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 bones? When I tell you we just hacked out Jones.
And NASDAQ leaves your fight 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 crack.
Hello everybody and welcome once again to Binary Revolution Radio.
Episode number 187 on an undercover cop.
Coming to you on February 20th, 2007.
I am Stank Dog and I am joined this week with a new first time co-host.
But long time friend, sort of kind of friend of mine.
I'm just kidding.
Actually, I'm very happy to have a friend I've known since I lived down in South Florida quite a few,
quite a while ago to drop a little bit of docs that everybody already knows.
From the FL 2600 meeting, Mia Flux joins us on the show.
What's up my fellow hackers?
Long time no talk, eh?
I know.
I was in seclusion for a while.
I followed you into the brief reprieve.
Yeah, well, real life happens sometimes.
But anyway, we are on the show this week to talk about some interesting stuff.
But before we get into that, I have a little bit of housekeeping to take care of.
Actually, we should point out, you're not only from the, we met, I should say,
at the Fort Lauderdale 2600 meeting many, many years ago.
But you're, you not only attended, and I guess you still attend that on occasion,
but also the BR 561 meeting as well, right?
Yes, I do.
So big shouts to them, or is it the GINREV meeting?
It would be a bit of both.
We started the grand tradition of finishing up the GINREV meetings at an Irish pub down the street
and drink lots of Guinness and talk about hacking.
So it works out pretty well.
So you have the regular meeting for a few hours, but then it turns into the GINREV meeting,
which I think is a hilarious thing.
And I know that's Logosex and Tabiz, shouts to them.
They're big, big proponents of Guinness.
I guess it's a nice politically correct way to say it, to say drunk.
Yeah, we'll be hacking around with a bunch of laptops in a crowded bar,
drinking Guinness, talking about Snow Crash.
Well, you know what?
And actually, that was a pretty cool bar because I was down there in December.
You guys bumped the December meeting back for me, which was cool.
And that actually was a cool bar.
It's a nice, it's really a cool place to hang out.
And they don't mind us all hanging out there.
Of course, we're all drinking and making the money.
But, you know, we even did some geocaching.
We did so much Guinness most of the time.
They gave us, like, last GINREV meeting this last Friday,
they gave us, like, a bunch of Guinness glasses.
And before that, he's given us, like, tons of shirts and everything.
Really?
Wow, cool.
Yeah.
I think maybe we draw the crowd.
People like seeing a bunch of hackers drinking.
Well, we are an interesting bunch visually, aren't we?
Oh, of course.
You've got to love a bunch of people with beards, you know.
Looking like Richard Stallman.
Unfortunately, the beer isn't free as in free, so.
Well, you know, what are you going to do?
Well, in the housekeeping, though, I've got a couple of things I wanted to talk about.
First of all, I finally got around to updating DocDroppers.
DocDroppers.org, of course, is powered by MediaWiki.
And we were several, several versions behind only because we hadn't gotten around to updating it.
It still worked and everything, so it's not like it was causing any real problems.
It was just old.
It didn't have some of the functionality we wanted and specifically some anti-spamming stuff.
We were getting a lot of articles thrown out there by bots that were throwing out their links and Invisalinks and whatnot.
So I was having to go out there manually and clear those up.
So it's good to upgrade it.
And hopefully that will cut down on that quite a bit, as well as give us some new functionality and new ways to organize and link things together.
So be looking for some updates, hopefully, to that in the future.
And if anybody wants to go add articles, of course, DocDroppers is our hacking library, so to speak.
We want to get a bunch of documents out there, make that a central location that's searchable, that's keyword sortable, that people can go out there and find hacking information, whether it's old, old text files to new articles that are written.
And I wish people would get in the habit of just when they release an article, go also release it and put it on DocDroppers at the same time or shortly thereafter, whatever they want to do.
And that way it will be one location that you can always go to.
And we'll gladly let people deep link directly to their articles and stuff like that so they can put it from their blog or their site or whatever.
But people that come to the site directly and want to search for articles can find things as well.
So that is the idea behind the whole thing.
So hopefully some people will contribute to that.
Now, we did lose the skin in the process.
We were several versions behind.
And the upgrade itself was a real pain in the butt.
But when you're several versions behind, they don't tend to give you upgrade scripts.
They give you an upgrade script to the next one version, maybe two.
They don't usually give you upgrade scripts to like five, six versions behind or 17 or whatever we were.
So it took a little bit longer than most upgrades would take.
But it seems to be working.
We just lost our skin.
They changed the way skinning is done, which is fairly common in different content management systems and software packages.
So we'll probably be changing the skin right now.
It's back on default, even with the thing that says click here to change your logo or something like that.
But hopefully we'll get that taken care of.
And the other thing to mention in housekeeping is that thanks to Enigma, our good friend Enigma has been doing show notes for us for quite a while.
He finally has filled in all the blanks, fell way behind there in like season three.
And throughout season four, he's been catching us up quite a bit.
So we are down now to where we're like within the past five or six episodes, the most recent one.
So like all of the old ones from 180 on back.
Probably, I think we're up to 182 or 183 on the show notes.
And this is episode 187.
So we're pretty close, caught up on everything.
So shouts to Enigma.
And finally, you know, the Google Bottle, grab those and they'll be searchable.
And people will be able to find the past episodes by topic.
So that's a very cool thing.
So, Mia Flux, if you will bear with us and help me out here.
We're going to transition and do some listener e-mail, if that's okay.
So let's do that now.
All righty.
And our first e-mail this week, let's see.
This e-mail comes from DarkSource, who actually sent a very long e-mail.
I just cut out this one part that I wanted to talk about.
So let's see.
That starts with, Stank, I heard you say that you disagree with a company's, quote,
casting a net, unquote, to monitor corporate users on the network.
You said that you think they should just target a specific user if they feel they are abusing the system.
I agree with you, and it would definitely make my job a lot easier.
However, I do not believe that approach is actually legal.
As I understand it, a company cannot target a specific user, even if there is just cause.
Every employee must be monitored and audited equally.
If data is gathered equally on all users and an anomaly arises,
the company then has the right to investigate a specific user in greater detail.
Thank you, DarkSource.
So, yeah, this is kind of an interesting one.
It's kind of an interesting conundrum.
And, Mia Flux, you probably know a little bit about this as well.
But, like, what I had said on the show was that from a couple different standpoints.
First of all, yeah, I don't like the fact that because one person in the office or in the company is doing something,
then they are going to, you know, be logging my chat sessions with my mother
or me checking my personal email on my lunch break or something like that.
I don't like the idea of that.
So, yeah, that's one standpoint of it.
But not only that, I also pointed out the fact, and he mentioned it as well, he, DarkSource,
I guess DarkSource could be a she, I don't know, but I'm going to pretty much assume it's a he.
He says that it would make his job easier because if you're – it takes a lot of time to go through and parse through all of that data.
If you're logging everything that's coming from the company, it's going to take a long time for you to go through and parse out everything that you want.
So, from a job standpoint, from a time investment standpoint, you're going to have to invest the salary and the people to do that.
You're going to have to buy software to do that.
So, even from a company standpoint, that seems like a lot of overkill when you know that it's just one particular person.
Of course, this is assuming if you know that it's one particular person, but generally, I think people have an idea who's doing what for the most part.
I mean, yeah, that may be –
Oh, yeah, I mean –
It's a little naive, but –
It depends.
I mean, there's a lot of different companies that have layered monitoring and or blocking.
I mean, I know in my company, they do a lot of content filtering.
Like in IT, for the most part, it's open access.
You can pretty much get whatever you want.
But for a lot of the other users, it'll be locked down.
And I guess some of the advanced systems will let you flag a bunch of different things like high bandwidth or, you know, like blocking MySpace and all the rest of the stuff off of saying, you know, it's like a social networking type site.
Or YouTube.
So, most of the stuff – what's that?
YouTube.
They block YouTube a lot.
Anything that's going to eat bandwidth, they'll block out.
Yep.
I think YouTube might be the main reason why we're going to be switching from 2T1s to a SonicNet connection.
Yeah.
Get that 70 meg downstream so you can look at all the YouTube videos.
Nice.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, I'm pushing for that, you know.
Yeah, I'm sure that's how you're selling it or two.
Hey, guys, we need to upgrade because –
Yeah, I'm fine.
Yeah.
Yeah, we need to upgrade because I can't look at enough of these underage chicks stripping on YouTube.
Because we all know that's –
Yeah, I don't know if that'll pass.
Yeah, that's – we all know that's the only thing that's on YouTube these days.
Well, I just tell them it's like the Google Tech Talks or like the Yahoo Hackaday Talks and stuff like that.
They don't block Hackaday?
Oh, no, no, no, no.
