesn't open until 8 a.m., so they all have to sit there and wait together and then run
up.
Yeah.
Yeah, I hate that kind of, that's not, ugh, that part's annoying.
And I wish there was a little bit more, now see, as far as the challenge of it, I want
to, I thought the challenge should be a little bit more, especially for the codes and some
of that stuff.
I found that those stupid little video, first of all, is it obvious they're in bed with
Motorola and Ask.com?
Yeah, the product placement is just annoying.
I agree.
The product placement is horrible.
They're giving laptops to access Ask.com, and they keep using them.
Right, but they're always using Ask.com instead of Google.
That makes me laugh.
Yeah, yeah.
And these Motorola phones that they're all given, and they're all forced to do speakerphone
with them, so that the cameras can pick up the audio, I guess.
Yeah, I wonder, I wonder about the Ask.com, I mean, do they have, are their laptops blocking
Google such that?
I don't know, that'd be interesting.
Or is there maybe some rule that the teams are told, you know, if you're going to go to
a search engine, you must go to Ask.com first, and then you can go to Google and you can do
something else, and we're only going to show Ask.com, or is it that they search on anything
they want, and then maybe they just edit it in the little interstitials, and they say,
oh, they make it look like they typed in Ask.com, but in actuality, they just typed into Google.
Well, if anybody, if any of our listeners out there, for some strange, by chance, weird
reason, work on the inside there and can let us know, I'd be curious to know that as well.
Yeah, because I track hits to my website, and I see where I'm getting traffic from, and
it's Google, Google, Google, Google. I get some stuff from Yahoo search, I get some things
from my search my way, and I'm not getting anything from Ask.com.
Yeah, yeah. And well, maybe that's why Ask is doing this, this is their publicity push,
or whatever. But anyway, the Motorola phones are even more annoying to me, because the complexity
of these puzzles would be, to me, I think they'd be challenging on their own, but that
stupid announcer guy comes on with a video message on the Motorola phone, and basically
gives it to them. He comes out and tells them, hey, here's how many characters are in the
combination, and the combination has to do with the Order of the Presidents, and it's
like you're giving them the answer practically.
And I have to rant, I don't like, and this is really petty on my part, I don't like his
voice. His voice sounds very robotic to me, and unappealing, and I just don't care for
him.
Well, Elonka, here's what we need to do. Teams of three. You, me, and we need to find a third
person, and we're going to submit a team next year. We'll be the hackers. I mean, come on,
now listen, that's good television, right? They would, come on, they'd put a team of
hackers on with it, they'd put a team called the Geniuses, and the Supermodels, or something,
and the, come on, they would, they'd eat that up. Except, here's the thing, we have to get
a person, a third person, or you, maybe, because I am not bungee jumping.
I was about to say, I'm not doing any bungee jumping.
We need somebody, I'm not doing the, okay, listen, if I was guaranteed a win, or if it was
like down to the final thing, and if we bungee jump, we win, I'll do that. But just for the
heck of it, for no reason, no, I'm not doing that. Secondly, I'm not eating any weird shit.
I am not eating any bugs.
Nothing with tentacles going down the throat.
No, no bugs, no old rotten meat, no weird egg.
Lamb brains.
Exactly. So we've got to find somebody willing to do all of that as our partner.
A strong stomach who has no fear of heights. Okay, there's our requirement.
Exactly, exactly. But that would be fun. I would love to do that.
Yeah. I agree. I agree. I'd enjoy that, too.
Yeah. All right. Well, put that on our list of things to do.
Yeah, like, we'll get that. We'll make that happen. Hey, you never know.
We'll make sure we all wear our bin rev shirts. Actually, did you notice that some of the
people had ask.com shirts on, too, as well? They obviously gave them shirts.
No, I didn't see that.
