And you're listening to radio station WBAI in New York, where if we can get one announcement
working, I guess that we're ahead of the game.
It's seven o'clock.
Time once again for Off The Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall, my dog's shaming, now I can't
make a call.
We couldn't get much worse, but if they could they would.
Von Diddley Bonk for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Von Diddley Bonk.
I'm not going to say a word.
Theme sounds fine this week, doesn't it?
Better than ever.
Yeah, there's nothing wrong with the theme.
It's a new style of music that relies on taking little bits out.
Very modern.
Oh my God.
It's like a Star Trek episode.
You know, the thing that bugs me the most, you know, I'm going to do this, I don't care,
because it doesn't matter anymore.
These CD players are manufactured by a company called Denon, D-E-N-O-N.
It's the D-N-9-6-1-F-A.
If you're ever in a situation where you feel you want to get a CD player, don't get that
one.
They've caused nothing but grief since the first time I've ever seen them, and this is
what they do.
They either don't accept CDs.
It stopped.
They do that when you put them in.
They're supposed to be the best CD players ever, too, for broadcasters.
I don't know.
I think a Walkman would have done a lot better.
Anyway, off the hook, enough complaining for today.
Emmanuel here.
We've got Jim.
We've got Mike.
We've got Redbird, and especially thrown in from Holland, we've got Hanneke and Sascha.
How are you guys doing?
Oh, fine.
Indeed, we came here especially for the radio show.
Well, you're tearing up the street, like, you know, it's the most important thing in
the world to get here in time.
Absolutely.
Well, you're here for a couple of days, wandering around New York City.
Last we talked, I think, well, last we saw each other was in Berlin after the Chaos Congress,
and at that point, we were announcing the What The Hack conference.
Yes, and What The Hack is still going on.
That's in Holland this summer?
That's in Holland.
It's the last weekend of July.
It's four days.
It's July 28 to 31, and it's going to be really, really cool.
We have a lot of people from the U.S. who already said that they will be coming, and
we expect a lot of people from all over Europe.
Well, of course, the theme is hacking, technology, et cetera, but we also want to make it a little
bit broader this time.
So basically, anybody who is into the future of the country, the future of the world, things
like privacy.
I'm getting a bit lost here.
Well, you're Dutch, I guess that's to be expected.
I'm also jet-lagged.
Well, that was two days ago.
I'm still jet-lagged.
Any fun experiences with Homeland Security coming in?
Oh, you know, we forgot to call Bernie.
Oh, my goodness.
You tell us about Homeland Security, and I'm going to get Bernie on the phone.
The interesting thing with Homeland Security is that after we asked them some questions
about the fingerprinting, which is now mandatory, told us basically to blame an Englishman named
Henry Folt, who came up with fingerprinting in the first place, which was pretty okay.
They were actually really friendly this time.
It's the first time I've ever had really friendly DHS or INS people actually helpful.
How did they help you, pray tell?
How did they help get you into the country without causing anger or annoyance, et cetera?
Well, the guy had to help me with manually putting my finger on the thing to read it
about three times per finger, because the thing couldn't read it.
And then he said, oh, it's okay, everybody's different, don't worry about it.
And then he took a picture with a webcam-like device, so I smiled, and he smiled back.
So you guys actually got to use the fingerprint devices?
Yeah.
I don't think we ever talked to anybody.
We were made to use them.
Well, yeah.
You didn't ask to use them.
You were told.
Nope.
But did anybody have trouble understanding the instructions of placing your finger here?
No, the instructions are there in cartoon form, kind of, or pictograms, and in like
six, seven languages.
Everything in this country is in cartoon form.
Yeah, true.
That's how we learn to read and everything.
But they basically take your finger and put it on a machine, so it's, yeah.
Wow.
Bernie S. joins us now from Philadelphia.
Hi, Bernie.
Sorry, we forgot to call you.
Oh, and we also forgot to put your thing on.
Hi there.
Hi.
Welcome to U.S. again.
How long will you people be staying here?
Until the end of April this time, so pretty long.
But not in New York City.
You're going out to California.
Yeah, California and southwest in general.
How long will you be in New York?
I want to come up to New York.
Up to Friday afternoon, actually, so pretty fast.
Anyway, I have a question.
When I came back from Prague last week on the Czech airline, there was this very chilling
video that they played explaining to the Czech people on the plane how the U.S. visit program
works with the fingerprinting and the digitized photograph, that sort of thing.
Was there a similar video playing on your flight?
I haven't seen it on our flight.
I actually saw it on the DHS website where they have it in like 20 different languages.
And it is kind of disturbing because they start with explaining how you need to get
fingerprinted to get into the country, and then they say it's for your privacy, which
is kind of strange.
Right.
For your privacy?
That's what they say.
I don't know.
Okay.
Well, that's a little double think there.
Yeah.
It's a very Orwellian video.
I wish I'd had my camcorder ready.
I would have videotaped it off on the flight, but I didn't get a chance to.
It's on dhs.gov on the U.S. visit website, so.
Okay.
The video is on there?
Yeah.
Okay.
In cartoon format?
Well, in various streaming video formats.
Now, Bernie, when you returned from Prague, I understand you had a bit of an encounter
with Homeland Security.
Yeah.
When I got back to the U.S., that's when the problem started.
I had brought back a bunch of interesting items with me, and when I went through customs,
they pulled me aside and said, you've been selected to have your checked luggage hand
searched.
So I went over to this table I was directed to, and was told to put my bag at a table,
and told to unpack it, and the Homeland Security, actually it was the Department of Immigration
and Customs Enforcement, the ICE, the ICE man, asked me to remove different items, and
yes, what they were, and there were things like my scanner radio, like a wideband receiver
to listen to radio transmissions, they want to know what that was about, and a Swiss Army
knife and what else, oh, an 18th century carved wooden jewelry box that I found in an antique
shop in Prague.
I found this box, he was very concerned about it, it was this black box with a handle and
metal edges, and he said, what is this?
I said, it's a box set of the plastic people of the universe, and he looked at me really
strange like, what is that?
I said, well, it's Václav Havel's favorite band, and he said, well, who's Václav Havel?
I said, well, he's the former president of the Czech Republic, who I just came back from.
And did he ask why there's a Czech Republic?