Well, like I said, IT gets free reign.
It's like the bastard operator from hell.
We've got the supreme power in the jurisdiction, so –
Gotcha, gotcha.
Well, but anyway –
You've got to respect the IT.
But I find – actually, he brings up an interesting point, though, with the email.
I mean, yeah, it's easy to say, you know, ideally you're just going to concentrate on one person, but legally that may not be the case.
So that is kind of interesting, and it's a tough situation for both sides.
Well, you can run into a lot of legal stuff, too.
Like there was something on Slash recently about how an IBM worker who happened to also be about seven months shy of retirement was browsing porn at work.
And he got warned by IBM, apparently, well, this guy is denying that he got warned initially, and then he got warned again and let go.
And, you know, it's funny because he was actually mentioning that there was a couple that got caught having sex on a desk in the office,
and they got relocated to another office, and because this guy is browsing porn, you know.
But it depends also.
I mean, you've got to look at the ramifications and why a lot of companies will justify widespread monitoring,
because if somebody walks by your desk and you're looking at porn, that secretary can file, you know, a lawsuit and easily get money for sexual harassment or working in a, you know.
Right, but, I mean, if you know the person who did it, you fire the old dude for looking at porn.
First of all, you're too old to be looking at porn at the workplace anyway, dude.
If you're that close to retirement, wait until you get home, and then you can Viagra it up all day long.
That's fine.
Well, he claimed to be a sex addict.
It was funny.
It almost read like exactly like a factored operator from hell article that I read recently.
You know, he's like, oh, you know, I'm a porn addict, so I can't help but look at porn at work.
Everybody's a porn addict.
Who doesn't like porn?
But unfortunately that justification doesn't seem to work with most, you know, pointy-haired bosses.
Gee, you think.
I wonder why.
Yeah, anyway, you know, there's no debating why they do it.
We certainly understand that.
It's just one of those things where it's – unfortunately, if what he's saying is true, and I would love if anybody knows for sure, anybody who has the legal knowledge that could email us and let us know, I really would like to know.
Is there – is it – because I don't – I absolutely believe that to be the case.
It may very well be true that you can't single out a person for some strange reason.
You know, you have to monitor everyone equally or something.
But if you have probable cause that somebody's looking at porn, like a secretary walks behind and sees it or something like that, I don't see why you shouldn't have the right to focus on that person and monitor what they are doing because they've been reported it.
I mean, granted, you may have some people that are just being jerks and claiming – like I'm going to say I'm getting a fight with Neoflux.
I'm like, yeah, by the way, he surfs for kiddie porn all day long.
You should go monitor him.
Sure, you could set up some false accusations, but it's better than everybody being falsely accused, which is what happens when you monitor everyone like that.
Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things where I realize the reality of it and whatnot.
It's just – I wish there was an easy answer, but I guess there really isn't.
Yeah, sorry.
Like, I mean, you know, for the most part, they just block everything.
So it's not even like necessarily monitoring where I work, and that's what I'm saying is probably the best approach.
Yeah.
It's content filtering in a lot of the cases, so you just stop it at the source.
I mean, do you really need most of your employees to be browsing porn at work?
And then if somebody goes beyond that point, then, yeah, like you said, like, I don't think you should actively monitor anyone unless they're a problem.
But content management sort of takes most of that stuff out of the loop, you know?
What are you going to do?
Go to your, you know, sysadmin and be like, hey, can you remove the block on porn on my computer?
Yeah.
What people have done where I work?
Yeah.
Excuse me.
I seem to be unable to get to my lollipro on now.
Can you help me out?
The younganalmales.com site isn't loading like it does at my house.
See, that's a joke, but I bet you that exists.
That probably, that site exists.
Anyway, well, I'm not going to check it out.
I'll just ping the site and see if I get a response.
Yeah, sure you will.
I'm not.
The thing is, though, that also, just to put it out there, I'm not naive.
I know the reality.
And the bottom line is, and I think you'll agree with me on this, is whether you like it or not, you're paid to work.
You get paid to do a job.
You don't deserve to have access.
They don't owe you access.
If they ban you, like the content filtering you're talking about, or like, for example, NetNanny, CyberGuard, all these things, you know, we have people in school that get frustrated because they can't visit BinRev because it's blocked for its hacking content, or you can't get to all these different sites because they're filtered out.
It is their network, whether it's school, whether it's work.
That's their equipment.
They are legally responsible for anything that goes through it.
And from a productivity standpoint, they don't want you surfing the global interweb all day.
So I understand that, and I don't argue with it.
I don't disagree with it at all.
That's really not the issue.
I completely understand it.
You know, it would be nice to hit slash dot in the mornings at work or something like that.
That doesn't seem like a big deal to me.
But I understand that, and I accept the reality of it.
It's just kind of like I wish they didn't monitor us.
The point I'm talking about is the fact that I don't like that I'm being monitored when I haven't done anything to justify it.
You know, I haven't done anything wrong to worry about it.
And if I do, you know, I get an email from my mother, you know, for an emergency or something like that, I don't think they have the right to see that.
But hopefully that won't happen, and I don't know.
But I would love if anybody out there has the legal expertise or knowledge, I would love to hear about it.
All right, so email from Crux, C-R-U-X.
Crux says, Crux?
No, it's got to be Crux.
Crux, hi, everybody there at BinRevRadio.
I've been following your podcast since around 140.
Of course, we're on 187.
That was my gunfire sound effect right there.
I need to find some gunshot sound effects and mix into the show afterwards or something.
Yeah, that's a little bit too much like work.
That's straight up Beretta right there.
Whatever.
Beretta.
Boy, you're dating yourself there.
Since we're on episode 140, you find your show is very entertaining and informative.
Well, sometimes at least.
I'm writing from Mendoza, Argentina.
That is a center-western province capital here.
And I am a few kilometers or miles for the non-metrics away from the Andes mountain range.
The Andes mountain range.
This is going to become relevant in the next lines.
I was catching up by listening to episode 176 on Wilderness Survival the other day
and started laughing out loud after Black Ratchet commented on the airplane accident
of the, quote, Brazilian soccer team, end quote, on the Andes.
Well, they not only weren't Brazilians, they were Uruguayans,
but they also didn't play soccer, football as we call it here.
They played rugby.
You can find more information for the housekeeping,
although it'll be a little late, I think, here.
And he gives a URL that I'm not going to read on the air,
but you can go to IMDB and look up.
There was actually a movie made on this whole situation too.
Anyway, my congrats to the whole crew there.
Saludos from Argentina and keep up the good work.
So, thank you, Crux.
Saludos, bienvenido, I've been Rev Radio.
Of course, you've been around since 140.
You've been around for a while, so.
Yeah, I don't know what I can tell you about these guys.
I don't know if you've noticed it, but Black Ratchet's a little slow.
Savant's not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, if you know what I'm saying.
I mean, these guys, you know, obviously their movie trivia is lacking.
I'll just leave it at that.
They've made quite a few movie mistakes between, they got Ferris Bueller and Wayne's World mixed up.
I mean, come on, classic movies here, guys.
And now this.
They did get the half court and the Disney myth, like, totally, that was on, or who did that?
The Disney myth, like an episode or two ago?
I don't remember, which I guess it was me, but I don't remember exactly what the Disney thing was.
Oh, there was a half court at the top of the Disney.
Oh, yeah.
The thing at the top of the mountain or whatever, he was spot on.
I checked that out right after listening to it.
Yeah, yeah.
Actually, I had never heard of that.
That was pretty cool.
But, yeah, anyway, and now the movie is called Alive, A-L-I-V-E.
It was the name of the movie.
And it's based on this.
It's a true story that the Crux here was referring to.
It is a true story, and it's based on that.
And, yeah, it was not.
Well, first of all, Brazilian soccer team, football, whatever you want to call it.
You know, I guess that's so cliche, Brazilians and soccer.
But then again, not to, you know, let's give equal time here.
Argentina's got a pretty damn elite soccer team as well, so respect.
But I don't know.
I guess I don't think I can think of as maybe we fly over.
Well, I see.
We have to fly to each one of them, lock them down in the chair, give them the clockwork orange treatment,
and pry open their eyes, lock them down in the chair, and get them a subscription to Netflix or something,
and make them watch and catch up on all these movies so they start getting these things right.
I don't know.
What do you think?
I think that works.
But you have to make sure you don't do the clockwork orange thing where you, like, you know,
accidentally turn them off of, like, seeing hacks or something like that.
We'll just, you know, we'll lock them down and we'll make them watch Hackers the movie over and over and over and over and over.
They'll just, like, vomit every single time they see, like, a hack stump.
They'll never, ever want to hack ever again.
Or ever, ever watch an Angelina Jolie movie ever again.