Oh, yeah. Product placement's there, buddy. Big time. All right. Well, we've got about,
oh, 15, 20 minutes left to go. And there's another topic, kind of, let's get off the cryptography
thing. See, I don't want to, I feel like every time you come on here, that's all we ever talk
about is cryptos, cryptos, cryptos, and the same thing over. And I don't want people to
pigeonhole you like, that's all that Alanka knows. We have a lot of great conversations,
some of them about TV shows or whatever else. So one of the other things that I know that
you're interested in recently, and for a while now, but particularly recently, is a site that
I do enjoy, generally, for looking stuff up, and that's Wikipedia. However, it's pretty
much the soap opera of the internet.
One of them.
Well, yes, one of them. What is, what's a story with Wikipedia? I mean, what is that site
becoming? What is that site turned in? Is it, first of all, let me ask you a blunt question,
straight, honest, to the point, put you on the spot. Hopefully you won't get hate mail.
Now, I don't know what your answer will be, but is Wikipedia a reliable source of information?
Well, if you want a yes or no answer, I'm going to say no. Anyone who uses Wikipedia as
their primary source needs to have their head examined. All right, flat out. Wikipedia should
not be used as a sole source. But Wikipedia, I still think, is a wonderful resource for people
who want to get a quick overview of a subject or want to find other places to get real sources.
And often it's a good source for kind of obscure bits of information. For example, I love Wikipedia.
I love Wikipedia. I've been spending a lot of time on there. I've written over 100 articles
on Wikipedia. I've accomplished over 5,000 edits on Wikipedia. And it's almost like an addictive
property, almost like a multiplayer game, how much I'm enjoying it. There's even like battles
as we fight against vandals. And there's the politics and the cliques and guilds and the
debates about different parts of the service. But I think it's an amazing and ambitious project.
It's growing fast. There's over 1.2 million articles at this point. And Wikipedia, I think,
has taken a lot of heat for some things that I don't think it deserves. I think that some
people, when they see Wikipedia, they make an assumption that it is supposed to be like
an encyclopedia, meaning that it's all carefully reviewed by academics before anything goes on
a web page. And that's not what it is. It is a groupware project by thousands of volunteers
from all over the world. Many of those volunteers have very different opinions about different
subjects. And any article that you look at at Wikipedia is probably in a state of flux. It's
very rare to find any article on Wikipedia that it's just there and it hasn't been touched for
months. I mean, it happens. But I think that it's the exception rather than the rule. You can go to
any article on Wikipedia and you can click on the history tab at the top. And you will see the most
recent times that people have been changing it. And every article is getting changed pretty much
constantly. And some articles, because you get these different opinions from different editors
coming in, and there will be like edit wars that will be going on in an article, especially
anything that involves nationalism. We're shifting borders. There's flame wars going on right now
about some things to do with Eastern Europe or the country of the Ukraine. And some people think,
well, Ukraine, what does Ukrainian mean? Well, it could mean this or it could mean that. And then
the Russian editors are coming in and saying one thing, and the Polish editors are coming in and
saying something different. Or some of the medieval Polish monarchs. That's another fun thing where
there have been some edit wars going on. Because some of these monarchs had different names in every
single country. They were a monarch of Hungary. They were a monarch of Poland. They were a monarch of
Lithuania. And in each one of these countries, they had a different name. It had a different number.
So they might be like Vladislav's five in one country, and Vladislav's two in another country,
and Laszlo one. So when it comes to titling the Wikipedia article, what do you call it? You get
these massive flame wars going on. Yeah. And like what the things should be called. And we see we see
flame wars that are personal attacks on people, or flame wars that are like distro wars of what's the
best Linux distro, or how much Windows sucks. And they're arguing about these medieval, it's just such an
odd thing to imagine a flame war turning into a flame war, isn't it?
Oh, but there's so much passion that's going into it. And to Wikipedia's credit, I think it has some
fundamentally good policies. There's a lot of guidelines, which are like suggested guidelines, but there's also
hardcore policies. There's a few of them. And one of the policies on Wikipedia is something called
verifiability, which not everyone knows, and not everyone pays attention to, but if someone violates it,
that an article is changed. Verifiability means that nothing should ever be added to a Wikipedia
article unless it can be verified in and outside its source. Which means that someone can't just come in
and say, hey, I was walking down the street and I saw this building and... Nobody does that.
