And a good hello to everybody over on YouTube, as we have our first edition of Overtime in
a long time.
I think the last one we did was sometime in March.
Well, we've been doing a lot, okay?
We've been really, really busy traveling and things like that.
Kyle, did you make it okay?
Hi.
Okay, you're in the same room as me, so yeah, I imagine you did.
Rob, Gila, how are you guys doing?
Did you make it?
We are well, and we sound good on YouTube.
Okay, sounds good.
And Alex, I see you as well.
I am here, only temporarily, though.
I'll hang out for a few minutes, say hello to some people, and then I've got to jump,
unfortunately.
Okay, I understand.
Yeah, you know, we could do like a five-hour show with all the things that we...
I have so many things to talk about, and we wound up talking about a couple of them because
we just get into these conversations, which are always fascinating.
But I did do a little bit more research on the story of the wallpaper guy from Germany.
Apparently, this guy, Bohm, B-O-H-M-E, previously tried to sue the granddaughter in the courts
in Dusseldorf and Stuttgart in Germany, but he was unsuccessful in his legal attempts
there.
The regional court and higher regional court of Dusseldorf ruled that Bohm had implicitly
granted a license by selling the wallpaper on the one hand, and that his lawsuits were
an abuse of rights on the other.
Wow.
Does that happen often, Alex, when you file a lawsuit and then the judge says that your
lawsuit is an abuse of rights?
Because that's got to hurt.
Yeah, yeah.
But it's very much in tune with the principle that I had mentioned before, that, you know,
this is essentially a trifle, right?
You know, there really aren't damages here.
This guy's being an idiot, and he got called out for it.
I hope he doesn't sue you for saying that.
No.
Well, if he does, I mean, I guess it would be on the basis of defamation.
The defense to defamation is the truth.
So I just have to prove that he's an idiot.
Okay.
Well, that shouldn't take too long.
Well, I don't mean to get myself into this by saying that.
Anyway, so you might wonder if his lawsuit was seen as an abuse of rights.
How is he still suing?
Well, while other German courts have rejected his argument, what he's doing now is hoping
for a victory when his copyright case is heard in Cologne Region Court on June 27th.
He previously won a similar copyright case regarding an image with his photo-based wallpaper
at Cologne Regional Court last year.
That lawsuit was also against a landlady of a vacation apartment.
Now, when it comes to copyright, the Cologne Regional Court says that a strict duty of
care applies and that anyone who makes use of other people's photographs by publishing
them on their website must ensure that this is done with the permission of the authorized
person.
No.
No, I'm sorry.
That's crap.
You're in your own damn house.
You're taking a picture of your wall.
How much more personal can you possibly get?
And to say that's copyright infringement, Alex, help me out here.
This is insane, right?
This is not where the legal world is going, is it?
Well, I'm not an expert in German law, but I would imagine that under German legal principles,
they would have very similar types of ideals that we would have with respect to copyright.
And this seems like it might come into the ... or rather, the principle of first sale
might come into play here, namely that when you buy that particular wallpaper, even though
it's comprised of other photos, you have the right to do with that instance of those photos
what you will.
You can deface them.
You can take pictures of them.
It's not as if the person would be distributing them or printing them for some kind of commercial
purpose.
That, I think, would squarely violate the copyright rights of the original photographer
of that particular work if they were replicating the work.
Right.
A commercial purpose involving the work, not a commercial purpose involving renting out
the room.
And solely the work, too.
I think that's what's really important here, is that his work is not isolated by itself
in the photographs.
It's part of their house, as you mentioned, Emmanuel.
So it's just one of many items in the house.
Everything that you create can have a copyright to it.
If you create source code, even though you don't file in the U.S. Copyright Office, you
automatically have a copyright to that particular source code, so long as it's unique.
And you created it.
So this whole idea of running around the world and forum shopping and looking for photographs
with your copyrighted items in it, if this is a legal principle that will stand on its
own, it will create absolute havoc and destroy our ability to share and distribute images
online.
It would work to such absurdity that I think this guy, the case has to be dismissed.
Rob Gila, you both have your hands up, so fight amongst yourselves.
Well, this is what I was thinking at the end of our over-the-air show, is are we sure this
is really the guy?
And I'm not even joking.
Do we know that this is actually what's-his-bucket Bohm, and it's not somebody pretending to
be him who's just running around looking for his stuff?
Or is Bohm's career so sad now that he's only making a living off of suing people like the
Westboro Baptist Church?
Are you attacking him or defending him?
I can't figure it out.
I'm not 100% sure myself, but yesterday we were talking about, Rob and I were talking
about Terry Jax.