Yeah, as a little segue there, I think Alive turned me off eating pizza for, like, three years.
I happen to be eating pizza in the scene where they're, like, eating the flesh.
One of the people.
Am I correctly remembering this movie?
Yes, you are.
I think I was, like, six when I saw it, but I was eating pizza at the time, and, like, I was like,
for some reason, I just got human flesh whenever I saw pizza.
Yummy.
Nice association.
Yeah, it didn't work out well.
Well, now I can eat, you know, Pizza Hut again, so I don't know what that means, but.
It means it's not real pizza?
But I digress.
We'll back off of that.
Yeah.
Who knows what kind of ingredients they put in.
Not, not, please, Pizza Hut, don't sue me.
I'm just joking.
That's just a little humor.
And we've, well, never mind.
I'll back off that topic.
We've been contacted by, never mind.
I'll just completely back away from that.
Hey, you know, on a kind of a somewhat related note to, I said that as a joke, getting them to Netflix,
but I was arguing with someone, well, maybe not arguing.
We were talking about Netflix versus the new Blockbuster has a new program where they're trying to compete with Netflix
where you can, I think it was Ice Toad, actually, from our BR407 meeting was saying that he has the Blockbuster equivalent.
Have you ever used either one of these before?
No, but I think I might actually go with the whole iTunes thing on the Apple TV.
Oh, what is that?
Right now, yeah, I know, that's sort of lame.
I know how you hate Apple, but I actually, right now, I've got like a 32-inch LCD TV, like, in complete geek-like fashion.
And I pretty much bit-torn all of my media.
And I'm not going to say it's copyrighted.
It's all open.
It may not be.
It's Hack TV.
It's all open source, yeah.
Free Creative Commons material, such as Hack TV.
Yes, go on.
Yeah, exactly.
So I don't actually have a cable subscription aside from my cable broadband,
but I have a HDTV hooked up to my computer so I can watch DivX.
Well, and now you've given a segue to another topic here.
I don't know if you want to do this one, but speaking of cable TV, cable internet,
do we not want to go there?
I think that's better as like a future episode.
Okay, well, we'll wait until that.
Yeah, okay.
So now that we've cock-teased everybody, let's back away from that.
But, yes, we were talking about at our meeting,
Ice-Toe was explaining that with the Blockbuster, what he liked about it that was different,
because I was giving him a hard time about supporting the giant corporation of Blockbuster or whatever,
but he was saying what he likes about it is he takes them back to the Blockbuster store.
You don't have to wait to mail them in and get the next ones on your list,
which, you know, the way Netflix works is as soon as you send them back,
they'll go ahead and send you the next ones anyway.
I don't think you have much of a delay between them,
but I guess he doesn't want any delay between them.
And he was saying that they're going to send you whatever you have next on your queue.
So if you've got other stuff, old stuff queued up,
you might not get the new releases right away unless you go in there every time
and manipulate your queue to push the new releases to the top or something like that.
And I think he was also complaining about all of them, Netflix and Blockbuster.
He was saying that they, if you want to watch like a box set of a TV show,
you know, if you want to watch all the Lost or whatever,
they send them to you one disc at a time, which is frustrating.
You can't get like the whole box or whatever.
You have to get them disc by disc, which is kind of a pain.
So he was saying he likes the Blockbuster one, though,
because he can take them back in the store and exchange them for new movies as well.
And I don't know, I'd love to hear anybody has anything to say about either one of them.
The problem with that is you're going back to the store.
You might as well be renting from the store anyway, I guess, other than the price is better.
But you can't then mail those back in.
You have to take them back to your store.
Now you're committed to going to that store physically all the time.
And I thought that was the whole point of joining one of these.
Oh, yeah.
Was that you don't have to go to these freaking stores all the time
and worry about late fees and overdue and all this kind of stuff.
But I guess the price now is just...
Do they abolish late fees completely, though?
I have no idea.
I don't go to them.
I don't...
Yeah, I think the new twist is that you never get charged like an overdue or late fee now.
But if you keep the movie past a certain amount of time,
they credit themselves with the amount of what the movie costs.
What it costs them, not what it probably retail costs.
You can buy it for $20.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
They probably give you retail costs.
Yeah.
Well, hmm.
Interesting to know.
But, hey, we got a little something these days.
It's 2007.
We got a little something called pay-per-view.
So...
Or just watching it on cable.
Or BitTorrent.
Of the free material, of course.
Anybody that would BitTorrent anything else might risk themselves getting in trouble.
Yes, yes?
Oh, yeah.
It's all about the Creative Commons, you know, Elephant's Dream movie.
I watched that thing like a thousand times.
There you go.
All right, last email here.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
No, I said I didn't actually watch it once.
I'm actually lying on that one.
Oh, okay.
Well, yeah.
Last email this week comes from Dane.
Dane says, just wanted to ask a question.
What percentage of your audience do you think would stop listening to you if you stopped using profanity?
Though I listen, I don't listen in mixed company.
Some of the reason is I know that some of the people around me don't want to hear it,
and I respect them enough not to play with them around.
But mostly it's because I get looked at like I'm an idiot for listening to
and taking advice from what sounds like a couple of kids who cuss like 14-year-olds.
I'm just saying you might do better if you at least sound like you're as old as you really are.
I bet your audience would grow if you did.
All right.
Well, thank you, Dane.
Don't mean to be a complete dick here, but truth is – I guess I'm going to just say this bluntly
because I do think this is sincere, and it is certainly something that I'm aware of.
But the bottom line is I don't – not to be crass, but I don't care about the size of the audience.
I don't care about the ratings.
I'm not doing this for the ratings.
If I was, I would be out there promoting it, pimping it on every podcast,
trying to go out there and post and spam every other board and try to drum up audience.
I don't do any of that stuff.
All of the audience that we have is just because I started doing the show,
and people liked it.
It spread through some word of mouth here and there.
It's a very targeted audience.
It's for hackers, by hackers, and that's what I'm doing.
I'm doing a show that I enjoy doing, and I'm going to do it as myself the way I want to do it
because I do find it missing.
It's kind of like the whole – and I hate to compare it.
I'm not comparing myself to this person, but I support and agree with their beliefs.
It's like Howard Stern leaving terrestrial radio to do satellite radio.
It's because I don't want to be stifled.
I don't want somebody to tell me that I can't cuss if I feel like cussing,
to tell me what I can and can't say.
I'm not going to be censored by not only the FCC, but I'm not trying to market or sell to an audience.
I'm not trying to be politically correct, and I'm not going to rein myself in.
I'm going to be me, and I'm going to talk about what I want to talk about,
and I'm going to say it the way that I want to say it without being censored by someone outside,
a third party, by listeners, or censoring myself.
I'm censored by politeness.
I mean, you know, the thing that I don't get is like when he's saying specifically,
I get looked at like I'm an idiot for listening and taking advice from what sounds like a couple of kids
who cuss like they're 14.
Like me, I mean, I would have to say one of my biggest lessons in life has been, you know,
sage advice comes from unexpected sources.
One of the most intelligent, like, hackers that I've ever met looks like a grizzled 50-year-old biker guy,
and he talks with a country accent.
Most people would never even, you know, think to associate him with any sort of a knowledgeable person.
Or for that matter, you know, ghetto people in Houston that, you know, are like wiring all these, you know,
crazy car electronics and doing like car computers and all this other hacking crap.
And like most people, you know, so, you know, cursing, I don't know if that's even, you know,
enough to detract from it.
I would say if the source is valuable, just acknowledge the source.
You don't have to say because there's something in the content that you disagree with that the, you know,
you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, I guess is what I'm saying.
Right.
And, you know, don't get me wrong.
I certainly am the first to admit that I do use probably way too much profanity.
You know, I admit that.
But that is me, unfortunately.
I should be ashamed to admit that truthfully.
But I do cuss probably too much.
And in a personal note, I probably should cuss less.
But as soon as I turn this mic on and we start doing this show, I'm going to speak freely.
And if I get angry about something and I drop the F-bomb or something like that, it's just going to happen.
I don't try to do it.
I'm not trying to sound cool or cuss like a – first of all, I don't cuss like a 14-year-old.
I cuss like a fucking man.
So get that straight first up front.
I cuss like a grown-ass man.
So if other people walking by your cube or even just a listener right now, I'll apologize to you and tell you that I'm sorry,
but there are going to be probably some languages that slip out, some bad language that slips out once in a while.
And I apologize for that, but I am not going to change it, unfortunately.
I hope that doesn't mean that we lose listeners because of that soul fact.
I do think there's a lot of good information from our co-hosts on the show and that we actually talk about some intelligent topics.
I hope anyway.
We try.
I hope that the language doesn't detract from that.