Yeah. And it was found, I know that it was founded in 1891, so I'm going to add this to the article.
Pretty much any other editor can come along and say, okay, you say the building was founded in 1891,
and if no one can prove it, then they can remove that information from the article, which I think is
a good policy where there's controversial information. And especially when you're dealing
with biographies, and as you said, there are people who will go in and put slam information
and criticize people. And Wikipedia has good policies, especially about what they call
biographies of living people, saying if you're going to put bad information about anyone into a
Wikipedia article. You have to point to a source. You can't just go in and say Madonna
is, you know, is a skank. But if BBC News said Madonna is a skank, then you can put it into
the Wikipedia article. Because it will say, according to BBC News, Madonna is a skank.
But then people would argue that BBC News is not credible and therefore shouldn't be put in there.
So we're talking about what is the standard by which information can go into a Wikipedia article.
And so we have the policy of verifiability. We also have the policy of no original research,
which means that if someone is, you know, doing scientific research in their own lab,
and they may have something factual where they've said, oh, we've discovered anti-gravity, okay?
Well, they can't go into Wikipedia and say we've discovered it and make the anti-gravity section
of the article say, well, here's what we've discovered in our laboratory. Because that's
against Wikipedia policy as well. Because you cannot use Wikipedia to publish original theories.
If you want to get the information out there, publish it somewhere else first. And then you
have the outside source. And then you can create the Wikipedia article and point to the outside
source. And I think that that's a wise policy as well.
Yeah. The thing about Wikipedia that bugs me is the same thing that, well, bugs me about every
site on the global interweb. And that's people can't separate their personal feelings from
things. And I mean, yeah, again, like you said earlier, anybody thinking that this is like
a reliable, 100% credible source of information needs to have their head checked. But it would
be nice to know that people are trying, that have good intentions, that are well intended to
be putting that information. And what I have found, unfortunately, is that I'm finding a lot
of people go in and edit, because they simply, well, and I'll use me for an example. I have
a Wikipedia entry that someone put out there a long time back. And I go in there, and I
just am being insulted, and just attacked for no reason. And it's like, okay, you can attack
me and not like me, but why did you edit out and change and put false information in about
me, when it's just because of that reason? I mean, there's no accountability, unfortunately.
Well, accountability, no. But I think the Wikipedia policy on verifiability can be the protective
umbrella in that case. If someone's adding false information, you have every right to
remove it from the article. And the issue of people's own biographies is a very, very touchy
thing. And there's some policies there and guidelines on what's called autobiographical
edits. Because unfortunately, a lot of people, and this is not about you at all, but many
people are looking at Wikipedia as an advertising vehicle. I mean, as you know, spam is everywhere
on the Internet. And so many, many people are going to Wikipedia, and they're creating, can
I say, quote, articles, unquote, about their company, about their product, about themselves.
Magicians are particularly bad about that, because they'll go in and they'll create a
biography of themselves and say, ah, yes, you know, this magician Merlin, you know, Merlin
Doodad is the most famous magician in the world, and he's the winner of the defabled golden
turban of Bangalore. Well, first of all, he's not the most famous magician in the world.
No one's ever heard of this guy. There's no such golden turban award. But you see these
articles sprouting up around Wikipedia all over the place. And so there's these teams
of accuracy checkers that are regularly sweeping Wikipedia looking for this and deleting articles
or removing this information or demanding that people point to outside references. And the
case that Wikipedia allows anonymous editors, which is a controversial thing, and this ties
back to what you were saying about people will just go in and they'll just add crap to an
article. It happens all over Wikipedia, especially with really high profile things like go to
the George Bush article, go to the Dan Brown article, or go to the Da Vinci Code article.