No, he, I apparently knew what the Czech Republic was, because he asked me where I came from,
and I explained to him, and then he asked why I was there, and, well, first he asked,
he was asking me questions about the band, Plastic People of the Universe, he'd never
heard of them, and he was like asking me interrogation-like questions about the band, like he didn't believe
me that there was a band called Plastic People of the Universe, and why I would have like
every CD they ever put out.
Well, that's part of Homeland Security's latest training program, is that their agents know
every single band and album recorded, so that you can't smuggle in a fake album that's really
a bomb.
Music appreciation.
Yeah.
So, but the best part is, he asked me about this conference I was there for, he asked
why I was there, and I said I was in Hanover for the CBIT conference, and he said, what
is CBIT?
Does it have something to do with the sea?
I said, no, it's like the world's largest IT and telecom conference and trade show,
and he said, well, are there, he asked me a couple of questions about that, one of them
was are there any companies that involve with satellite television there, and I said, well,
yes, there are, as a matter of fact, and he said, any companies involved with Nagrovision?
I said, well, yes, as a matter of fact, there are.
He said, well, what do you know about Nagrovision?
I said, well, I know it's an encryption scheme used by several satellite television providers,
I think mostly European ones, is that right, Sascha?
Yeah, it's mostly used by Hispasat, a Spanish satellite operator, and I think they've even
switched from using it and switched to NDS Videoguard, which is owned by Fox.
I was surprised that an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer was asking me about an
encryption scheme, and I asked him, well, what's your interest in that?
And he said, well, I have a free-to-air satellite receiver, which is a legal thing you can use
to receive, very common in Europe, but in this country, very few people use free-to-air,
which is, you know, perceive all the unencrypted broadcasts, a lot of fun, but anyway, he told
me he had one of these free-to-air receivers, and he likes to watch the football matches,
but some of the programming he wants to see is encrypted, and he was looking for a way,
he asked me if I knew how to hack Nagrovision.
I said, well, no.
You've had this conversation with, I don't believe this.
Yeah, this is the strangest thing, he's like, you know, he said break was his term, he said
you know how to break, break, no, he did say hack at one point, he said you know how
to break the Nagrovision scheme, it's like, no, I don't know anything about that.
And like you're going to say yes to a person like that.
So he said, well, he was interested in being able to get those, his term was get, he wanted
to get this programming that was scrambled, that was the term he used, scrambled, and
he just wanted to know if Nagrovision had been hacked.
And I said, well, you know, if there's people looking to try to, you know, get it for free
like you, I imagine there's other people willing to sell it to them, but not me.
And he just sort of looked at me strange, and then he just told me to pack up my bag
and leave.
So that was the end of it.
He's probably very disappointed now, it smells like entrapment.
Well, it reminded me a lot of when I was in prison almost ten years ago, and there were
two security guards at the eastern, the prison in eastern Pennsylvania, Northampton County,
Pennsylvania.
Well, it was one of the many, one of the five prisons I was being held in.
And after they read a newspaper article about my case, they were very intrigued about me
and were asking me questions about cell phones.
And two of them had admitted to me that they had purchased cloned cell phones, illegally
cloned cell phones, and had saved lots of money making calls with them, and it's like
they thought it was pretty great.
And I really thought there was something wrong with that picture, because they were on the
other side of the bars, and I was the inside, and I was never accused of ever committing
fraud or even attempting to commit any fraud with cell phones.
But it was just a surreal thing, and that just came to mind, that this ICE man was asking
me questions about this encryption scheme, if I knew how to break it.
Well, you always do have the most interesting conversations with law enforcement of all
different sorts, so not surprised.
If you engage them in conversation, I guarantee you, you will have an interesting conversation
many times, because all it takes is just to respond the right way, and you can get some
pretty interesting responses from law enforcement people.
Now then, in honor of our Dutch friends here today, we have a couple of stories from Holland.
Maybe you've heard about this, maybe not.
Five computer hackers in the, and I use this term very loosely, in the Netherlands, not
the Netherlands, but computer hackers, have been handed sentences ranging from work orders
to youth detention for disabling a number of websites operated by the Dutch government.
A group of around 15 hackers, who call themselves Oxife Crew, I believe is how you say it, O-X-1-F-E,
it's the spelling, carried out a distributed denial-of-service attack last year on the
government websites, Overheid.nl and Rigoring.nl, in a protest against recent cabinet proposals.
The group claimed cabinet members were its sole targets.
The websites, the central gateway to all information on cabinet policy in the Netherlands, couldn't
be reached for five days.
Did you know anything about this?
Yeah, I read about it, but I don't know any more than that is in that message.
I think it's the first case, at least, where denial-of-service attacks have been enforced,
and actually people have got a real fine for it, and the problem is it's, yeah, it's basically
electronic vandalism, and it's been a big problem for years, and years, and years, and
I know a lot of people who work for ISPs who've been trying to get law enforcement interested
into actually doing something with this, but because, yeah, if you put up websites for
days, and days, and an end, then there's no real way of doing anything against it, and...
Well, I mean, I've always thought that denial-of-service attacks are the lowest possible thing people
can do.
Yeah.
Maybe an extra credit card for it.
It's like throwing in Windows and stuff like that.
It's, yeah, it's vandalism, but I'm also a bit surprised by the sentencing here is very
different than it would be in this country, you know.
Like no lifetime...
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
And I wonder if it's any less effective, or maybe it's even more effective to have a sentence
like this.
You know, work orders...
No, no, no.
I think for the crime they committed, it's pretty low, but it's comparable to other things.
But in general, we don't have really high sentences, and I'm not sure it would work.
But if somebody were to make Yahoo go away for an hour, all of a sudden they're the enemy
of the state, and they've caused all kinds of mayhem and horror.
And you know, it's a website, people.
Deal with it.
You know, get around it and figure out something else.
Emmanuel?
Yes.
I've always likened denial-of-service attacks to people who do that, to people who enjoy
intentionally clogging public toilets and then flushing them to watch them overflow.
Are there people like that?
I didn't...
There probably exist.
There are.
Believe it or not, there are.
And, you know, or like junior high school students who like to intentionally clog the
toilets and then flush them and run away as they overflood.
It just...
It's that kind of thing.
I think nothing less than a 20-year sentence will send the message that this kind of thing
will not be tolerated.
That's my personal feeling.
Junior high school kids?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I don't think age should matter in a situation like that.
You should be tried as an adult if you stop at the toilet.
Well, you can't be executed now.
That's the good news if you're a minor.