But I'm just not going to intentionally pull it back in.
Except let me just also point out one thing, and I'll use last week's episode as an example.
Last week I had on Scott Baranato from CSO Magazine to co-host with me, and I know that that's kind of a different style of co-host.
Another example is Elonka, one of my good friends I've known for a long time, one of the nicest people in the world.
I'll admit I kind of do rein myself in a little bit out of respect for those people, out of respect for those co-hosts.
I know that that's not their cup of tea.
I know that they're not into that sort of language.
So I will purposely try to keep it a little bit more professional, I guess, depending on the circumstances, depending on the co-host, depending on the topic.
So some episodes, yeah, I'll go through the whole episode without cussing or without saying anything too politically incorrect.
But on other episodes, I'm going to let it go buck wild and say whatever it is I want to say, and that's just the nature of doing a show.
If I did not do that, the show would be fake, the content would be fake, and people would listen to it, or people would notice it, and people would stop listening to it because I'm not being real.
And the whole thing about doing the show and why I've always preached about how we can only do it on the Internet is because of that very reason.
A, the content, and B, the language and the way that we say it and the manner in which we say it, the politically incorrectness that we're not afraid to call out people for doing stupid things.
I've said all along we're never going to be on public radio.
We're never going to be on the airwaves.
They can't handle it, and that's the reason why.
So I've accepted that from day one of doing the show, and Dane, I appreciate you listening, and I hope I didn't lose you.
I'm not trying to be – again, I'm not trying to be a – and I'll rein myself in for you.
I'm not trying to be a jerk here, but I just – I've got to be myself.
I've got to keep it real, and I'm going to continue to keep it real.
And if that kills the show, at least I go out with my dick in my hand.
I have no idea.
For that matter, I mean, you know, like what I would say, too, is, you know, you look at how much do you want to filter yourself for politeness.
I mean, like, for instance, hey, there might have been some people that might have stopped listening at the very second that they heard 187 on an undercover cop.
True.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, I'm going to have fun, too.
It's like, you know, how far do you go?
Of course, we hear 187.
That's the first thing that pops into our heads growing up with gangsta rap, you know.
I don't know what a critique of society that is, but I mean, you know, like – but that's what pops into our heads.
And if you edit that out, you know, it's like any other radio show that you're going to listen to on anything where it's just going to be meaningless drivel by the time it's drained through, like, 14 different filters.
Well, and yeah, and to go back to the Howard Stern thing, a lot of people hate him because of his content and because of his language.
On satellite, I mean, I don't know if you've heard him, but he's pretty – they get away with a lot more and say a lot of things that they weren't able to get away with.
So, yeah, if you alienate some listeners like that, that's unfortunate.
We don't want that.
Our goal is not to alienate anybody.
But if that happens, you know, I like to think that we're shooting towards our target audience.
Not that we really have one, but we're – hopefully we'll attract more people with the realness than we're losing with the insincerity that a lot of other shows have.
So, all right.
Well, I guess we'll leave it at that.
So we leave ourselves some time.
We're about half an hour in here.
So let's move on to our main topic of this episode.
And the reason that I had Mia Flux on the show this week is because he had an idea for a show topic that I really don't know a whole lot about.
So I hope you can not only explain and bring our listeners in on a lot of this stuff but myself as well.
And I guess the global word to describe it would be accessibility.
But basically other ways to interact with a computer if you had some sort of disability or some sort of limitation that you couldn't interact with a computer the way most of us kind of have accepted, I guess, you know, typing and having all of our functionality about us.
You know, there are people out there that are not able to do that.
So it used to be that that was a huge hindrance but disabilities aren't like this big obstacle to using computers like they used to be.
I mean there have been accessibility programs and applications for a while but they've never really been as good as they could be.
But there's a lot of hackers, open source programmers out there that are doing a lot of interesting things and a lot of cool applications and research to make computers more accessible than they've ever been.
And I mean I don't want to kind of start – it's probably a bad way to start off with a specific example but you know what pops into my head is Stephen Hawking.
You know, Stephen Hawking who has Lou Gehrig's disease and I've been watching a lot of – they're doing a lot of cool stuff on the Science Channel lately with Stephen Hawking and black holes on physics.
But anyway, here's a guy who really has no control, who has no way to communicate with people and he's got this whole detailed system to communicate.
So –
Oh yeah, well he does entire presentations, you know, that are sometimes hours long and he basically has to go through and, you know, arrange it word by word and sometimes letter by letter.
We're, you know, days in advance, you know, maybe even weeks in advance to go through and get that much text done.
So –
In addition –
It's amazing that somebody a hundred years ago would not even have that capability.
We would have completely lost somebody like Stephen Hawking.
Right.
Well, and, you know, and that's in addition to his research and ongoing writing and research and development that he's doing, not only teaching the classes and stuff like that but all that.
But as far as computers go, you know, specifically, obviously a hundred years ago was a whole different technological era but as far as when computers first came up, it was never really thought of.
You know, you had to have vision, you had to have sight, you had to have hearing, you had to have hands, you had to have – to be able to type in the keyboard but there are a lot of things that can help people interact better and more with their computers.
Now, first of all, how did you even get interested in this topic in the first place?
Well, first off, I mean, I did see a Slashout article I think a few years ago that specifically dealt with some of these topics.
And I guess it stuck in the back of my head.
And recently I've had to do research on OCR software.
And I wanted to go open source for it for the most part.
I mean, I love open source software.
And I started really looking at a bunch of different OCR engines.
And one of the things that I ran across was a specific website where they used OCR engines as a direct feed-in for processing video mounted to eyeglasses to help blind people navigate around.
So explain that a little bit.
I'm not sure that that – I'm understanding how that works.
What is the objective here?
The objective is that essentially without a guide dog or – I'm sure it's not actually at that stage yet.
Most of it's actually, you know, proof of concept right now for a lot of the more advanced technologies.
But there's a lot of stuff that they're playing around with that in the next few years and even right now we're definitely seeing returns on.
And people are using to enhance their day-to-day lives with disabilities.
So, like, OCR, the way we usually think about it is just, like, scanning in letters and images and things like that and having it scan through to recognize letters and numbers and things like that.
We're talking about video here?
Yeah, yeah, and that's one of the challenges with it is that they're taking traditional OCR engines.
But if you have – you know, if the video is not that choppy or if you can even grab it frame by frame, of course, which you can do with the computer when you have direct, you know, CCD, you know, input,
you can go through and analyze each image in a video like you would with normal OCR software.
So that way a blind person could see that there's a stop sign and it could be estimated that it's eight feet away.
Oh, wow.
Whereas before they'd have to rely on, you know, like a stop dog or something like that.
Right, that's amazing.
Is that – is there any relationship between that and – I know this probably sounds funny, but, like, on BattleBots or any kind of robotics,
don't they have to have some sort of similar engine to prevent these robots or whatever from hitting walls or knowing what boundaries and things like that?
Is there any relationship?
Are they – is that where some of the research is coming from or no?
Machine vision is still very stunted in that it's hard to get the machines to recognize objects.
Most of the time they just use, you know, like IR or something like that, like the cheap Lego kits that will essentially say, you know,
Right.
Okay, you're four feet from a wall, back up.
Gotcha.
Gotcha, okay.
But with some of this stuff, I mean, there was something else that I saw recently that I hadn't got into very much,
but it was talking about how to extrapolate dimensions from just straight images,
which would also be very useful in this type of technology.
You could say, yeah, there's a stop sign, not just that, but, hey, there's a stop sign and it's 4.37 feet away from you, you know,
or whatever the metric conversion with that would be.
Right.
Yeah, that's really, really cool.
Yeah, I mean, it's not just stop sign, but they also have a bunch of patterns that it's trained to recognize, too.
So you could see stripes on the ground like a walkway, and it could tell you when you go out of range by how far you turn your head left or right.
And there's a lot of applications for that.
I mean, you could see road signs.
You can see, you know, if you happen to be a blind person walking to New York, I'm sure you'd want to know that you were on Wall Street and whatever the cross street is.
Right, right.
Wow, that's interesting.
Now, is this like, this is still in fairly early stages of research, though?
Yeah, and the thing is, they're using a lot of, they only use, the specific website I'm talking about is Seeing with Sound,
and they have a lot of resources on there for blind people.
They use a number of different open source OCR engines, and they only use open source, which is a really interesting thing that I think about it.
Right.
Is that pretty much anybody who wants to contribute worldwide can go in there and say, you know, hey, that's not good.
If it says T-O-P, we need to say, hey, it's probably going to mean stop or, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
But there's a number of different OCR engines that they use.
And Tesseract, which is the most recent one that I've been hacking around on, is open source through Google.
And that, that's really cool in that it had a, something like a 93%, like, correct to read.