And people will be vandalizing these articles on a regular basis, sometimes every few minutes.
But overall, the community works because they check these articles and if vandalism goes, it's
sort of like graffiti. Someone will come in and they'll spray paint a swear word onto a wall
somewhere. But then the responsible citizens will come along and go, oh, graffiti, they'll
wash it off and then move on. Life goes on. And it can take some, it takes some fortitude
to deal with some of that. Because sometimes, especially an article about yourself, and you
see, oh my God, someone came in and said something bad about me.
I think they said I was a shitbag, I think, on one of them one time or something like that.
Right. And I know it's hard to say don't take it personally. There's this book that someone
just recommended to me called The Four Agreements, which overall I see is a bunch of new age crap.
I mean, the guy who wrote this book believes in Atlantis and he's not someone that I would
call a verifiable source. But there's a few good points in the book. And one of the points
that is said in the book is that you have to realize that everyone walking around the world
is living in their own dream. And if someone says something to you, it doesn't necessarily
have anything to do with you. It has to do with them and their dream, how they're perceiving
the world. And if they're calling someone a shitbag, that's them. That says more bad things
about them for saying it than it says anything about you who they said it to. And obviously
it doesn't deserve that kind of a comment. But it's hard to not take those things personally.
I agree.
Yeah. And it's the lack of support or people to then follow up and go, no, he's not a
shitbag, you're a shitbag. Or that was uncalled for. Anything like that. That's the part that
disappoints me. It shouldn't be honestly such a... I know another controversial one I think
is creationism. Isn't that another one that's a known controversial subject?
Oh, there is. I mean, you can get people going to the Earth article and wanting to put the
Flat Earth Society comments in it. Yeah, there's stuff all over. 1.2 million articles.
You can find as many flame wars as you want. Yeah. Well, I mean, can't...
And actually, I'll phrase this as a should. Should Wikipedia have a policy or should the
way Wikipedia entries be listed is to say some people think creationism is this, some other
people believe that creationism is completely this. Right.
And show both sides. And people can't seem to even accept that.
References. You can't just say some people. You have to say, according to the following
scholars. Oh, sure.
Right, right.
Why is that so hard? People don't even seem to be happy to compromise with something like
that.
Well, okay. Some people are reasonable and will compromise. And some people will be unreasonable
and will not want to compromise. But my belief, because I'm a huge supporter of Wikipedia,
I believe in the project. I believe in the concept. I think that overall, the reasonable
people will win out over the unreasonable people. But I think it is unreasonable to assume
that everyone in the world can be reasonable.
Yeah. And don't get me wrong. I completely support it and I agree with it. I think it's
a great resource as well. I just wish it didn't take so damn long for this stuff to cycle
out. For the flame wars to go through and for the right thing to finally eventually happen
after going back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. It just takes too damn
long.
Jeez. And I know Jason Scott was also big into Wikipedia and had some interesting comments
and I think he even presented on the failure of Wikipedia, I think is what it was called
or something like that. I did not see it, so I don't want to speak to what he might have
said about it. But I know he's interested in it as well.
I went to his talk and it was very entertaining. And one of the quotes that he said, which
I really enjoyed, was he referred to Wikipedia as the Katamari Damacy of the internet. Just
kind of rolling along, collecting everything.
Yeah. Well, and another good point that he made, or yeah, a good definition or whatever,
was he pointed out that one of the big sources, I guess, of flame wars or one of the big conundrums
was the two different factions, two different thought processes, the inclusionists versus
the exclusionists.
Yes.
Those people who think that you should make these entries as large and all-encompassing
as you can versus the ones that think you should only include those things that are
very precise and that only fit into criteria and certain things should not be allowed and
should be kept minimalized and something along those lines.
Well, it has to do with whether or not an actual article should exist. For example, right
now there's a debate about athletes and how many athletes are deserving of having their
own article on Wikipedia. And some people say that someone should only have an article
if they've won national awards, have received major attention, they've been in the news,
they've been on TV. And other people say, well, we'd like for there to be an article
on anyone who's been an athlete anywhere, even if they've only played in like a college
sports game. And the final decision is going to be somewhere in between those two extremes.