Let me tell you, the excretory system, and I don't want to, you know, offend the FCC
here by delving into this too much, but I'm just saying, you know, it's a very serious
system.
You don't want to mess with it.
And if you do, you should have to pay the price.
That's all I'm saying.
We're going to get so many letters on this topic.
I'm sure a lot of people feel strongly about it.
Maybe life is a more appropriate sentence for these kind of people.
Thanks for waking me up about that, Bernie.
Another story from Holland here, five major Dutch internet providers have agreed to cooperate
in a crackdown on illegal file sharing, saying they will send warnings to clients suspected
of swapping copyrighted music, film, and software files.
The providers said they will forward letters from the Brain Institute, yes, I'm not making
that up, the Brain Institute, which represents the entertainment industry in the Netherlands
warning clients sharing copyrighted materials against the law.
The Brain Institute?
Yeah, it's a Dutch name normally, Brain, but it comes down to the same.
It does mean brain.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, there's one very interesting thing.
One of the providers who is forwarding, the problem is there are letters sent to subscribers
who are blamed of using peer-to-peer networking for illegal music downloading, and they don't
want to give out the address to the Brain people, but they'll forward the threatening
letters as a service, that's basically what they're saying, and I know of some users who
are trying to go against the internet provider now because officially the end-user agreement
or the agreement of the internet provider doesn't allow the internet provider to give
them news from outside companies, be it a company or the government or whatever, so
it's an interesting case, but yeah.
Well, there's one part of this that I think is really amazing.
At least one major Dutch provider, Access For All, who we all know and love, Access
For All said it would not cooperate with the Brain Institute.
Spokeswoman Judith Van Erven said, they never even asked us.
I guess they know where we stand.
I love these people.
That's the perfect attitude to have against authority figures.
They go on to say, Access For All was not an enforcement arm of the entertainment industry.
Amen.
Exactly.
Wow.
So, yeah, that's news out of Holland.
I have some French news that sort of touches on that.
Okay, Jim, what do you got?
Well, last St. Patrick's Day, digital copying in France, a French court case being closely
watched by intellectual property experts and the entertainment industry, a judge at the
Court of Appeals of Montpellier has ruled it's legal for a person to make digital copies
of music, video, and other materials for friends and family members.
But the public prosecutor's office has appealed the case again to France's highest court,
saying it broadens the idea of private use too far.
The judge extended the scope of the private, but too much beyond the limits set by the
law itself, said the lawyer for the prosecution, which is representing 17 major film studios.
The case concerns a 22-year-old former student who owned 488 copies of movies, some downloaded
from the internet.
The defense lawyer, Joelle Gluck-Fossat, hailed the ruling, saying before downloading was
called piracy, now it will be just called downloading.
She noted that French consumers already paid copy taxes when buying computers and blank
CDs.
Interesting.
I thought so.
What do you make of it?
I think that this is just a, I hope it's not, but I think it's probably just a momentary
large blip.
It will eventually get crushed even if they have to rewrite the law.
There is some leeway in the last bit about the fact that the French consumers already
pay taxes to allow copying, much like I believe there was a charge put on CDs, blanks, not
blank CDs, blank cassettes years ago and videotape.
But that may be the only thing keeping it alive and they'll just rewrite the law.
I think the problem with those fees, in Holland we have them too, they're called the home
copying fee, and they're on all blank media, be it cassettes, minidisc, DVDs, etc.
Is that you pay the fee for the fact that you're probably going to copy on it anyway,
which doesn't legalize the copying.
So it's basically getting a fine for a crime you might not commit.
So you buy this and you're a thief.
Not only that, but it's sort of like a tax on drugs.
If you pay the tax, they get you for selling the drugs anyway, and if you don't pay the
tax, they get you for avoiding the tax.
In other words, it sounds like it should give you some rights by paying this fee, but it
doesn't.
Yeah.
Well, not to be outdone in the United States, we've been working on some laws too.
This particular one comes out of Utah, and you know that means enlightenment.
Ignoring threats of litigation from civil rights and free speech advocates, Governor
John Huntsman Jr. has signed legislation meant to protect children from internet pornography.
Mike, you look like you might know something about this.
Yes.
I have the law right here.
You have the law, the entire law?
It's right here.
Okay.
It sounds like this.
Wow.
That's what a law looks like.
Yeah.
It's got all kinds of underlines.
Basically what this law does is mandates internet service providers in the state of Utah to comply
with this list that the state attorney has to come up with of, I guess, porn sites or
otherwise sites offensive to minors, and they must, at the request of the customer for free,
block all those sites.
Wait a minute.
You're saying they've got to come up with a list of all the porn sites?
Yeah.
Someone in the attorney's land of the state of Utah-
Do you know how much money they could make by selling that list to people that want to
get to it?
I just want to know, are they going to put out a help wanted ad?
We need like 1,000 people to go on the internet and look for porn?
I'm sure they already have all the people they need that will happily go out and search
for porn.
This is Utah.
But I'm just thinking, especially in Utah, I'm just thinking that for someone to actually
volunteer to go out there and just list all the porn sites, that's a fantastic service.
People have been looking for that kind of a list for decades.
If you operate an ISP in Utah, you will be getting this list, I guess.
The law is pretty clearly, I think, unconstitutional, being photographed.
Anyway, there can't be a law that says the government mandates that these sites be blocked.
This has been fought and won by the forces of freedom on the federal level several times,
on the state level several times.
I think this is just like a political ploy so that people can, congress critters, whatever
they're called, can go and say, I voted for the anti-porn law and win re-election.
Wait a minute, there's an interesting wrinkle on this.
The government isn't mandating that these sites be blocked.
The government is coming up with a list that says you can now tell your ISP, I don't want
to see any of that porn that's on that list, and then they have to block it.
It would be similarly unconstitutional, Jim, if the government came up with a list of communist
newspapers and said, if you want, we're not going to sell you these.
That's probably next.
It's probably next, except they're going to call it terrorists.
There's so many different ways this can't work.
The technical ways it can't work, the legal ways that it's going to be challenged.
It's especially bizarre for ISPs, which are most ISPs these days, which do business in
states other than Utah.
Is America Online going to be forced to comply with this for their small fraction of Utah
customers?
They'd lose half their business, wouldn't they?
Plus, it also seems that it would be so easy to get around this.
They also list the IPs of all the websites, because you can just type in the IP instead
of the actual name.