So, I mean, you look at stuff like that, and yeah, I mean, applicable, it depends on your day-to-day how much text you're dealing with.
But even if you're looking at, like, text-to-speech and you're talking about graphics in a web page or anything like that on a computer,
it's not just, you know, for use on a street, too.
So, I mean, Google's interested.
I know you don't like Google that much, I think, right?
I don't know what your recent standard on them are.
I think it's more like they don't like me very much.
But I've definitely appreciated a lot of their works now, which is to take, you know, OCR'd your,
or basically a bunch of images and OCR them, especially with their book project and everything else.
And, I mean, once it's in plain text, you can use a text-to-speech synthesizer and, hey, a blind person can read, you know, any book they want to.
Right, but that's not necessarily new.
I mean, that's OCR and text-to-speech has been around for a while.
We even had an email on the show a few episodes back about Dragon Naturally Speaking and someone who was saying how,
what kind of great luck they've had or what kind of, how good it's been for them to use that and how handy it is
and how much better that technology has gotten.
But it's been around for a while, but it's, it's, I've never heard of this.
Well, Dragon Naturally Speaking, you're talking about speech-to-text, though, right?
Not text-to-speech?
Well, is it?
I thought it worked both ways, but I don't know.
I'm just saying, you know, it makes the text available.
But the important thing that I'm saying is that, you know, it's an open-source OCR engine.
So, essentially, instead of having to go out and pay $100 or $1,000,
you may not make that much money if you're blind and you don't have, you know,
a standard, you know, income aside from disability.
Right, right.
You know, so you're probably low on the dollar, and open-source software is definitely a boon there.
And certainly, we agree with and support that, no doubt.
I, this is, I mean, this, that's really, I gotta say, I'm still kind of, I don't know, amazed,
because that's like some James Bond-type shit there with, like, a video, OCR through video,
where it can see and identify things, and that's, that's really some, that's some James Bond stuff.
Oh, yeah, well, I mean, it's, it's crazy.
It doesn't just stop at, like, you know, like, text, though.
They can go through and they use pattern recognition to a certain extent,
so, like, you could, in the future, necessarily, like, see a car or something like that.
I know that right now they have a bunch of things, like, you can change the speed,
so if you need a more reliable read, you can, it has, you know, speech-to-text utilities
built into the system that I was talking about earlier, and you could tell it, you know, slow down.
And it'll recognize that and slow down, you know, the frames per second that it's grabbing
and just analyze the images more in depth.
Or, you know, you can go through and say, like, motion, and it'll essentially grab everything,
but it'll be choppy, so it's not as accurate.
And I think you can even go through and check it to see if there's certain colors in the image.
So it'll tell you, essentially, what's the main color of whatever you're pointing your head at.
Wow, and that, of course, is one of those things that's only going to get better with time
as they continue researching it.
I can foresee some point where, using this technology,
a blind person could walk through an office building, down hallways,
you can, it will detect where there's a turn and where the hall ends and turns left or right
and things like that, or even, I don't know, even being in a maze kind of thing
where it'll be able to detect and tell distances
and tell that there are walls to the left and right, et cetera, et cetera.
I could see it going in that direction easily.
Well, in light of the question that you were asking earlier, too,
I sort of got away from it, but machine vision is a very complex problem,
and that's something that's probably going to be integrated into this technology
over the next few years.
But, you know, it has to do a lot with a lot of complex etch detection
because you don't just want to know that, you know, four lines are essentially a square.
You want to know that it's a car, or you want to know that that rough shape is a person,
and computers have a rough time.
I mean, you get into it, and a lot of what I found with, you know, looking at machine vision
is you're going to have to get into, like, huge transforms and, you know,
some advanced calculus and differential equations just to get into the math behind it
and, you know, tweak some of this stuff.
So it's not like it's, you know, very easy to just launch all of that stuff into a mainstream product.
A lot of it's going to take ongoing research, but it's getting much better.
Well, and isn't one of the reasons for that, and I'm being presumptuous here,
but I think this is probably the case,
because that is very complex mathematics to do that sort of differential equations
and to do the calculus on the fly, especially if it's something like video
where it has to be constant on-the-fly calculations.
We didn't have the computing power to do that until, you know, fairly recently.
So now that we have that power, we can start down these new avenues of research.
So as technology advances, it's opening these doors.
Absolutely.
And, I mean, you know, it's not just about specific, like, software.
Where, I mean, like, what we're talking about with the blind people is helping them get out.
And, actually, if you read, some of the blind people who have used it
have gone out and walked around with it.
And a lot of them have said right now it's sort of like a gimp guide dog.
So that's been the general description, you know.
Like, it's cool and everything, and it's useful, but it could definitely be better.
And that's what a lot of people are working towards.
But, you know, on that note, there's a lot of different ways, too.
Like, if you talk about deaf people, a lot of people think, you know,
hey, they're deaf, whatever, they can type.
But if you look at a lot of the recent technology, you know,
a lot of deaf people sign at 120 to 180 words per minute average.
You know, most typists are probably at about 50 to 60 words per minute.
So you're inherently drastically reducing the speed at which they communicate,
even if they're using text messages on their phone or anything like that.
You know, you probably get even lower texting on a phone.
But, you know, technology has recently come out where they're working on people
being able to sign over the webcams or cameras on their phone.
So they could go through and essentially point the cell phone in their direction
and use sign language to sign to each other at a much faster rate, you know,
probably closer to spoken text.
And that's related to the same video that we were talking about earlier,
that what you're saying is they're actually interpreting the signs
and not sending the video necessarily,
but converting it to text based on recognition of the sign?
No, no, no.
No?
I'm sorry.
I should have completely separated those two.
Yeah, because it sounds like, well, it sounds possible, though,
for what you were talking about earlier.
It sounds like that could be a problem.
You know, that's very precise as compared to what we were talking about earlier,
recognizing a stop sign and recognizing a wall
versus movement of hands and sign language.
But it certainly sounds like that's a possibility, you know,
down the road as the technology advances.
That is a possibility.
But it gets a lot closer to, say, reading emotions on faces
and other machines, you know, learning problems like that,
and that there's a lot of subtle nuance in how people sign,
which is very much like facial expressions and how people talk.
And the computer is probably going to miss some of that, you know,
and just converting it straight.
And, you know, it's probably going to incorrectly read a lot of those 3D images.
When we're talking about text still, most of the time it's not raised text,
or it'll essentially appear 2D to us even if it's sticking out.
Right, right.
So, I mean, it is, it'll probably be there in the future,
but right now those specific technologies for the deaf people are, you know,
a little bit more limited because those problems are a lot more complex mathematically.
Right, so I was jumping ahead of the gun.
I'm a few years ahead, so we're not quite there on that technology yet.
Well, that's cool.
You're a regular, you know, hacker Ray Kurzweil.
Well, we're thinking, yeah, we're thinking ahead.
I'm thinking where this is going to go, you know.
And are we going to have to worry about people planting viruses
and having blind people, like, walking into walls and stuff, though?
I hope not.
That'll be, like, almost like Snow Crash, right?
Yeah.
Upload the new virus and everyone starts walking into walls.
Exactly, exactly.
Well, what other kind of...
Yeah, but, I mean, that's important.
Like, you know, you think deaf people with webcams,
and it probably makes no real impact.
But even on their home computer or on the fly,
they can go through and talk a lot more naturally,
like we talk right now over the phone or over VoIP or anything like that,
and you take it for granted that these same technologies
are really helping out a lot of people, a lot of disabled people.
Right.
Well, and not only that, I mean, we've got...
We've still got a good 20 minutes, 15, 20 minutes.
Let's talk about some...
Unless there are some other specifics you wanted to bring up,
let's focus...
Aren't there...
Isn't there a lot of...
I see.
I don't even know how to phrase this.
Aren't there a lot of different specific distributions
doing a lot of homegrown stuff for the different distributions,
like for accessibility?
Like, I think you had told me about Debian one time.
Yeah, Debian's the one that springs to my mind,
like, first and foremost.
But I think that KDE has an accessibility package as well.
And I think that a lot of other distros followed suit
or probably predated Debian
in that they have accessibility packages.
And a lot of them are pretty far ahead
of what Windows has for accessibility.
Well, and that's what I'm trying to think.
Like, Windows accessibility is what?
Don't they have, like, a magnifying thing
that'll make it easier for people who are sight-impaired
to be able to see, like, increasing the stuff?
And maybe some speech technology may be built in.
You know what?
I never really lose to that.
Vista might go a little bit closer
to maybe helping, you know, blind people
in that it has the whole text-to-speech
and speech-to-text, you know, sort of built-in thing.
Right.
What I understand now.
Right.