You remember Terry Jax?
Terry Jax, yeah.
He did, what was the song he did?
Seasons in the Sun.
Right.
I don't know the thing about Terry Jax.
No.
Okay, this is 100% true.
Terry Jax, Seasons in the Sun, what, 1972-ish?
We had joy, we had fun, we had Seasons in the Sun, but the hills that we climbed were
just something in my mind.
Seasons out of time.
Whatever, yeah.
It was a cool song.
And it's an incredibly, it's a pretty song, it's incredibly depressing, but Terry Jax,
it was a big hit in like, what, 72?
And he toured and did all that stuff until about 75, and then he just vanished.
And then a few years later, some dude turned up and said, hey, I'm Terry Jax.
And he started giving concerts and giving interviews and going on tour, claiming he
was Terry Jax.
The world believed him because they didn't know any better.
And then he got sick of it, turned himself in to the real Terry Jax, and everybody thought
it was over.
But then a few years later, he started doing it again.
And this time he was like, getting hotel rooms and not paying for them and giving bad concerts
and not showing up.
And the real Terry Jax was like, dude, you're destroying my name.
I need you to stop again.
So I'm wondering if what's-his-face Boehm is really doing this, or like it's a Terry
Jax situation.
Well, this guy went to court and won.
So that takes a lot of balls if you're going to impersonate somebody and go to court in
their name and win and then try it again.
I don't know.
But I'm fascinated by the Terry Jax story now.
I got to look into that because, boy, how do you get away with that at all?
I mean, don't the fans know that that's not the guy that sang the song?
It was the 70s and the 80s.
It was about 10 years later.
He might have looked different, but it had been about 10 years later.
And this was, you know, pre-internet, so nobody knew.
Wow.
OK.
Yeah, Rob, go ahead.
Yeah, I can only speak about this from the perspective of an artist.
I am an artist.
I have, you know, sold my work.
I have given away my work.
I have work on walls that are not mine.
And sometimes I get I get a photo of my work on one of those walls.
And that makes me so freaking happy.
How is this guy angered or believes he is owed more by by somebody who purchased a bit
of his work?
But I'm guessing didn't accept any outlandish terms of service before they got this wallpaper
and used it and then wanted to show off their pretty room.
But it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter if if somebody purchased your art legitimately, if they stole your
art, if they, you know, did something, they copied it themselves and they put it on the
wall and they took a picture of it.
That's not the crime.
The crime is the stealing part of it.
That's that's what you get them for.
But not for taking a picture of something in somebody's house.
I don't care if it's a Mona Lisa or whatever.
It's it's it's your house or, you know, a building outside.
There are people who try to say this building is protected.
It's a landmark.
You can't take can't take a picture of it.
That's ridiculous.
Of course you can.
I'm sorry for that.
Go ahead.
No, there if you take a picture from my point of view where I'm sitting right now at my
computer desk, there are posters on the wall that I didn't design, but I bought.
There's artwork on the wall from artists I like that I either bought or was given.
There are some there are little figurines sculpted.
There are action figures.
There's desk toys, all this stuff, comic books, you know, stuff that I did not create.
But that if I take a picture of my room, that's a picture of my room that is not hurting the
commercial value of any of the junk I happen to be surrounded by.
Wow.
Kyle, do you have something?
I think, I think it's a reach for sure.
Like the, the thing that she's doing commercially is in the realm of a space to rent.
And the, the photograph she took is of decor that I think as was mentioned here, all great
points, by the way, the, the, is an assemblage of multiple aspects of the space and the physical
property itself.
So that's the commercial sell of which this wall covering is a part.
And I think that that's pretty, that's a pretty good argument.
It's not that she is selling copies of wallpaper that has this man's art.
So I think that would be a competitive like violation of his, his product.
Like you're competing with intellectual property that is simply, that is essentially his work,
which anybody would, would view that way.
And I think that that's probably like the healthiest view.
I understand the competitiveness being someone that's involved in the visual arts and takes
photos myself, you know, the, the temptation is there to be so guarded.
And there are like Alex said, firms that will broker and otherwise manage the licensing
of your art and chase down with well-resourced legal teams and departments.
I even applied for a position one time.
I didn't really realize what it was at the time, but yeah, there's jobs, people's entire
tasks and probably what we've seen more of now, because that was many years ago, is the
automation of it where these letters just appear.
So we've covered this on our cover of all things, but there's so many people that are
being affected by the automated nature of this.
Well, you're talking about Splotchgate where we got a letter because random paint splotches
were identified by some computer as part of some piece of art.