I'm sure the list will be incomplete.
And constantly changing.
And what constitutes pornography, anyway?
How are they going to define that?
I mean, by Utah standards, that's not the same as, certainly, by, say, Nevada standards.
It just says, material harmful to minors.
Hasn't 2600.com at least once been inappropriately labeled as a porn site?
We've been labeled as everything.
Everything you can possibly imagine we've been labeled as, and I'm sure they'd want
to block us as well.
The odd thing about that, too, is that our website is constantly being blocked in various
places, yet it's not the contents of the magazine that's on the website.
The website has the radio shows, and it has various news items and other types of things.
Audio from conferences.
So there is no real hacker newsletter on there.
So I can't imagine what it is that they think they're blocking.
And they give all kinds of different reasons.
Obscenity, pornography, illegal activity.
You name it, they've come up with.
In fact, the entire Easy Everything chain.
In fact, when I go to Holland, this is one of my pet peeves, going to Holland, because
every couple of blocks is Easy Everything Internet Cafe, and that's where everybody
tends to go for access.
But they block us by default.
Every single one of those places blocks us.
They block Dutch hacker sites as well.
So it's very difficult to keep in touch.
I just skimmed through this law, and I could not find any definition of material harmful
to minors.
Well, they know it when they see it.
Yeah.
It's all about protecting the children.
But, you know, I think they need to be protected against stupidity as well.
All right.
Speaking about stupidity, this is a story we had last week.
We didn't have time for it.
A newly opened Brooklyn bagel shop is in deep trouble with the MTA.
The Metropolitan Transit Authority says F Line Bagels is out of line and off track.
I hope they didn't really say that.
That's just the stupid news story we have here.
Yeah.
Farid and Fawad Asad, they're brothers, and they own the place.
They left out few details in decorating their Brooklyn bagel shop like a subway.
It's called F Line Bagels because we're right underneath the F Line.
And F Line Bagels has been serving strap hangers and the Carroll Gardens community for only
six weeks.
But they received a visit and then a letter from an MTA lawyer, usually goes the other
way around, but I guess they got the visit first, then the letter, telling them to cease
and desist from using the F Line symbol and any subway memorabilia because of trademark
and intellectual property infringement.
What is the big deal here?
So what?
So they use an F in a circle.
How is somebody going to be confused and go to a bagel shop thinking they're going into
the subway and give them money instead?
What is the problem here?
If anything, it's good publicity for the transit authority because people are seeing
brand recognition.
The F train, it means something.
What's the problem?
Well, what I think is ridiculous about this is that people in New York identify places
by where they're on the subway lines.
Very often you'll hear, how do I get to so and so, and somebody will say, oh, just take
the N line or whatever down to a certain stop, and that's how you get there.
And it's similar to other cities where people would give you directions based on the streets,
and people name their businesses off of the names of streets and the neighborhoods where
they're located and all the time.
So how is this any different than doing something like that?
Yeah.
I mean, can you – I think there's a diner right by the Queensborough Bridge that named
itself after the bridge.
Are they going to have to change their name to something on the boulevard?
Well, they're naming the boulevard.
They're naming the avenue or something like that.
Can you not name something after the street because the city named the street?
You have to pay the city royalties now.
Come on.
Where is this going to stop?
I think the city should just charge royalties on all ordinal numbers between 1st and like
200th, whatever.
You know, I would say ordinarily that's very funny, but today I'm going to say don't give
them any ideas.
All right.
Don't do that.
We should all patronize this bagel place so they can fight this.
Yes.
I agree.
It's F line bagels, but I don't see an address here, but I guess you can get there on the
F train.
It's at the Smith and 9th Street stops of the F and G trains in Brooklyn.
Oh, they didn't call themselves F and G bagels.
You know, I don't think that they could have been sued if they had done that as long as
they didn't use the colored F and the colored G that they have on the subways.
Well, the G train leads all the publicity it can get.
That's true.
I agree.
So I don't see how they could possibly sue them if they named them that, but it shows
they know what, you know, how to market because G line bagels wouldn't have worked.
No one would go there.
No one goes there because no one can find a G train ever.
Jim, you were an MTA employee.
Do you have any idea whether that symbol, the F in the circle or any of the letter lines
in the circle is an actual copyrighted or trademark?
I honestly believe they are.
I do believe I've seen that on something, and I was trying to dig it up or to remember
it and have had very little luck.
But the problem that the MTA has with this is that there's precedent that goes against
them.
There's a well-known woman by the name of Ellen Hart Sturm who was a Miss Subways back
when the contest was in its heyday from the 30s through the 60s.
And she had a couple of well-known restaurants.
She owns Iridium, the jazz club, as well as Ellen's Stardust Diner, which is a little
bit to the north of Times Square.
And much of its decor is subway related.
Much like the F Line Bagels, they spent about $1,000 on internet auctions or direct purchase
of MTA memorabilia, signs, straps, actually their metal bars to hold on to, and other
things to decorate the place.
The TA apparently, that's not what bothers them.
It's the combination of that with the name of the place.
But the point is, someone else has done something similar beforehand.
The MTA doesn't have much of a legal aid to stand on, I believe.
People are not going to be going to this bagel shop instead of taking the subway to work, though.
And they could just point them, you know, 50 feet away to get to the real subway.
Well, I mean, it's basically complimenting the MTA by saying the F train is a landmark
of sorts and thereby recognizable in that sense.
I really...
Clearly the MTA's case is full of holes.
Yeah.
Like the bagels.
Okay, so that's the story on the F Line Bagels there.
We have some letters to read.
Our address for you to send us a letter and maybe have it read on the air is oth at 2600.com.
And in a little while, we'll be taking phone calls.
If you're off the hook, I'm a senior citizen.
Know nothing about the new technology except to use the internet and email on an Apple computer.
But yours is the only show I never want to miss.
You are so funny and so political.
Thinking of getting a prepaid cell phone, I'd like to have it just for emergencies.
What do you think?
Signed, Florence.
Well, Bernie, I think you had an answer for Florence here.
Yeah, I wrote back Florence in the list.
And I told her that if she only...
This is the thing most people say.
They only need a cell phone for emergencies.
Well, it depends on your definition of emergency.
If it's a kind of emergency where you just want to call 911, if you want to limit it to those emergencies,
you don't have to pay anybody anything.
You can just get an old cell phone that works.
It doesn't have to be activated.