But aside from that, I mean,
most of the Windows stuff is just, you know, utter crap.
It's like, you know,
oh, well, we'll display an icon at, like, you know,
120 by 120 with, like, a, you know,
200 by 150 resolution on your screen.
Right, right.
It doesn't really necessarily help, you know,
even power users.
So if you have power users that, you know,
are either born, you know, handicapped or become,
it makes a lot more sense for a lot of the power users
to go with Linux.
And even the base users, you know,
are probably going to find it a lot easier
to orient themselves, you know,
using speech-to-text at VI
than necessarily going through and, you know.
Well, and that's, you know,
an interesting thing that you bring up
because that's one thing that I've always wondered about
is I know all these great new programs
and features exist in some of these,
but is it to the point where,
and I don't mean this to be insensitive or to,
I'm saying this out of ignorance, I admit,
is there any way that a blind person
is going to be able to write C++ code in VI?
I mean, that's not like a natural language
where speech-to-text sort of thing will help.
It's clumsy.
It's symbolic by nature.
Are you saying it's going to be a little bit of,
let's-so-double-delete-the-ant-killer-select-all?
Yeah, it's going to be really...
Dear Ant, let's-so-double-delete-the-killer-select-all.
Yeah, something like that.
Trying to remember the exact phrasing there.
I'm sure somebody will, like, send you 20 emails
on how I got one word wrong on that.
Yep.
But, yeah, I mean, it's not just that deaf and blind people, too.
I mean, like, we were talking about Stephen Hawking earlier,
and there's a package called AccessX,
which is Linux software specifically for motor function disabilities.
So if, say, you have palsy or, you know,
I'm sorry, what is Stephen Hawking?
ALS?
Well, yeah, like, pretty much any neurodegenerative
or, you know, motor function impairing illness,
and it'll essentially autocorrect for you.
So, like, if you start going through
and tapping a bunch of keys at once,
it'll sort of shut off the keyboard, you know, for a moment
and try and cope with it as best it can.
So a lot of that stuff...
I'm sorry, we're talking about any kind of muscular thing,
anything like, what, maybe Parkinson's
or ALS or Lou Gehrig syndrome,
which is what Stephen Hawking has,
or things like this where you're talking about physically
not having the ability to type directly on a keyboard,
you know, like, the way we all take for granted.
Exactly, exactly.
And it helps them out, too.
So, I mean, packages like this,
there's a lot of different ways that people can be disabled,
and it's amazing how many different software packages
are out there to help people cope with that
and become more proficient at the computer.
And, you know, there are some blind, you know, Linux hackers.
They're out there.
They exist, you know.
Well, there's...
And, yeah, it's probably a little hard saying
open bracket, closed bracket, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
But a lot of this stuff can be tweaked,
and that's, you know, that's the same thing.
If you're willing to get to that level
and it doesn't exist,
you could be a blind, you know, programmer
and help to write the software that makes it better.
Right, absolutely.
And isn't there...
There's a famous phone freak, right,
that's blind but has the perfect pitch or hearing.
Gosh, see, this is where Ratchet would know.
Is that Joy Bubbles?
I'm not positive.
You know, I can't recall off the end.
He was a friend of Captain Crunch, correct?
Yeah, I know.
Somebody will email me with that one for sure,
and I probably should know that.
I should be ashamed for not knowing that.
But, yeah, I mean, there's certainly a lot of hackers out there.
That's why it's kind of a sensitive subject.
We've had...
Well, I guess I won't go here too much,
but we've had people in the past claim to have different disabilities
or whatnot when they've been found to be liars afterwards
or prove themselves to be making up or taking advantage of that.
And that's not a cool thing because there are people out there.
There are hackers out there.
There are open source programmers, which...
I'm sorry, hackers and open source programmers, to me,
really go hand in hand a lot.
I think any programmer is a hacker by nature
that are doing great things and trying to advance these technologies.
And I think you've given us several examples.
Yeah, I believe that's his name.
Yeah, that's it.
Okay.
So, cool.
I guess that'll lay...
I don't know his handle right now, so...
Yeah, yeah, we got it.
But I remember seeing the footage of him, and it was amazing.
I mean, but you think, you know, somebody born blind,
you look at technology and how this guy, you know,
is not just sitting around or reading Braille or anything like that.
He's actively going out and hacking with the phone systems.
Right.
You know?
Right.
So, it's really a different world for a lot of these people.
Absolutely.
Yeah, and I mean, that's what I mean to segue into,
like a lot of these technologies are only going to get better.
You know, the application of artificial neural networks
and reverse engineering certain, you know,
certain networks in the brain, like cochlear processing
and, you know, looking at the optic nerve.
As we better understand those networks,
we can reverse engineer and maybe even build them into implants in the future.
And we have limited implants right now.
I remember reading something about a blind man a few years back
where they actually went through and directly attached electrodes to his optic nerve.
Now, he had sight before, and that's an important distinction.
I'll get back to that in a moment.
But when he had the implants put in, he already had the ability to see.
And although it was a very poor resolution, his brain learned through its plasticity
to make sense of those signals.
And he eventually got to the point where he could, you know, everything was blurry
and then he could sort of make out shapes.
And it got to the point, you know, where he could essentially say, you know,
that's the Coke can and that's the table.
And it didn't get much better than that
because the resolution of what we can achieve by attaching, you know,
our electrodes, you know, before nanotech really takes off, you know,
is pretty low resolution.
So, you know, if you have CCTV or CCDs in the future that are extremely high resolution
and we find a way to hook them up directly to the optic nerve,
hell, not only blind people who had vision before,
but people with vision might end up, you know, rolling off and taking these as enhancements.
You know, not just as ways to get by in day-to-day life,
but this technology is definitely, I would say,
a boon to the next generation of body hackers, if you will, or biohackers.
Absolutely.
I mean, I'd get, hey, I'd go $6 million man in a heartbeat.
Yeah, I mean, who wouldn't like having eyes that naturally see infrared
and pretty much record anything whenever you flick it on
or having, you know, supersonic hearing, you know, being able to shut it off
and all the rest of this stuff.
I mean, Ray Kurzweil gets into some of this stuff
and he talks about how in the future we're going to do a lot more hacking with our body
as computing takes off more and more.
And, I mean, you know, a lot of this stuff,
it just has to get to the level where it makes sense for us to do it.
But it's being worked on and that technology is getting there.
So, yeah, $6 million man might not be as far away as we think, I guess.
Well, we're becoming Borg.
We're all becoming cyborgs here, down the road anyway.
No, we're talking, this is generations away.
Let's be serious.
We're joking a little bit here.
But this is quite a ways off that we're talking about.
But, I mean, like I said, a few years ago you had a man that, you know,
had vision, was blind.
They attached electrodes to his optic nerve and he can see.
So, it's not necessarily five generations away.
No, but that's a unique case.
We have people with normal or subnormal vision that could actually walk around who have had vision before.
And the same thing with people who have gone deaf.
As long as the pathways in the brain are there to begin with and they have an atrophy,
then we can go through and nurse that back.
Now, the much more interesting and tough problem that a lot of them are facing now
is that implants won't even be a choice for a lot of people who are born deaf or born blind
because, say, like the visual cortex in your brain will atrophy if it doesn't get any input.
So, a lot of those different areas of the brain will never fully develop.
So, even if you hook, you know, a billion, you know, electrodes directly to their, you know, optic nerve,
it's not going to matter.
Their brain won't know how to process the signal.
So, you know, it depends on stuff like that.
That technology is ongoing and we're going to have to live with getting as close to AI as we can, you know,
and have machine intelligence to tell people, hey, there's a stop sign 10 feet away.
We're always probably going to need that until we can hack the brain directly and, you know,
build it up.
Well, I still, I mean, that's like a, you know, you said that a couple years ago, this particular person,
but that's an isolated case and that's research ongoing.
I do believe it's going to be quite a while before this is something that we see rolled out to the masses per se.
I'm not saying, like, next month you're going to see, you know, a bunch of people, you know,
walking around that couldn't see before.
But, I mean, what I'm saying is the technology is there and as I've pointed out in a lot of these cases,
it's good and it's really interesting and it's engaging where the technology is, but, you know,
it's not to where it could be.
And that's it.
I mean, you know, hey, all these hackers listen to BinRev Radio.
You decide you like the idea, you can work on all these things and make them even better.
Well, and, you know, like you said earlier, some of these people are working on it themselves
because they're benefiting from it directly themselves.
So, I mean, there's a lot of people working on this and that's, it's definitely progressing and moving.
I mean, we got cars, for crying out loud, that park themselves now.
They can see and know how to back in and move.
I mean, there's, there's, you know what I wonder is, like, kind of what I said earlier about the robotics
and you were saying that that's simple infrared eyes and stuff like that.