And even the people running the company that sent that agreed it was ridiculous and immediately
withdrew it as soon as we started complaining about it.
But I should point out that did not happen because of the cover that went out to newsstands.
It happened when the cover showed up on our store on the internet and some computer came
out and crawled and found it that way.
And just, it became just another job in its tasks.
And we're buying into that world of litigiousness, if that's the right word, that just define
our existence.
It's absurd to me that somebody has to live in fear if they're making a documentary and
somebody drives by and you hear a snippet of a song that's playing through their stereo
as they drive by and they've got to go and edit that out.
That's insane.
What exactly are you protecting?
You think somebody is going to go out there and say, hey, here's a song.
I'm going to grab four seconds of it and wait for another car to come by 10 seconds later
in the song and eventually I'll piece it together and I'll get this 99 cent song for
free.
I mean, what is the logic?
It makes absolutely no sense.
But what it does is it cripples creativity, makes us all paranoid, looking over our shoulders.
Look, we're on YouTube right now, there's an image of the 2600 van right there.
And that image of the 2600 van is a van that's made to look like a phone company van of old.
Now imagine the phone company was still around using that emblem, those colors.
They could say, you guys aren't allowed to do that.
You guys aren't allowed to probably, A, have a van that has that paint job, but also you
can't take a picture of that and display it on the Internet.
I mean, I think we'd all be seeing red to actually be confronted with some idiocy like
that.
But that, it's becoming the norm more and more where an image or a sound or even a thought
is copyrighted and protected.
Go ahead, Rob.
I think a good analogy would be if Ford, who made the van in the first place, decided to
sue you for showing.
Actually, it was Dodge.
It was a Dodge.
Dodge.
OK, yeah.
So Dodge, who manufactured the van in the first place and owned the design to that van,
then sued you for publishing a photo of it, even though you bought it because it's a van
and it happens to be that shape.
And as it happens, Ford did sue us for a different reason.
Worth also noting, it doesn't get to these levels of absurdity if there is not a legal
market for these sort of situations.
And I think this story is a symptom of a sort of intellectual property market that may be
a bit flawed right now and copyright as well.
The gain by pursuing one particular van, the legal cost and even for their corporation,
which probably has ample resources, to come after that, the gain to go after our van or
an individual just hosting an image of an apartment, it's fraught.
So a corporation, it's a lot more than the cost of actually pursuing it.
The cost to do it is a lot more than what would be to gained to collect from that person
that you are grieving or you're seeking legal grievance with.
If the cost comes down, but I think that's what's happening.
The cost is coming down.
Well, with the automation.
Things are automated.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And that may be a part of what is flawed in this copyright system, because we're not living
in a world where we come from a time when this didn't exist.
These things are emerging.
And I think our experience with that is like, we're tempted.
And I heard that a lot in the conversation, like the exclamation of what world do we live
in where we would want this?
Well, the people pursuing these kinds of things see a value in it if they can cast a wide
enough or a large enough net by using the tools and information that is available of
this day.
So that's kind of what we're up against.
So you have to kind of calibrate your expectations.
And I think that's why people that are growing up with this might not really see the implication
because it's sort of invisible or we kind of accept it and self-censor along the way
or don't want to react to it.
I think what you just said is meaningful in the way that we come from a different time.
I think we need to preface a lot of conversations with we're from a different century because
we are.
Go ahead, Gayla.
Well, OK, now I have another theory as to why this is happening.
Do we think that wallpaper guy is trying to rent out his own vacation apartment?
So he's trying to get other people to take down their listings.
He's trying to bully people out of putting up this image to get them out of the marketplace.
Twisting yourself into a pretzel, defending him.
I mean, you think it's because he wants he wants to rent out a bed and breakfast.
And this is somehow preventing him from doing that because people might be confused and
see his image on a different wall.
You know what?
No, it's right.
He's trying to knock out the competition.
I think this guy.
Well, that's the American way she is escalating.
OK, here's the escalation.
If I was this person, I want to get a call.
I wanted to call us.
I would take I would take the picture that's on the website, use a wallpaper print on demand
service to make like a pattern with that picture, then recover the walls with her photo
of the old room with his photo on it so that it's like a pattern in the new space.
Then take a photo of the room with her new wall covering that is a pattern of all the
other older pictures that were on the website and then argue that it's her own work that
is now the wall cover.
I want to see a photo of people urinating on it.
I really do.
That's that's what I think about this.
It's that upsetting.
But the funny thing is, I read this story from when I get this from Petapixel.com.
And you see the story there, Kyle, you guys see the story of a chair against the wallpaper.