And the FCC requires the wireless carriers to carry the 911 calls.
In fact, I recommended to Florence she get one of the real old analog back phones.
Remember those things that weighed like three or four pounds that you plug in your cigarette lighter and had a handle on them?
Those things put out a lot of power.
They put out like three watts.
So you have much greater range.
The fidelity is really good.
You can hit 911 sites miles away or hit cell sites miles away and just have really good access to 911.
And you don't have to pay to activate the phone.
It will just send the 911 calls out.
But it's possible that Florence was asking, she said she wanted to use it only for emergencies,
maybe not just 911 emergencies but emergencies where she needs to call a friend to help her fix a flat tire or something like that.
Well, if you're really a cheapskate, some of these, and I think we had a listener call in or write in about that not long ago,
I think it was a caller.
You could actually make collect calls or calls on a major credit card from one of these not activated cell phones.
Now, it doesn't work in all areas.
It depends on which carrier you happen to be on.
But, you know, if it's only once in a great while kind of thing,
you don't mind spending a couple bucks a minute for that rare emergency call.
But then again, you don't want to be stuck and find out it doesn't work in your area.
There's a couple other companies.
TracFone is one that several friends of mine have said.
It's T-R-A-C-F-O-N-E.
You've probably seen them in convenience stores.
It's a phone you can buy for about $50, and you can buy prepaid minutes,
which only expire if you don't buy more minutes like within a year kind of thing.
It sort of keeps stringing you along.
But it's not as bad as like the prepaid calling cards on pay phones,
which as soon as you start using them, the minutes just start dwindling right away without using it.
So TracFone is another option for Florence.
Speaking of phones, I'm going to have a real phone challenge later this year.
I guess we should fill folks in on what we're planning, Hanneke and Sasha, overseas.
I'm going to be going around the world by land and by boat.
That's something I've always wanted to do.
And I'll be joining you on the Trans-Siberian Express, which goes through Russia.
And, of course, throughout all this, the challenge will be to do the radio show somehow.
Now, I believe we're also planning an eight-day excursion in the country of Mongolia.
Yeah, and I think phone-wise, Mongolia will be a bigger problem than Russia.
Yeah, I think it's going to be probably the biggest problem of all.
They don't have much in the way of electricity or in the way of phones.
So our batteries are going to be running out.
Our phones are going to be nonexistent.
I guess now is the time to start looking for solutions to this.
Do we know anything about the infrastructure of this country?
They have camels.
All right, well, that's not going to help us.
That's not going to help us get a line back to New York.
We'll have to get one of these very expensive satellite phones.
Okay, that's something I'm willing to consider for that one show because, you know, I do want to stay in touch.
How do satellite phones work?
Are they vastly expensive?
Bernie, do you know anything about this?
Coincidentally, when I was at this TBIC conference in Hanover a couple weeks ago,
I saw a company demonstrating or at least showing—
they couldn't demonstrate because they were inside a building—the new IntelSat 4 transceiver.
IntelSat 4 is a new satellite, which was supposed to have been launched last week,
but it ran into some glitches.
But I suppose it will be launched any day now.
I think in the French Guiana down there, the Ariane French rocket-launching program,
we'll be launching an IntelSat 4 program.
The rates aren't too terrible for a satellite phone.
It's going to work out to like 70-some cents a minute.
I don't know what the monthly plans are and so forth, but that's one option.
Basically, it's something about the size of a hardback book that you can plug a regular telephone into.
You can just, you know, get any analog phone with an RJ-11 plug.
Just plug it into this little brick and, you know, have to—
I'm not sure I want to be traveling around the Gobi Desert in Mongolia with a desk phone and a brick.
You can get one of these Motorola Iridium phones, too.
They're the ones you see often on—like if you're watching like war coverage in Iraq on CNN
and you see somebody on a phone with this.
It looks like a regular cell phone except there's this hideous antenna that's sticking out about 12 inches.
I think Iridium is probably one of the best options.
There's also Thuraya.
It's a company out of Dubai.
Yes.
I doubt they have coverage in Mongolia.
They mostly do Middle East and Europe and—
Part of Africa, I think, too.
Yeah, but that's something to look out for.
All right.
We have a few months to look out for this and figure it out, but that's a challenge ahead of us.
I think we'll have to be prepared to get like completely, yeah, everything for ourselves,
like maybe solar panel kind of thing or whatever.
It's just—probably it's heavy, but—
Yeah.
Well, you know, we live for these kind of challenges, and Mongolia is only one challenge.
It's going to—this whole expedition is going to be taking place all around—on the ocean, on the high seas.
I'm going to be out there in the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean trying to make phone calls.
There was a very interesting thing about satellite phones and being on the ocean on a BBC documentary
about war correspondents being on a U.S. ship in front of—near Qatar somewhere.
Yeah, I think I saw that.
The ship was not in the harbor, but it was turning small circles all the time,
so they couldn't get a lock in on their satellite phone and all kinds of problems like that.
All right.
Wolf Blitzer can do it, Emanuel.
You can, too.
I always try to start every day saying something like that, and it helps.
It really does.
Continuing with the emergency phone issue, regarding the mystery, a listener writes in,
about dialing 09 to get the police, which another listener called in with that little tidbit.
Perhaps this is there for people traveling abroad who did not know that the standard emergency number
for the USA and Canada is 911.
I don't know why they would know it's 09 then.
But anyway, to test this theory, you might want to try dialing the other international standard emergency numbers
of 112 and 08, not 80 as pointed out in the previous show, signed Jed.
Did we say that?
Did we say it was 80?
I can't recall.
But 112, that's standard in Europe, isn't it?
Yeah.
In fact, don't try this at home or anywhere.
On your cell phone, if you dial 112, even in the United States, it should go to the police,
at least on a GSM phone.
I don't know about Verizon and Sprint and all those guys.
Jim?
Speaking about dialing the police, you remember our discussion about, what was it, 344,
pound 344 being replaced by 811 for the one-call center to see if you were digging into a gas line or something?
Excavation.
Well, I don't know if I should confess this because I think it's a probation violation,
but I tried 811, and at pay phones in the city of New York, 811 is as good as 911, every single time.
Meaning that it works.
Meaning that it dials 911.
Oh, it's the same thing as 911?
I tried it at least 10 times on various pay phones, and every time I dialed 811.
And after the second time, I was thinking, am I missing the 8?
You have very big fingers.