You know, we're talking Roomba technology here.
But it seems like there's, seems like there's got to be, there's probably, like everything else,
especially when the government's involved, one hand doesn't know what the other's doing.
I mean, do you know or do you, do you have any knowledge of how much people are working together?
Like, you know, is, are they doing research in robotics over in Japan that really is similar to this research for the blind
that may or may not be related to the, you know, the car parking itself?
I'm joking, you know, but it, I mean, it seems like they're all somewhat related.
Are these people sharing information or?
And, no, that's probably it for a lot of sciences nowadays.
And that's the sad thing is that, well, there are certain things like, you know,
a bunch of people acting around with the genome right now that are looking at large, you know, databases
and they can all share information.
Publishing papers isn't necessarily enough to, you know, let everyone know what's going on.
You know, it needs an aggregator, I guess, of sorts.
And so, yeah, I mean, you've got the MIT working on machine vision,
but who knows what a specific university in Japan is going along with.
And so I tell you the truth.
I couldn't, you know, really tell you how a lot of these research organizations are, you know, linked together.
But from my idea and from, you know, most of what I've looked up, a lot of them seem fairly disparate.
You know, it seems like they're essentially all working on their own thing
and, you know, leaving it up to certain people to tie a bunch of them together.
Well, and I'll tell you one other concern I have about this is we're going to kind of start wrapping up here in a few minutes.
One other concern I have is the future of this.
Once it becomes, once it gets to the, like right now it's open source,
it's people working together on this kind of stuff, which is great.
But at some point there's going to be money in it.
There's going to be money involved.
And one of the biggest and most corrupt systems,
and I don't want to go into a big political tangent or anything,
but that's the medical industry, the insurance industry.
If they get their hands on something like this,
when it does become a more believable solution,
a more realistic solution closer to coming to fruition and actual day-to-day use,
you know, whether that's the next generation or three generations down the road,
that all of a sudden this is all going to close up and become privately owned,
that this development is going to stop, the price is on it.
It's not going to be something that anybody and everybody, like you said,
on limited income is going to have accessible.
Ironically, the accessibility tools are not going to be accessible.
I mean, how do you prevent that from happening?
That's why I was specifically citing the one website in particular that I was citing earlier,
you know, that...
SeeingWithSound?
SeeingWithSound.com, you know, they stress that everything's open.
You know, you could go through and you could hack together.
It's not like this is going to be proprietary cell phone stuff.
This is going to be actually, I hate to, you know,
draw something to a little toy I've been looking at recently,
but open MoCo, and that's essentially a phone that from the ground up hardware has been built.
Everything's completely GPL, the hardware and the software.
And it's up to certain groups of people to a certain extent.
You know, all of this stuff that's GPL, yeah.
If they take that and run with it before somebody makes it proprietary,
then it's going to be like people using OpenOffice or Firefox.
You know, the proprietary side of it won't even make sense to most people.
So right now, a lot of it, because it's cots, you know, albeit probably expensive cots with the CCDs
and, you know, everything else, it's still available to the average person.
They can hack together their own kit and play around with it.
I mean, you know, that's the power of the people.
That's one of the things that I love about OpenSource is, you know,
something like this right now, a company isn't going to take away somebody that has a site
that gives you a list of cots, you know, parts and, you know, and free software.
Well, and you know what, I kind of wonder too, and this will be interesting.
I don't know if I'll live long enough to see this out to fruition,
but it might be interesting because this is all OpenSource, you know, and this is people,
you know, OpenSource stuff is OpenSource for a reason.
So people can take it and use it themselves, maybe tweak it, further develop it,
knowing how it works, et cetera, customize it for their use.
You know, right now from a software standpoint, we take and use a lot of OpenSource software
and tweak it to manipulate it to do what I want it to do, push it a little bit further,
hack it, make it better, make it customized to me.
Let me see what I can do with this.
I can see in the future, I don't know, this might be a stretch, I don't know,
but I could really see, obviously if you're talking about surgeries and cyborg
and planning stuff in your brain, that's not going to happen.
But it might be some interesting things.
Yeah, I know, that was a little far-fetched.
Right.
But there are some things that I can foresee people, like a hacker at home,
deciding that they do want to try this and maybe invent some glasses themselves
and develop it in their garage for their own use, just for the cool factor of it,
just for the neat factor, not necessarily.
Yeah, close your eyes and walk down the middle of Wall Street.
Sounds like the next...
Spit it out.
Oh, my God.
Am I going to have to get you a Netflix subscription, too?
People are going to kill me.
Hope.
The next hope?
Sounds like what should be done at the next hope.
Yeah, I don't think it's going to be done by then, if there's a next hope.
A bunch of hackers walking around with headgear, like walking down Wall Street.
No, no, we'll probably be riding segues, if anything.
That's if there's a next hope.
I guess that's a topic for another time, though.
Well, maybe DEF CON.
There you go.
Walking down the strip.
That's exactly what we need.
A bunch of people walking down the strip with big glasses on,
trying to interpret everything that they see.
That's the place to test it.
If it can handle Vegas, the strip in Vegas, it can handle anything.
There's a lot of signs.
There you go right there.
It's probably a great test.
And it'd handle all the neon and colors and everything.
All right, well, I'll tell you what.
Is there anything else here?
We're going to probably have to wrap up here in a second.
Is there anything you want to summarize or anything we left off that you think is worth mentioning?
I mean, there's a couple of site-specific links.
I mean, the only thing else that I really have off of there is, you know, that it is important and it's going to be forced.
You know, there's AOL and a bunch of other sites have been sued recently because, you know, people have said that they aren't accessible.
Well, AJAX is another thing that impairs it, but, you know, a lot of that stuff is going to have to move in the future
because there's more people that are tech-aware nowadays, so it's a good thing.
Well, yeah, you've got, you know, there's the ADA Disability Act that is going to require certain things from, you know,
but, yeah, let's stay away from, like, the legal and other implications and focus on the tech.
Well, I mean, yeah, a couple of programmers are probably going to say I'm an asshole because they have to make, like, an ASCII version of their site, but...
Right, yeah, I mean...
I'm going to try not to be, like, a HTML purist right now and speak about how broken AJAX is because I get paid to write a bunch of AJAX apps, so...
Yeah, don't, don't...
Yeah.
Don't shit where you eat.
I'm not going to bite the hand that feeds me, I promise.
Yeah, don't shit where you eat.
Yeah, I know.
All right.
Yeah, that's pretty much it.
And, you know, I would say if anyone wants to flame, don't, you know, kill, like, stank dog,
you can email me at neaflex at gmail.com, so if you have any questions or want any additional resources or you just feel like flaming, you can go ahead.
Or if you're down in South Florida and you want to check out the BinRev slash BinRev 561 meeting.
Yeah.
Third Friday of every month.
Take a couple of Guinnesses and talk about hacking.
I'm always up for it.
So I guess on that we'll kind of segue into the shouts, and I'll let you go ahead and go first since I'm sure,
I guess we've got to give shouts out to the GenRev meeting, so go from there.
Yeah.
I'll give shouts to Logos, Blunderbuss, let's see, Tiaxka, I can never pronounce his handle correctly.
Tiaxka?
Yeah.
Let's see.
Got to give shouts to Pyromoto, give shouts to Freak Mac, of course.
And I think I'm pretty much out right now.
If I left you out of the list, I'm sorry, so.
All right.
And, of course, I definitely second everyone at the BR561 meeting that I met down there
and have known for a lot of you guys for years, so certainly second you on all of that stuff.
And I guess I'll also give shout-outs to everybody, not only from my BR407 meeting,
but Right Coast and I actually went over to the west side, took a little 187 action over to the west coast
over there on Tampa to the BR813 meeting last weekend.
So Enigma and Spinsane, the gang over there, took good care of us, had a nice, fun meeting,
had some good laughs, talked about some cool projects that aren't ready for primetime discussion yet.
Oh, and actually, you know what?
I should have mentioned this in the housekeeping.
I'm going to do it now because I have time.
Oh, and I've got to give shouts to Thought Freaker, too.
Thought Freaker's been doing some cool stuff with the Living Good Switch, doing a lot of research on that
and some other things, so shouts to him.
But I'm going to – this is some late, last-minute housekeeping.
Willhackforfood.biz is up, but it's down.
And what I mean by that is we realized – there's some back story here.
Willhackforfood.biz was a site that I registered many years ago just because it sounded funny
and especially funny because it was a .biz for business, which I thought was really stupid.
So I registered it because it was like $5, $3 to register at the time or something like that.
And we ended up turning that into our disposable email solution.
Well, one of the things about it is that .biz is heavily filtered by a lot of mail services
and having the word hack in it also kind of – it doesn't make it easy to use.