That's not even the wallpaper.
For some reason, they didn't put the image in the front of the story.
Right.
That doesn't look like a photo.
No, it shows the stock image.
For some reason, they didn't dare put the actual wallpaper in the story until you go
a couple of pages in.
And then it just looks like a bunch of stones on top of each other.
It's like stacked rocks.
And what?
He took a picture of stacked rocks.
How about the person who stacked the rocks?
Don't they have some say in this?
Because somebody did that.
Yeah, that doesn't look natural.
That looks like a very large wall.
And it's just a texture.
Wow.
Oh, my God.
Alice, you look like Mr. Robot.
It suddenly appeared in a hoodie and I wasn't expecting that.
Wow.
Do we even know that's Alex?
Yeah.
It's a little cold here.
Are you in Pennsylvania?
I'm in Pennsylvania at the moment.
There's massive thunderstorms and lightning and the temperature has dropped considerably.
You know, we got hit by lightning last week.
And it's funny because the cable TV went out and the cable company said, no, you don't
have an outage.
Even though everybody in the neighborhood was out, they refused to believe it.
I had to sit through 10 minutes of talking to an automated response system that would
say, what is the problem?
You can only answer a certain way.
I said, the cable is out.
We suggest that you reboot your cable system.
Do that by unplugging it.
There's no way.
I can't say representative.
A screaming representative at the top of my lungs wasn't doing anything.
They said, unplug it now.
I will wait six minutes while it boots back up.
I did that already, you moron.
Now I have to wait, you know, six minutes before I can even get to a human.
And by the way, the human didn't believe me either.
I had to convince them that there actually was an outage.
And two hours later on the outage map, I was so happy.
I saw a little dot show up.
That was the outage I reported.
And sure enough, they figured it out and eventually fixed it.
But boy, what they put you through these days, it's just unreal.
What happened to the days where you could call somebody and say, hey, it's a problem.
You might want to look into it.
Yeah, those are gone.
Those are those those days are gone.
But while we're on the subject of personal appearances, I wonder if that lightning strike
had anything to do with the lack of facial hair of both you and Kyle these days.
I just noticed you guys are looking pretty clean shaven.
Well, you don't know what we look like normally, because what you see usually and people don't
see this, you see, you know how when when you pull off a job and you replace the tape
in the surveillance cameras with old footage so that people are fooled.
It's a filter.
Yeah, that's what you've been seeing.
This is a film.
Is that right?
It is.
Yeah.
It's amazing.
I felt I felt like I was like, I'm like, I'm looking back in time here or something.
I was wondering why I just felt a certain amount of disquietude during this whole show.
Well, we're not going to discuss your face.
Yeah.
Because.
Yeah.
Well, I've got a face for radio.
Well, you said it, not me.
But we have a phone for radio.
Let's give out the phone number because we haven't heard from our listeners in forever.
802-321-4225.
Hey, I remember the phone number after all this time, 802-321-HACK.
If anybody is out there and wants to call us and say hi or have a question or a comment.
And Gila, you have a question or a comment.
Go ahead.
I do, but it's not mine.
So first of all, it's we're like 20 minutes in and I have not said hello and welcome back
to the 39 people who are with us on YouTube right now.
I'm super glad to have you all here.
We have a comment.
Ray Coon says, why does Emmanuel still have cable TV?
There's so many alternatives.
Oh, my God.
Here we go again.
It's the whole the whole grandpa thing is you still have cable TV?
Don't respond.
Yeah.
You know what?
I still have all kinds of things.
I have a non electric razor, too.
We have token ring.
Boy, judging for what kind of technology I should have, whatever I want to be able to
have.
And if I'm paying for it, you know, it's it should work.
And if I'm not paying for it, it should work, too, because, you know, people never used
to pay for TV.
I'm from a different century.
I know these things.
I'm going to push the audio button just to see what happens.
The what button?
I'm doing it.
Oh, OK.
You know what?
It's I don't even.
I don't even know if this existed when checking connection.
It's going to be a dialogue.
What happened?
Oh, OK.
Unfortunately.
Is she OK?
OK, so this this pulled up a I guess an app store entry for the app, which is not on this
TV and with an apology that says, unfortunately, I can't look and talk at the same time.
It says, unfortunately, audio has shut down and is no longer available on your Roku device.
We're sad to see them go.
Instead, we have more than 100 other streaming music services for you.
Just go to streaming channels on your home screen and select the music category.
But that's the whole reason you got Roku in the first place.
Everything is ruined now.
And that's also the only thing one of the biggest buttons on this remote now does.