I was very careful after the second time, and got 911 every time.
Your fingers are at least twice as big as most people's.
Well, everything on me is twice as big.
If you hit the 8, you might be hitting the 9.
I carefully moved over.
I eventually used the tiny little pin.
Okay, that's probably the best thing to do.
I remember when I was a kid and I was scanning.
I was scanning all the exchanges.
I used to get all these people upset by doing that.
But I dialed 811, and I remember the recording there was simply saying,
if you dial 911, you will get the police.
That was the entire recording.
And I guess the only reason for that was for people that, by mistake,
dialed 811 instead of 911.
And I guess they just didn't want to have it go to the police,
and maybe a little hint like that might get them to dial right the next time.
Those hints should be expanded.
There's all kinds of other misdialing things that people could be doing
that should be reminded, like, well, if you dial this number, you'll get them.
Yeah, like if you want to dial Australia, dial country code 61,
not area code 612, and reach Minnesota.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Okay, this listener writes in, hey, I'm from Uruguay,
and I'd like to say that social engineering is very effective here.
I used it once to get information from Antel, our telephone provider.
It worked.
I've got a lot of public telephone passwords for the admin menu.
Okay, well, thanks for that little tidbit from Uruguay.
Yes, social engineering works everywhere.
Basically just lying and getting information from people.
Not hard to do.
In your program of March 16th,
I can't believe you didn't discuss the news that a team in China
has broken the code used to provide signatures
for authentication in secure transmissions.
Apparently this group from China has been able to break the 161-bit signature code
in one day using a laptop.
You know anything about this, Mike?
Well, to say they broke it is a bit of an overstatement.
What the thing is, it's called SHA-1.
It's a way of taking a message
and creating an almost unique string of bits
that verify basically that two people have the same message if they say they do.
And what these people did is they found a way
to more quickly than previously thought possible
generate two different messages that give you the same hash.
And basically the consensus seems to be
that there's nothing to be concerned about yet
because it still takes quite a while.
But the fear is that once the function has been shown to be weak in any respect,
more effective attacks will come quickly.
Okay, well, hopefully that's enough coverage for that particular security issue.
But it is a big advance in cryptography.
I don't want to downplay that.
Okay, it's just we can't cover everything.
It's impossible.
We only have an hour a week.
I wish we had more time, but we only have an hour.
So we have to try and cover as much as possible,
including this story or this letter from another listener.
And our phone number, by the way, 212-209-2900.
We'll be taking some phone calls.
I love your show.
It's great hearing intelligent conversations about technology.
But I felt I should throw in my two cents.
The Video Game Ratings Board,
we've had this long conversation about the MPAA and ratings
and how they have all this control and power and things like that.
The Video Game Ratings Board is called the ESRB
and can be reached at ESRB.org.
It says that it is rated by adults who volunteer
and that their office is in Manhattan.
This sounds like a lot of fun.
We're adults.
We're in Manhattan.
We can play video games, go to this office,
and just basically rate them after we play the video games.
That sounds like a great deal.
Infiltration is our life.
Well, I just want to play video games.
If I infiltrate, well, you know, that's a side effect.
You get paid for it too.
Oh, wow.
Oh, there's money involved.
Wow.
Anyway, another issue that you touched base on
and I feel is up my alley is the fact that movies are restricted by age.
I'm 16 from British Columbia,
and we have a rating system that is close but not the same.
We have G, PG, 14A, and 18A, which to me seems more lax.
But ever since I was young, I've played video games
that were meant for ages 17 plus
and R-rated movies that I rented,
but I have never felt that I was too young for them.
Of course, I didn't understand some of the concepts that were explained,
but when I went back and watched them again,
some information that was there but didn't know about the first time came out.
I personally think that your country is starting to trap you guys in,
not keep the invaders out.
But as they come up with more schemes to track us,
they never think about how people can use that against them,
such as the trackers in the passports that are coming out
where others might be able to see what your identity is
and take it, signed Tom.
Yeah, there's a lot of things to be concerned about,
a lot of things to be wary of.
I have a letter also.
Go ahead.
This letter comes not from a listener,
but from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection people.
They listen to our show?
Well, they didn't say they do.
This letter comes in response to a letter that I wrote them in August,
so they're not the speediest people.
Oh, when we came back into the country from, okay.
I wrote them a letter saying basically,
why is it necessary to separate the people from their car
as the car is being searched?
And they wrote me a very long letter.
It's about two pages.
And I thought when I first read the letter
that they didn't answer my question,
but it turns out they did answer my question.
It says, in compliance with the safety policy,
the Port of Halton, Halton, Maine being where we crossed,
has implemented a standard operating procedure
to have all occupants exit a vehicle
and remain in an attended area
while the secondary inspection is conducted.
At the Port of Halton,
this attended area is the lobby area of the Port's main building.
But it's out of sight of the car,
so you can't see what they're doing to your car.
Look, this is due to the events of September 11, 2001.
The border crossing of Halton began
and continues to conduct more detailed inspections.
Yeah, but they could do that
with me being able to see what they're planting in my car.
The safety of the traveling public and of our officers
is paramount to CBP.
Yeah, well, stupidity apparently is more paramount.
I just have one question maybe our listeners can answer.
They thanked me in their first sentence
for my correspondence of August 17th
filed at the Hidalgo Port of Entry,
and I don't know what that means.
I don't know either,
but it took them a long time to answer you.
It certainly did.
Well, they have recently completed their review of the matter,
so maybe they were reviewing the whole time.
You think some heads might have rolled?
They were reviewing.
I don't know.
They called those guys in for questioning.
That would be kind of nice to know.
There's also one more thing,
is if they may offer further assistance,
they gave me Mr. Arthur A. Pitts,
Senior Director, Land, Border, Passenger Operations,
his phone number.
Okay, yeah.
It's 202-344-1280.
So maybe if I call him, he'll assist me further.
All right.
Well, that's something,
getting a response from any governmental agency.
All right, our phone number.
Mike, I wonder if you asked
if you could just set up your camcorder on a tripod
videotaping their searching your vehicle
while you waited in the building out of sight,
whether they would mind.
It's still unclear as to how going inside
enhances anyone's safety.
I mean, if I were going to shoot them,
which is something I would never do,
I could easily do it before I go inside.
That's true.
We can theorize about this all night,
but I think you've gotten as much out of them
as possible right now anyway.
Our phone number, 212-209-2900.