If you're going to use that somewhere, they see the word hack in it.
We know what the connotation of that is, unfortunately.
So what we have done is actually gone out and registered a new domain for that.
Same engine, works the same way that it's always worked,
tested and up and running now as you hear this.
You can go to WH4F, which stands, of course, for Willhackforfood,
but it's not quite as obvious.
WH4F.org.
So hopefully it will get by any blocks that people may be putting out there.
So check out WH4F.org.
Willhackforfood is up and running,
so you have your secure disposable email accounts back up and running again.
So feel free to use that.
And I'm not going to cheap out and make that the site of the week.
Actually, we do have another site of the week that you gave us.
It is – and let me make sure I say this enunciate clearly –
XKCD.
That's X as in X-ray,
K as in kangaroo,
C as in cock ring,
I don't know,
D as in dog.com.
Is that right?
Oh, yeah.
That's a great site.
I've got to say it's one of my favorites.
All right.
So that's a cool webcomic there,
some funny tech humor there.
And our email address –
God hacking together the universe and pearl.
So if that seems to appeal to you,
then you'll probably like the website.
And I think that will appeal to our audience.
Any feedback of any kind,
we would appreciate,
and we will follow up on a future show.
So you can email us radio at binrev.com,
and I will wade through all the spam to get to the actual emails.
And hopefully we will read them on a future show.
So please give us your feedback,
good,
bad,
or indifferent.
And our closing music tonight is Emergency Pizza Party,
which I think –
speaking of Tampa,
I think that is actually a nerdcore group
or a group of nerdcore artists from
over in the Tampa
and possibly some in the Orlando area.
So Emergency Pizza Party,
it's a song called Get A Life,
which was on Song Fight last week.
So enjoy that music.
And Mia Flux,
thank you for being on the show.
Thank you.
And pass on my good wishes
and have an extra Guinness.
Yeah,
have everybody have an extra Guinness for the dog
at your meeting next month.
And actually –
I will, thanks.
Uncle Stank.
What are you trying to say?
I'm old or what?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Or that I touch you,
one or the other.
Yeah.
That I touch –
The proverbial Uncle Stank.
Yeah,
I'm touching you inappropriately at the meetings.
Is that the hidden message there?
Oh, wow.
No, no, no.
Just the cookie girl.
Oh, yeah.
Is the cookie girl still there?
Oh, yeah.
She's still there.
I saw her last 2600 meeting.
Really?
I was almost, you know,
averse to go up and approach her.
I figured she might have been,
you know,
done with hackers completely.
No,
she's fiending over me, dude.
You've got to go up there
and tell her I'm still –
I've got to come –
yeah,
see,
I didn't realize she'd still be there.
I've got to come –
people think the cookie girl is like not real,
like I made the story up or something.
No, no, no, no, no.
Hey,
I was personally there for a number of years,
remember?
Right.
I will stand right now and verify.
The cookie girl does exist.
And she's hot.
And she's of age now, right?
A personal note would steal her away from you.
If I didn't fear the wrath of BinRev.
As if you had a chance.
Come on.
Yeah,
she'll be like,
I'm dropping you
because I saw you got flamed a lot online.
If we were judged –
That would be the most novel breakup
that I've ever had, though.
True.
If we got judged for how much –
you know,
if that was a variable by which we were judged
how much we were flamed online,
I would never,
ever,
ever have any kind of interaction
with anybody in the world.
It's not like Jay and Silent Bob
strike back.
Exactly.
Oh, man.
Well, okay, so –
Oh, oh, oh.
One other –
Yes.
Oh, quick thing before the sign-off.
Logos was talking about
doing a wiki
on the regional
BinRev meetings page.
And I didn't know
if that was going to be rolled out
big time
or if we were just playing around with that.
But I didn't know
if you wanted to endorse that
and talk about that a little bit.
Oh, I'm not sure.
Actually,
we have someone
that's going to be working on
the taking over
the BinRev meetings pages.
And actually,
I guess they already have.
I can announce that Enigma
is going to be taking that on as well.
Again,
Enigma,
who's been doing all our show notes
and helping out
with a lot of projects
and running the BR813,
he's going to be taking
kind of responsibility
and driving
the BinRev meeting sites
along with Tabiz as well
who's been running it
with myself in the past.
So the two of them
are going to run that kind of stuff
and keep it organized
and up to date.
So, I don't know.
We'll have to talk about that.
We'll shout out to Tabiz too.
Oh yeah,
Tabiz and Mrs. Tabiz.
I guess we shouldn't use Mrs. yet.
Yeah,
Miss Tabiz.
We'll be careful.
Yeah,
what's the politically correct?
MS period.
Freak Nurse.
Shouts to Freak Nurse.
But anyway,
yes,
have a few Genrev for me.
Make sure you keep your eyes open
for Undercover Cops
because you know what we do
to Undercover Cops.
1-8-7.
Brr.
That's like a gun
at a clown circus or something.
That's the worst gun sound.
Oh,
I am totally not going to find
real gunshots,
so you're going to have to
live with that,
everybody.
So,
until next week,
next episode,
we will see you guys
same hat time.
Same hat channel.
Your music is poop.
We're wrapping the poop.
Benjamin Bear,
why do you hate nerdcore?
Benjamin Bear,
he's covered in cold sores.
Well,
if you don't like it,
listen to the track deck.
Don't be flippin' on me
because my music is whack.
I didn't know that
I was so disliked.
Maybe I should just
put down the mic.
Benjamin Bear,
you need to get a life.
Benjamin Bear,
you're a big fat jerk.
When you spit your shit,
the microphone gets covered in turds.
Everybody on the PBS
knows you suck.
And stop feelin' up
on my boyfriend's butt.
It's time for you to get a life
but you don't care
cause you're gettin' more blaze
than the average bear.
Put your panties back on,
we don't wanna see that.
Don't flaunt that
red-haired baby rap.
Why you got me spittin' on this?
Benjamin Bear,
sounds like a bitch.
Skip this track,
I'd rather smoke crack.
Compare me,
yeah, that's fair.
110% better than B-Bear.
I'm the one that brings the flair.
Benjamin Bear,
I hit and miss.
I'd rather drink a jar of piss.
Your music is poop.
We're rappin' the poop.
Benjamin Bear,
why do you hate nerdcore?
Benjamin Bear,
he's covered in cold sores.
Well, if you don't like it,
listen to the track back.
Don't be flippin' on me
cause my music is whack.
I didn't know that I was so disliked.
Maybe I should just put down the mic.
Benjamin Bear,
you need to get a life.
Y'all be there.
Time to make you a bitch.
Red hair,
so we burn you like a witch.
You got a smaller dick
than any bear should.
This track gives both
beefy and shellwood.
Oh, does it burn?
Does it sting?
Does it hurt?
All the good stuff and darks
that came from Rain Thirst.
Does a bear shit in the woods?
You might ask.
Not B-Bear,
he shits on the track.
Benjamin Bear,
you need to get yourself a life.
You need to stop
hittin' rocks from the crack pipe.
You've been hurtin'
nerdcore from day one.
Your raps are poop
and your beats are dumb.
But I don't give a fuck.
All this,
you don't beat all.
Look,
you've been banned
from the NERCO documentary.
It's gonna be a fault
if you lose on fight.
Suck B-Bear,
you need to get a life.
Your music is poop.
We're rappin' the poop.
Benjamin Bear,
why do you hate nerdcore?
Benjamin Bear,
he's covered in cold sores.
Well, if you don't like it,
this is in the track.
Don't be flippin' on me
cause my music is whack.
I didn't know
that I was so disliked.
Maybe I should just
put down the mic.
Benjamin Bear,
you need to get a life.
Hangin' tough
like a new kid on the block.
Benjamin Bear,
he be givin' no fuck.
You're a stupid dumb cock.
You can't even make this mic rock.
Tryna bust the flow,
you would not be asshole.
You put the nuts
in the nuts.
That's all.
Don't even try to rap.
You're a nerd called Pussy.
Change your maxi pod.
Make way for the worst
in the game.
Benjamin Bear,
sit in there for lame.
I got the worst rhymes
at the worst beats.
Movin' a fight
in the dark cold sea.
Put your back down,
Benzie.
Don't you care, man?
Sell the target
when you brought that crap.
Everyone knows
that you're the worst
in the land.
You from here
right now
started jumping.
You Conan O'Brien,
E.B.
Wan-looking motherfucker.
You call yourself a bear.
Benjamin Bear,
you suck.
That's a thing here.
You know,
you in the gegangen
you're the biggest
one.
You're the most
you're the biggest
one.
You're the biggest
one.
Hey,
you play all the fact
you're the biggest
one.