Yeah.
What about the button?
Well, now it's just wasted real estate on your remote.
You know what Alex was saying before about this being an advertisement in your house?
We should start billing them for advertising in our homes when we had no say in that.
I agree.
Yeah.
You want to be litigious.
We can do that, too.
Do we have a phone call?
They're certainly billing the advertisers for the opportunity to advertise to us.
Yeah.
We can litige.
We can litige with the best of them.
Kyle, do we have a call?
Yo, no say.
Yes.
I don't know what that means.
Is that yes or no?
We have a call.
You literally said yes and no at the same time.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Overtime.
Hola.
It's Johnny Fusion.
Hey.
How you doing?
Johnny Fusion from West Coast, right?
Yeah.
Bay Area.
Cool.
What's on your mind?
Hola.
Hey.
How's it going, everyone?
Long time.
So I was thinking about the insidious use of copyright and you mentioned the example
of filming a documentary and a car goes by with, you know, playing music.
Something that was starting to happen in L.A. that the LAPD was doing was they would, when
they were having interactions with the public, they would get on their phones and start playing
Disney music because when people were videoing them, they figured Disney's the most litigious
company out there when it comes to copyright.
Yeah.
I heard that.
I heard that story.
It was really both infuriating and clever at the same time.
Right.
I mean, yeah, but that's what I thought of was one of the most insidious uses of using
these copyright bots against the people, you know, because it's the First Amendment right
to keep the film in public and especially people that are public employees like the
police and to keep them accountable.
And it was a way of trying to skip accountability.
Yeah.
That's how did that turn out, you know?
I think it was like a fad.
And Disney, like these videos would be posted to YouTube, but Disney had just started giving
them a pass on the copyright.
Wow.
OK, that's something.
Or it was ruled fair use or something like that, you know.
It shouldn't have to get to that stage, though.
It shouldn't have to, you know, go into the courts or be dependent on a huge corporation
to grant permission.
You know, it's just if you're recording something in normal life, you should be able to do that
like you always have been.
Yeah.
I mean, the famous case was like it was like a little girl's birthday party and a Prince
song comes on and Prince had them take down the video because Prince doesn't want any
of his music on YouTube or he did when he was alive.
It's on YouTube now because the state says, yeah, sure, why not?
But when Prince was alive, he didn't want any of his music on YouTube.
OK, I mean, you know, there are there are limitations to the control you can have over
certain things.
And I certainly think that somebody could say, I don't want my music to appear on Amazon.
I don't want music to appear on YouTube.
And you know, they can they can take that down.
But if something is playing in the background, that's that's not that's not a duplication
of your work.
That's just something in the background, like, you know, a sunset or something.
And if you're alive on this planet, that could happen to you.
You could wind up.
You can't get the permission of everybody in a crowd scene to have their faces displayed.
I know there are people who think you have to and they go and they blur out the faces
of all the people they couldn't get clearance from.
But for God's sake, you know, that that famous photo of I think it was Coney Island in the
1940s, 1950s, where the beach is just crowded with all these people.
Can you imagine if they had to go around every single person and ask for permission?
You would not have that photo.
And it's it's it's it's magic.
Well, yeah, the the part of that that you have to realize is it's it's public spaces
that is totally legal.
And if you're in public, you do not have the ability to protect yourself in the way that
you would on private property or under the policies of of your own residence and the
expectations there.
So I think like Coney Island is a public space as public as any.
Oh, yeah.
I don't think it's like private property.
It's pretty damn public on the boardwalk.
So if you're photographing there, even if it's commercial, I think you don't necessarily
need people's permission, especially like you're talking about for a crowd scene.
You may have like policies, especially for a feature length film or a production of that
scale.
But if you're doing something independently, that would be like that would be something
I think that you may not have to adhere to the same policies that they have in place
where like a large film that's doing location shooting would have to post things at the
very least so that public entering an area where filming is in progress has at least
the awareness that they could be captured on film and the expectation is that they relinquish
their rights in that moment.
But I think like you say, if it's in public, you just by default don't have those rights.
Let's say, though, that on the street, I'm walking down Coney Island.
But this time I'm recording and somebody is playing a Prince song and Prince is still
alive and he doesn't want his music anywhere.
I don't think he has a say at that point.
I really don't because it's being played in public and I'm not there recording his music.
I'm there recording the beach and all the people around and his music just happens to
be in the background.
And I don't think you can control what people record or share when it's in a public space.
I just don't think that's right.
Just like I don't think you have to blur out license plates.
I know Google Street View does that.
I don't think that's necessary.