So the inclusionists say that anyone who's ever been mentioned in a newspaper ever or any
musician who's ever released a CD of any kind, regardless of whether or not anyone bought
it, should have an article. And the exclusionists say, a musician, or I'm sorry, a musician
should only be on Wikipedia if they've sold, you know, 100,000 albums or something. And
then you have a community debate to say, well, somewhere in between those two points, those
two extremes, that's going to be where our guideline is.
Yeah. And speaking of music, I know there was a play more, there's some things going on
with the nerdcore, nerdcore hip hop and the nerdcore music entries where some people were
feeling like they were slighted and should have been listed and they weren't listed. And
it all comes down to what is, I'm going to make up a word, what is Wikipedia worthy? You
know, what is worthy? And, you know, quite honestly, I think a lot of it might be, a lot
of these might be solved. And of course, this is just my opinion and I won't speak for anyone
else, but don't even have any biographies, period. Don't let any people be in there. Make
it about science, facts, history, mathematics, studies of science, social sciences, things
like that. Keep the people out of it as much as you can.
No.
No?
No, no, because science discoveries and facts are all based on people.
It would be wrong to just cover the concepts and not, in my opinion, it would be wrong to
just cover the concepts and not to cover the people behind those concepts.
Well, if they're, and again, I guess it comes back to the drawing the line of notability
of the whole thing.
Notability.
And yeah, like when I say, when I say no people, I mean, there should be, in my opinion, again,
no net celebrity. There should not be a stank dog entry on there.
I disagree. I think you're famous.
Oh, please get out of here. That is so.
You do this regular weekly radio program.
So what?
You've founded Digital Dog Pound. You've founded Binary Revolution. You've written dozens of articles
for $2,600. You've been on the news.
All right, I'm going to totally edit this.
You're famous. You've got to deal with it.
I'm totally going to edit all that crap out of there. The bottom line is, plenty of people,
look, plenty of people make podcasts and radio shows and all this kind of stuff. I mean,
there's tons of them. There was an entry for every one of them. Come on.
It says...
No? Wikipedia isn't paper. Why should there be a limit?
You know, now, actually, that's the best point I've heard all night. You know what?
It's on there. Wikipedia is not paper.
That's actually a very good point. I mean, I'm saying that kind of, not sarcastically,
but bitterly, I guess is the better word. It's just all the fighting and flaming I see.
I'm just so sick of all the flaming and drama and crap. It's like, can't we all just get
along? That's all I want. Can't we all just get along? No, seriously, honestly, I do believe
that more is better. More information is always better. You shouldn't ever, ever, ever filter
or not have information. So I guess I'd be on the, I guess the inclusion. I would say
include everything as much as possible that, you know, let's not do this or let's make this
global rule. And of course, I threw that out there because I know damn good and well that
that's unreasonable. But, I don't know, it's a dream. I guess it'd be nice if people weren't
just... The time they spent flaming, they could spend researching and verifying some of these
things instead.
Well, I believe that a lot of people attack other things because that prevents them from
having to look at the problems inside their own home, inside their own heart. And it gives
them an excuse to avoid their own problems by focusing on other people's problems.
Well, actually, here's one more example, one more thing I had in my notes about Wikipedia.
And it goes back to what you talked about earlier. I'm not going to leave this dangling
plot line here. You asked me about Lost. Okay. So, yes, I'm a big fan of Lost. And on
Lost, I TiVo everything as well. And I was actually out of town for a couple of weeks for
work and I came back and caught up on past episodes of Lost. And I was a couple of weeks
late on the fake commercial, which I'm sure if you...
Go to Hansel Foundation.
Exactly. So I didn't catch that until a couple of weeks later on TiVo, or on my DVR anyway.