Let's take some listener phone calls.
Let's go all the way down here.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Oh, hi.
I'm calling from Switzerland.
Switzerland.
Yes.
Wait, is this Arsene?
Yeah.
Arsene, how are you doing?
You're usually in the studio,
and there you are in Switzerland,
and you're the first caller.
That's pretty good.
That's good.
Yeah, well, I'm listening on the feed on the internet,
and it's really good.
It hasn't dropped at all.
We're beyond the dropping stage.
We've mastered it, so finally we can...
Yeah, well, the ISP here in Switzerland is in bed.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
The other thing I kind of wanted to mention
was about the telephone system here.
I used a phone the other day that told me
how much I had to pay on my debt,
how much was going on my bill.
And I also found out that voice over IP,
it's almost cheaper to call the U.S.
than to call Zurich,
which is the nearest, biggest city.
Kind of interesting.
Wow.
What's it like over there as far as overall connectivity?
Are people generally more wireless?
Oh, wireless does not exist, basically.
Really?
Outside of the major cities, no one has wireless.
Just for the place I'm staying,
we got DSL, or at least ordered it,
and that has a wireless option.
But otherwise,
I haven't been picking up any access points anywhere.
ISDN is really big.
DSL is just coming in.
Interesting.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, anything else you want to add?
No.
Just saying hello to everyone.
Okay.
It's about, what, 2 o'clock in the morning over there?
That's 1 o'clock.
Well, it's going to be 2.
Okay.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, good to hear from you,
and we'll see you here next week.
All right.
Bye-bye.
Yeah.
Arseny reporting to us from Switzerland,
another one of those European countries.
And speaking of European countries,
Hanneke and Sasha here from the Netherlands.
Again, reminding people about the What The Hack conference
coming up the later part of July.
It's basically a camping thing again.
I had a great time at the conferences I've been to
that have been held outdoors.
It's kind of an alien concept to a lot of people here.
I mean, we have, you know, our concerts occasionally
that take place outside,
and we have Burning Man and things like that.
But, you know, a hacker conference outdoors with tents
and things like that, does it really work?
Oh, yes.
Absolutely.
We did that the first time in 1993,
and it was really early to have an Ethernet out on the field
and all the tents connected to it,
and we've been improving on that ever since.
That was hackers at the end of the universe, right?
That was hacking at the end of the universe,
and later we had hacking in progress and hackers at large,
and this will be What The Hack.
Yeah.
So basically people, they build communities, right?
They have all kinds of different gatherings.
There's the BSD tent, the free BSD tent,
the open BSD tent, and the Linux area, the other side,
and there's even a Microsoft tent.
Yeah, we have to be careful whom we put next to each other.
Yeah, you do.
Otherwise fights might erupt.
All kinds of things.
Plus the stench of certain, well, never mind.
But so basically you have this huge area,
and somehow you get connectivity to this area.
Yes, yeah.
And it's really good connectivity too.
I don't know how you guys do it each time,
but you have better connectivity in the middle of a field
in the wilderness than we have in the middle of New York City.
Yeah, that's part of the hack.
Yes, I still don't understand it, but how do people get it?
And telephone service too.
Yeah, telephone service and everything.
You have the DECT phones,
which is like a little PBX you have out there in the wild.
Well, the DECT phones are brought in by the Germans,
the guys from the CCC.
They had it on their hacker camping events,
and it works really, really great.
And the DECT phones replaced all the portals
that were usually used by the organization.
And every visitor can just bring their own DECT phone,
and they can ask for a number,
and they will be reachable on the field for free.
Cool.
Very cool.
So how can folks get involved in this?
First thing to do is just go to the website www.whatthehack.org,
and hack is spelled with H-A-C-K.
Well, there you can read all the information about the dates
and what we're going to do and about the price and everything.
And you can also send an email to volunteer at whatthehack.org
if you want to volunteer at the event.
And volunteering is always a lot of fun
because you're not really like a visitor,
but you're a participant of the event.
Well, it's great just to help build the community.
You basically start off in a field,
and before you know it, there's a city,
a city that has really been built.
Yeah, absolutely.
A city with different neighborhoods and different communities in it.
Yeah, the dangerous neighborhoods and the nice neighborhoods
and all kinds of cool things like that.
Well, I'm really looking forward to it.
It's the Hacking Event of the Year.
What are the dates?
July 28th to 31st.
Okay, so it's four days.
It's four days.
All right.
And www.whatthehack.org,
and you can sign up for mailing lists.
You can get all kinds of updates.
It'll be a blast.
Absolutely.
It's going to be so cool.
Yes, Bernie?
I had a question, Hanneke.
There's a mention on the website, www.whatthehack.org,
that there may be payment options to buy tickets
other than PayPal coming up soon.
Do you know anything about that?
No, at this moment I don't,
but you could send an email to info at www.whatthehack.org
to ask about that.
Okay.
All right.
Mike?
And in further news from Europe,
if you are in Oslo and it is 7 a.m. on Wednesday,
then you can hear off the hook on Radio Raquel,
which I'm mispronouncing.
Well, you're mispronouncing it very well.
Thank you.
99.3 FM.
99.3?
Wow.
So it's just 200 kilohertz below us,
but many miles away.
Cool.
One of the stations to carry us in addition to WBAI.
Of course, we're on WBCQ,
which is a shortwave station at 7415 kilohertz.
Hope I get that right.
And if you have a low-power FM station
or a high-power FM station that wants to carry us,
or even an AM station or a shortwave station or whatnot,
let us know.
Write to us, othat2600.com.
We can provide you with a good quality feed
or a copy of the show so you can air it,
and it'll sound pretty neat.
All right.
Let's take another phone call.
Good evening.
Hello?
Yes, go ahead.
I better shut off my phone here.
Okay.
Okay, I'm sorry.
I have a question pertaining to 911.
All right, go ahead.
I had an interesting thing happen a couple of weeks ago.
I was on my way home from work.
I work in the Bronx, crossing over the Whitestone Bridge.
As I was traveling over the bridge,
I noticed a truck that was on fire in the opposite direction.
I attempted to call 911 to report it on my cell phone,
and lo and behold,
a red line appeared at the bottom of my phone,
printed out in text,
stating that I had to dial an additional star
and then number in order to contact 911.
What service do you have?
I have Sprint.
Okay, that's interesting.
No, it has nothing to do with Sprint, sir.