I think if it's there, it's there.
If you see people, they're there as well.
I know there's reasons to not want to have people there and that's fine.
But legally, I don't think it's something that should be required.
Yeah, I think you're right.
Maybe I'm even granting too much when I'm talking about different scales of production
because the means to do a lot of this is so pervasive.
Any telephone can begin recording video.
The more I'm thinking about the scenario you're talking about, it is a new work and
there should be protection for what natural sound there is.
YouTube may have their own policy or their own strictures because they feel it's a liability
to their model because they're distributing so much content with an ad model.
But someone producing something on their own or even a small production or student or documentary
or just a private individual, they're bumping up against that on the distribution side.
But to produce it, I think you do have any right and especially in public spaces to create
what is new content.
It isn't that original Prince recording.
It is an entire scene visually in time with that as one element of the natural sound.
These claims like to have the idea that the estate or that an artist would go after an
independent or even a feature length production, it does change when you get into box office
sales and all of that because they have to clear things and do all this sort of due diligence
at that level.
So these issues with YouTube and online services, they're small examples of what those productions
go through.
It's mostly done in the cheapest way possible with like threatening automation or just bans
on your accounts on whatever platform it is.
I find it interesting.
The natural sound should be natural.
But on YouTube, you can find pretty much any song you're looking for that's posted either
by record companies or just somebody where it doesn't get taken down, it's just there.
And that's fine.
It proves that it's not that big a deal to have the music out there.
Johnny, I'd like to have one more point, then we're going to move on to another phone call.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
Oh, there is something, though, in Europe, in the EU, under GDPR, your photograph, your
face is considered identifiable information and is protected under the GDPR.
So it's a little bit stricter in Europe for people to publish people's faces.
Yeah, I mean, I'm curious what you would define publish.
And I mean, to publish isn't necessarily to identify them or reveal more about them.
However, the mere act of publishing could widely distribute something that could make
it portable enough for others to use things to identify that individual.
So therein is a liability in you distributing more of someone's face like that.
So we don't have that here.
And you do not have your face.
And as I've said in the past, voice, there's zero expectation of that being protected.
And I think this is an example of why we need to hash out some kind of privacy, I don't
know, framework or policy goal to think about greater protections in that way, while not
poisoning the creative marketplace of ideas and new content that's emerging.
John, it was good hearing from you.
You've given us a lot to think about.
I hope you keep writing articles and hear from you again soon.
Okay, I'll get to work.
All right.
Take care.
And our phone number, 802-321-4225 for those people who...
That rang fast.
Boy, I didn't think it was possible to ring.
You just hung up the phone a second ago.
Okay, well, I guess the line is going to be engaged for a moment or two.
Are you ready?
And good evening.
You're on Off The Hook Overtime.
Go ahead.
Yes, hi, Emmanuel calling from Portugal.
You're in Portugal.
Before we get to that, I just want to point out that you weren't number one this time.
You're number two.
You were the second caller.
You're losing your touch.
Well, I haven't slept in like almost two days.
Oh, that must be why.
Well, because I wanted to take an Airbus 380, which I've never taken.
I think it's like the biggest plane, like bigger than the 747.
I always wanted to take it.
So I had to go to Germany, like Munich, Germany, New York City.
Yeah, their doors don't pop out, but I think one of them caught fire the other day.
Airbus 380?
I'm pretty sure.
Really?
Yeah, I think so.
But regardless, I'm sure yours was fine.
Oh, yeah, it was.
So you're in Portugal, and you haven't slept for two nights.
They have a lot of fun in that country.
The partying never stops, so don't expect to get any sleep for the next week or so.
Well, I'm not going to.
I'm only going to be here for a couple of days, and then I'm going to Italy, Ireland,
and then London.
Okay, well, one of those is a city, and none of them are connected, well, except Ireland
and, well, London.
Oh, yeah.
Are you taking trains, or are you flying all the way?
No, I'm flying to Italy, and then I'm going to, no, I'm going, yeah, flying, and then
I'm going to go from Italy, fly to Ireland, and then take a ferry to London, I mean to
England, and then take a train to London.
Okay, well, at least you take a train at some point.
And I imagine you might be going through Wales when you cross over on the ferry, right?
I guess.
I mean, I haven't planned it out yet, but I guess.
Well, when you look at the map, make sure to see if you're in Wales, and if you do wind
up in Wales, spend some time there.
Yeah, I do plan on spending time.
Okay.
My question to you is, I registered for Hope, so I'm going to be at the Hope conference
in July.
Cool.
Yeah.
My question to you is, you know, Telnet, right?