And I actually went to... Well, I went out and did some searching for it first and found
a couple of websites. And then Wikipedia does have some entries and had all the information
because the numbers that they gave out in the commercial were real. And you heard and
they were people from the cast that were mentioned on the show. Some of the scientists' names
were real people from the Hansel Foundation, which were mentioned in the films and stuff from
the show, which I thought was really, really cool. Until... Until I found out that it was
all a big freaking advertising campaign for Sprite. Subliminal.com. I was so pissed off
at that.
I haven't heard about the Sprite connection. I've heard that Hansel Foundation is a fictional
corporation that has a commercial during the show. I've also been... I've really enjoyed
how there's a book out called Bad Twin, which you can go into Borders or Barnes & Noble. You can buy
this book. It's by Gary Troop. And Gary Troop is a fictional character that's from the show. For
example, if you go and buy the book in Borders and you flip to the copyright page, it says this book
is a work of fiction. Even the author is a fictional character. And it all ties into the show Lost and it
ties into the Hansel Foundation. And if you watch the movie Mission Impossible 3 and you stay
to watch credits. I love watching credits. In the credits for the movie Mission Impossible 3
where it's thanking all the different companies, one of the companies that thanks is the Hansel
Foundation.
Oh, that's awesome. I didn't know there was a book. That's interesting. But yeah, if you go to
subliminal.com, there's like a little flash animation in the game and a combination stuff
you put in. It's simple. But if you look down the bottom right-hand corner of the copyright...
I'm sorry. No, that's not what it was. If you go look up the Whois information, the site is
registered to Sprite. And it's subliminal. And when I saw that, you know,
I think the word subliminal. But L-Y-M-O-N is Lyman, which is what Sprite is pushing in
their current commercials, that it's lemon-lime. So they're calling it subliminal.com. And
it's basically they're promoting and they've got Sprite commercials and ads and all this
kind of stuff mixed into the whole thing. So if it turns out that was all a big advertising
thing, does that get taken out of Wikipedia later under that what you talked about earlier
that it's spam?
No.
No. It's...
I mean, I'm sure that there's an article in Wikipedia on Sprite and on various products.
To get removed from Wikipedia, it would have to be something like an obvious promotion that
was using what we call peacock terms. Like, this is the best soft drink ever. That's going
to get deleted out of Wikipedia really fast. But just say... And this following program was
sponsored by the following products. Nah, I don't really see that as spam. I see that
as reasonable disclosure.
Hmm. Well, it's disappointing as a viewer to find out that that's not actually part of
the show. I thought it was a little hidden thing to make the show interactive. And instead,
it turns out to be a little advertising ploy. An interesting one, don't get me wrong, but
disappointing. Now, that book you talked about, that sounds a little bit more interesting.
Yeah. In one of the episodes of Lost, where you're seeing the character Sawyer,
and he's sitting outside his tent, and he's reading a manuscript. And then one of the other
characters grabs the manuscript and throws it in the fire. The manuscript is for the
book Bad Twin. Which is the book you can actually buy in Borders. And supposedly, the author
of the book, Gary Troop, was one of the passengers on Flight 815 in Lost that crashed on the island.
So when you buy the book in Borders, and it says, Gary Troop, the last book he wrote before
he was tragically lost in the Flight of Oceanic, Flight 815.
But how can that be if it burned?
It's a whole RG alternate reality where it gets really difficult to tell what's real and
what's fake. But I find that all very, a lot of fun.
Well, A, how did the book make it back if it got thrown into the fire?
Oh, because it was a manuscript that was on the plane, but the manuscript had also already
been delivered to the publisher.
Oh, and secondly, Dan Brown will take that and call it fact and write a book about it
in 10 years.
Oh, oh, that was so uncalled for.
Oh, that was such, I think we'll wrap up the show on that one. That was pretty rude.
Sorry, Dan, don't sue me or anything.
Actually, one little note, and maybe you know this, I wish I should have looked this up before
the show, but didn't one of the main creators of Wikipedia leave?