That's the thing.
I contacted Sprint as soon as I got home.
I immediately hung up the phone and called again.
I thought there was a problem.
Sprint insists that it's something that the city of New York
has input into their 911 system
in order to find out who's calling.
I live outside of the city of New York.
I have a different area code.
That's possibly the reason.
I'm not sure.
I don't know, because they know where you're calling from
when you dial 911.
Not on a cell phone.
No, sir, they do not.
No, I was in communications in the military.
I'm retired.
And you can't track it
unless you specifically know exactly
where you're looking for the number.
Well, as far as location,
that's still something that they haven't yet perfected.
It won't show a location.
Right.
It won't show a location.
All it shows is...
A phone number.
And it's showing a phone number
that is a different area code
from where they're receiving the information.
So they're apparently asking for...
Well, in this particular case,
it said star.
It was in bright red
across the bottom of my phone.
That's very strange.
I'd like to know if anybody else has stories like that.
We'll certainly keep our eyes open.
But that's weird.
That's very strange.
911 should always just work.
And thanks for telling us about that.
We'd love to hear any other stories.
See if we can fit in one more phone call, though.
We're running out of time.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Yeah.
Quick question.
You...
I was on,
and the phone was ringing
and ringing and ringing.
When you picked up that previous caller,
I went to a fast busy.
Just immediately,
both of them were fast busy.
I don't think anything
with picking up the last caller.
I think what happened was
whatever company you used to call us
timed out at that point.
Right.
Right on the button there.
Yeah.
The...
I think that the
DHS or whoever it was
that was searching the vehicle
and wants you to go away.
Right.
They don't want you to...
They don't want you to see
what they're doing.
In other words,
see what they're overlooking.
If you scrutinize what they're doing,
you'll find a place
where you may want to
put the contraband.
Ah.
So you might get some hints
as to what they...
But everybody has their own weaknesses
as far as agencies.
You know,
some will search one place,
some will search another.
I don't know if that's really
the reason.
Exactly.
Well,
if you watched them all,
then you'd be able to
create quite a list.
Yeah.
That means you have to
keep going back
and keep getting
searched everywhere.
And I think they'd raise flags
on you for that reason alone.
But interesting theory, though.
I'll tell you where they didn't search,
which was on my person.
That's true.
They didn't search our persons at all.
Interesting.
Okay.
Well,
I just ran out of time,
but Redbird,
you were in Boston
over the past couple of days.
I got a chance to check out
the public transit system there.
It's called MBTA.
Yes.
And that's, I think,
the oldest subway
in the States.
Is that right, Mike?
They claim it to be.
All right.
Yeah.
So,
it's very complicated.
Do you want to just
briefly give us—
The fare payment options
are very complicated.
I don't understand it.
Okay.
So I can't explain it.
Well,
sometimes you pay to get on,
sometimes you pay to get off.
They have stops
where you pay to get off.
I can't explain it,
and it's really not worth it.
If you want some fun, though,
if you can find that web page,
I don't know what it is offhand,
but there's a description
of all different types
of fare structures,
and you need a college degree
to figure it all out.
MBTA.org.
Yeah.
But what was great
about the system
is the lack of surveillance.
Like,
in the New York City subway,
you really feel like
you're being watched now.
Everywhere you look,
there's a surveillance camera.
If you see something,
say something.
That, too.
You know,
cops all over the place.
I saw very few cops,
very few surveillance cameras,
maybe one or two total.
And I took pictures
in front of the cops,
which you're not able to do here
without getting interrogated.
Wow.
Yes.
So you can still have
a degree of freedom
in the Boston subway
and not feel like
you're being watched
all the time.
Yes, and they have
very funny messages.
Can I read one?
Yeah, go ahead.
Sure.
They had a sign that said,
big letters,
we're sorry,
and underneath it
it read,
for your protection and safety,
and under that,
we have removed
the trash barrels
in this station.
New and safe trash barrels
have been ordered,
in the coming term,
please help by carrying
any personal trash
or refuse
to the next available
trash receptacle
you encounter.
Again, we thank you
for your help
in these trying times.
These trying times.
Well, they've had that
in London
for quite some time, too.
So removing trash cans,
and they've done that
in New York as well
during New Year's.
Well, we're just
about out of time,
but interesting point.
There's a famous song,
we're going to go out
with this famous song,
having to do with
the Metropolitan Bay,
no,
the Massachusetts
Bay Transit Authority,
this guy named Charlie
got stuck on the train,
he didn't have the fare
to get off,
because you need to pay
to get off sometimes,
and so he was forever
stuck on this train
riding around in circles.
And the funny thing
about this,
this is a famous song,
I think it came
from the 60s,
the MBTA is actually
issuing a new fare card,
and they're calling it
the Charlie card
in honor of the song.
Right, I've noticed
it looks like a very,
very, like,
quick hack
to what is now
a turnstile system
with tokens,
and it just doesn't
look very professionally
done at all.
Okay.
That's going to do it
for us this week,
so hopefully the CD player,
which is the same CD player,
since we only have
one semi-working one,
won't mess this up
as bad as it did the intro.
If it does, I'm sorry.
We'll see you next week.
These are the times
that try men's souls.
In the course
of our nation's history,
the people of Boston
have rallied bravely
whenever the rights
of men have been threatened.
Today, a new crisis
has arisen.
The Metropolitan
Transit Authority,
better known as the MTA,
is attempting to levy
a burdensome tax
on the population
in the form of
a subway fare increase.
Citizens, hear me out.
This could happen to you.
Well, let me tell you
of the story
of a man named Charlie
On a tragic
and fateful day
He put ten cents
in his pocket
Kissed his wife and family
Went to ride
on the MTA
Well, did he ever return?
No, he never returned
And his fate
is still unlearned
He may ride forever
Neat the streets of Boston
He's the man
who never returned
Charlie handed in
his dime
at the Kendall Square Station
And he changed
for Jamaica Plain
When he got there
the conductor
told him one more nickel
Charlie couldn't
get off of that train
But did he ever return?
No, he never returned
And his fate
is still unlearned
He may ride forever
Neat the streets of Boston
He's the man
who never returned
Now all night long
Charlie rides
through the station
crying
What will become of me?
How can I afford
to see my sister
in Chelsea
and my cousin
in Roxbury?
But did he ever return?
No, he never returned
And his fate
is still unlearned
He may ride forever
Ha ha ha
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