Like, if I was, is this the way Telnet works?
If I was at, let's say, Harvard, and you were at Stony Brook, and let's say you came to
visit me at Harvard, and you wanted to log on to your Stony Brook account, did you use
Telnet to log in?
Well, yes, that is true.
If it was 1990, I don't think anybody uses Telnet anymore.
No, no, they don't use it anymore, no.
Because, but that's the way it used to work.
If the mainframe in, the mainframe in, let's say, Stony Brook uses a D.
The old Univac, yeah, I know, I know.
No, not the old Univac, but let's say it's 1988, or 90, or 91, and Stony Brook used a
DEC mainframe, and Princeton used IBM.
I don't think they had a DEC mainframe.
They might have had a VAX, but I know they had a Univac.
Gaila, do you have some information on this?
No, I have a different question from a listener, but I said I would ask it when Rebel talks
to Brent.
Yeah, let Rebel get through, yeah, this talk.
Let Rebel get through his, otherwise, he hasn't slept in two days.
Oh, yes.
Okay.
Okay, so if, like, let's say you had two different terminal systems, you could log on to your
system, like, if you were in Princeton, you could log on to the system at Stony Brook.
Stony Brook, right?
Well, that was the idea.
Yeah, the idea was to be able to connect, and you know, what was cool, and what you
can't do anymore, you used to be able to run a talk window, and the way that worked is
you would type talk, followed by the account at the school address.
So, you know, it would be sunysb.edu or something, and even predated actual internet addresses
like that.
But what would happen was your screen would split in half, you'd be on the top, and the
person you're talking to would be on the bottom, and you could both type at the same time and
have a little conversation there in the window.
That command still exists on many Unix systems, but it's been disabled pretty much everywhere
because of security reasons, but I think it was one of the coolest things about being
on the early days of the internet, because you could talk to people all around the world,
and there weren't other ways of doing that at the time.
Now, can systems disable telnet?
Like, if Stony Brook didn't want anybody to telnet to them, they could disable it?
I'm pretty sure it's disabled everywhere.
I don't know of anything I can telnet to.
No, I'm saying back then.
Oh, back then, maybe.
Alex, you have something. Go ahead.
Yeah, you could always disable telnet.
It operated on port 23, as opposed...
And then telnet mostly became really deprecated when SSH took off.
The problem with telnet was that everything happened in clear text, right?
So you could sniff out...
You could sniff out people's passwords as they entered them on the remote system
to which they were telnetting.
But there are still some places to which you can telnet a manual,
which are kind of cool.
And in fact, I think telnet is mostly used these days, as I understand it,
to operate telnet-based BBSs.
Okay, yeah, that's true.
So they do still use that particular service occasionally.
And you know, Kyle just pointed this out to me,
and it's important to point out there, telnet is not telnet.
Telnet is a service that was run by GTE at one point,
and it was a packet-based switch network back in the 80s.
So, yeah, a lot of people got confused by that.
But telnet, telnet, two different things.
But yeah, telnet is still a command that works
if you want to connect to something.
Yeah, it used to be a way to get to management stuff
on different hardware to check or otherwise set something up,
like on a switch or something,
or various things will use that.
And you can still launch it in some operating systems, I'm sure.
You know what I like about telnet that I don't like about SSH?
SSH pretty much is a replacement for telnet.
You could type telnet, hit return, and get a telnet prompt.
And then you would type O for open,
followed by a space and the address.
And if somebody also logged into your system
who types the W command to see who else is on the system,
it shows what you're running.
When you did that, it would show that you were running telnet,
as opposed to if you did it all on the command line.
You could type telnet, space,
followed by the address you were going to.
And then if that person ran W to see who was on the system,
they would see you running telnet
and also see what you're connecting to.
SSH, it's replacement, that uses encryption.
You can't hit SSH and hit return and get an SSH prompt.
You have to type the whole thing.
So therefore, you're giving away that information
to anybody who types W to see who's on the system.
And I don't know why they never had just an SSH prompt,
because that would have been another layer of security.
I'm sure there's something I'm missing.
But Gila, is this concerning Rebel?
It's a question for Rebel.
Question for Rebel.
Okay, Rebel, get ready for a question.
All right.
Rebel, the question in the chat is,
Rebel is quite the traveler.
What European country do you like the most?
Oh.
Amsterdam.
That's not a country.
For God's sake, you went there.
You got to know it's not a country.
It's a city.
Don't go off like this.
Come on.
You know better.
Go back to Telnet.
This brings me to my next question.
I can't get through to people.
I can't get through to people at all.
Go ahead, Rebel.