Didn't he like, I guess he didn't like the direction Wikipedia was, or he didn't like
that it was becoming stagnant and he wanted to go in a new direction. Didn't he start a
new site that was more encompassing of media and video and audio and graphics and stuff
as well? More like, instead of being an online encyclopedia, an online dictionary, it was
more like an online encyclopedia a la Microsoft, what is their, oh, what is Microsoft's encyclopedia
thing?
MSN, Encarta?
Encarta, that's the word I'm looking for. It's more like an Encarta thing except publicly
created just like Wikipedia. It's a group community project where the group and community creates
all the content.
I cannot speak much to that. I know that the main figurehead for Wikipedia is a guy named
Jimmy Wales, Jimbo Wales. However, he has passed off the reins of it to an actual board. I'm
not certain here. I think it's called the Wikimedia Foundation that manages it and that it's a
non-profit. And I'd like to give props to Wikipedia for staying free and not being covered with ads.
I think that's another good thing about Wikipedia.
Absolutely. Absolutely. Something that we also agree with and do at binrev.com. We try
our best not to put them, at least not on binrev.com, that main site with the forums and everything.
It'll be very easy and I could be very tempted with the number of hits we get, but I do not
like the ads being placed everywhere.
Right. And I feel the same way with ilanka.com. I mean, my odometer just rolled over. I've had
over 2 million page views on my site with everything, with crypto and everything. And I'm proud
to say that I have been ad free from day one. And some people, oh, you're at 2 million and you
could do this and you could put an ad here and put an ad there. And no, no, it's not me. And even
when I put in a web page about my book, I sort of felt bad about that. I didn't want people to think
that I made my whole website just as a way of promoting my book. So I had this whole little
apology. Like, well, here's my book and I'm sorry if you think this is an ad, but I think
some people seem to want to know about it. So here's a link.
But you had to put up all those new pictures you had taken, too.
Oh, yeah.
Oh.
Professional photography thing done. Yeah.
Yeah.
Susie Gorman. She's like the Annie Leberwoods of St. Louis. She did a great job.
All right. Well, let's wrap up here. Let's see. Do I have any, let's see, any notes for the end
here? Okay. Well, yes. Again, I'm not going to beat it to death, but this is the last episode of
the season. That being said, I am really not going to be available until after DEFCON, which is a good
while away. So consider me unplugged for all the rest of July. This will probably be the last you hear
of me. Or if you hear something from me next week, whatever we end up doing for that week's time
slot, it will be pre-recorded and everything. I'm going to be pretty much unavailable for the rest of
July and the beginning of August. I will be at Hope and at DEFCON, and that's the reason. I'm not
going to really have access to my computers at home, et cetera, et cetera. I'll be on the road
traveling.
I'll be at DEFCON. Cool.
Yeah, I will be at Hope. I will be at DEFCON. So look for me there. We are going to be presenting at
Hope, the first episode of season four of the radio show. So that's going to be Friday
night starting at 11 p.m. So come on after the presentation. We're all going to try to
meet up there. A bunch of people from the forums are planning to meet after the show, which
will be around 1230-ish, and we'll kind of probably wing it, walk through the cities
of New York, raise a little hell, howl at the moon, whatever it is that we're going to
do. And so I'll be glad to meet up with anybody at either one of the conferences. At DEFCON,
I'll definitely be free. I'll be wide open, except Elonka and I are going to go out
and grab a bike at DEFCON. So other than that, and Elonka, obviously, like I said,
you're going to be at DEFCON as well.
Oh, yeah. I wouldn't miss it.
Are you actually going to set up a booth with your book or anything like that?
No.
No. I'll bring a few copies. If somebody wants an autograph, I'll have my special pen
there, but I'm not doing anything spectacular.
Gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah, well, and yeah, because they charge so much for booths in these places
now, but I won't go there. So shout outs. I'll stall Elonka so you can come up with
your shouts. Again, I want to give shouts out to the crew down in Houston that I met
a couple weeks ago, especially to Booter, who, you know, met me and met up with these
guys at Houston. They took good care of me. We went and hung out and grabbed a bite to
eat and drink, et cetera, et cetera. So that was cool. And looks like I'm going to be spending
some time down in Houston area for the next few months. So I look forward to meeting up
with everyone down there again. So my shouts to them and shouts from you, Elonka.
Okay. Shouts to Monet Friedrich and some other members of the cryptos group that were involved
with that, that player two, layer two discussion from last year. So that would be Monet Friedrich,
Paul Kiesel, Mark Siegel, Thorne Contos. Also shouts to a couple of people. My book that's
out, I have a treasure hunt hidden inside the book, puzzles hidden within the puzzles. And
the book was released just this spring. And there's two people that have already solved
the treasure hunt. And so I want to give a shout out to them. That's Bernard Samuels,
who actually was in Singapore and solved it. And also Daniel Fretwell out of the UK. So
congratulations to those two. And I will be giving out some prizes to them and the next
several solvers as well. Probably at least the 10 first solvers are going to get prizes,
but they definitely get credit for being the first.
Cool. Cool. Congratulations to them. Our site of the week this week actually comes from
Fcon, E-P-H-C-O-N from our forums, came up with a site. It's cryptoggle.com. That's C-R-Y-P-T-O-O-G-L-E
dot com. And Cryptoogle, and I'll just quote from their site because it explains it pretty
straightforward. Cryptoogle uses Google to secure your documents. The encryption is based
on Google results. Your key is a query to Google. We collect the results, process them,
then encrypt with them. Why? Because Google changes. So your encryption changes. So everything
you type into Cryptoogle is going to disappear permanently in a few months. It's a real world
implementation. Look at this. Look at how this comes full circle again. It's a real world
implementation of the concepts described in Dan Brown's Digital Fortress. See? I couldn't
have scripted this show any better. Well, I did kind of script the show because I do write
these show novels. But anyway, if you have feedback for us of any kind, again, probably won't get
back to you right away on this particular case, but if you've gotten any feedback on this episode
or for Elonka or myself or about the whole, all of series three, all of season three of the
shows. This is the last one. If you have feedback on anything along the way, send it to radio
at binrev.com. Our closing music tonight is a track called Tech City Fury from Brent Simon. Cool
track that I stumbled across. And Elonka, thank you so much for being on the show. And I know that we
could make a five, six hour show with you and I. And it's hard to cut it off sometimes to be able
to squeeze it into our time slot. But we're going to have to do it more often so that we don't get
backed up on material like this. So you and I have already discussed another project. So maybe
we'll make that happen. And I think that'll help to be another outlet. So and along the same lines,
you know what? I know it's kind of corny and people know I do get corny on the show sometimes. But,
you know, thanks to everybody for supporting the show. We have been out for three years.
I do put a lot of time in the show. I do take pride in the show still to this very day,
as much as the day we started it. I still put a lot of time in it. And I know that we have a lot
of people listening to the show, some of them that are new, some of them that have been around
for the whole three years. And I sincerely appreciate everybody listening to it. I totally
appreciate it and understand you're taking an hour and a half out of every one of your weeks to
listen to the show. And do not think that it's not appreciated. We absolutely enjoy the feedback we
get on the show. We enjoy the input. I learn a lot from people that email us corrections or new
information or show topics or even come on and co-host the show. So thank you to everybody for
doing that. 156 episodes in the books. They were a blast. So much fun doing them all. So come to
the Sixth Hope, New York City, July 21st, 2021, 22, 23, somewhere in that range. Whatever that Friday
is, Friday at 11 o'clock will be the first episode of Season 4 of Binary Revolution Radio. And you will
hear about the future of the show, whatever that may be. But until then, we will see you next
season. Same hack time. Same hack channel.
Bye-bye.
Hate Day.
Bye-bye.
Thank you.