Just talk about Telnet.
Remember in the 80s when you go to an airline terminal
and you give them your credit card
and they swipe your credit card?
You know, the computer terminals that were hooked up
to the main thing.
How did they verify the credit card?
Did they use a Telnet type of a system
where they, not Telnet, but a similar type of system
where they log into their credit cards?
Well, I mean, there used to be all sorts of ways
of verifying credit card numbers
and also just assuming the credit card was correct.
There's an algorithm.
Basically, I think the way the system works
is you add up all the numbers
and they have to add up to a certain number.
That's a checksum, I believe, of the last digit.
I don't know.
This is so long ago that I remember
this particular formula.
And we printed it back in old issues of 2600.
There was some kind of calculation you could do
or a computer could do to say
if this is a valid format for a credit card.
Like, you know, we know that Visa begins with four.
MasterCard begins with five.
But this went beyond that.
This took the whole number,
and if it added up to a certain amount
or was divisible by a certain amount,
then it was at least it passed that test.
But there was no guarantee it wasn't being used fraudulently.
Then there were also these books that came out every month,
and these books were filled with credit card numbers
that I think were fraudulent.
So when you made a purchase,
oftentimes the merchant would consult that book
and see if the number was on there.
That's a very crude system,
but back then credit card fraud
was nowhere near what it is now,
so they didn't really have to have it updated to the moment,
but that was the best they could do.
Another way of verifying,
and this was probably the most fun,
a merchant would make a phone call
to a credit card company.
And if you ever overheard the phone call,
it was really amazing.
It was pretty comical.
They would start.
The person would pick up on the other end.
They wouldn't say hello or anything.
They would just read off their merchant number
to verify that they had the right to call in the first place.
The person on the other end would say okay.
Then they would read the credit card number,
and then the person on the other end of the phone,
if the credit card number was valid,
would give them a confirmation code.
So the whole conversation
was basically two people exchanging numbers back and forth,
and that was how a lot of credit card verification
worked back then.
Okay.
Now, is this the way that computer terminals
in the airports worked back in the early 90s,
late 80s, early 90s,
where instead of them calling,
the computer's not making a phone call,
but it's basically calling the visa company
or American Express.
Are you talking about for the airline?
Automatic.
Yeah.
You're talking about what the airline would have done?
Yeah.
Yeah, they probably began,
well, because of the volume of authorizations
that they would have to be doing,
they probably linked in their business systems totally.
That was probably some of the earliest sort of retail models
that required just a higher level of integration
with the merchant service provider.
Most definitely.
Okay.
Gayla, did you have something else?
I wanted to say that CKermit
is the same thing that he's talking about with Telnet,
but it also has SSH baked in,
and I do still have a question for you guys,
which we'll get to when Rebel's off the phone.
Okay.
Rebel, one more question or point from you,
and then we're going to move on.
Do you remember police call?
Like, back in the 80s,
before the bail system breakup,
like, you would pick up the phone
and dial the local operator and make a local call.
Or you'd tell her a police call
and you'd give her any four digits
and say that that was a badge number
and they'd put calls through.
I never heard of that.
I know you always would talk about privilege calls
that would make the operator do the work
that most people would do on their own for you,
and they would just dial numbers at your command.
I never heard of a police call like that.
What was the intent of that?
How did the TFPS system verify the calling cards
when people entered them back then?
It's like I'm not talking at all.
I don't know.
Rebel, it's been a joy as always.
Always good to hear your voice,
and maybe you don't hear mine,
but thanks for calling,
and enjoy Portugal and the rest of Europe,
countries and cities that you wind up in.
Hopefully you'll be able to tell the difference.
That would be nice.
Okay, is our phone line clear?
Okay.
802-321-4225.
802-321-HACK.
Gila, go ahead with your question.
Okay.
The question is,
how was the van acquired,
and was it bought from the phone company?
Is the van still somewhere?
My question, not from the listener,
is do we call it the dodgy van because of who made it?
Okay, I'm just going to ignore that last one,
but I will say that the van was obtained legitimately
at a phone company auction
where basically all these old phone company trucks
and cars were being auctioned.
I think it was,
I want to say Westbury, Long Island, Nassau County.
Basically, we went there the day before
to look at all the vans that were out there.
Every single one of them had all the paint scraped off,
so it didn't look like much,
and we got to climb inside
and see what certain vans had
and what certain vans didn't have.
Some were in good condition,
some were in bad condition.
This particular van was the one we chose
for a couple of reasons.
First, it didn't have very many miles on it.
I think it was around 80,000,
which really wasn't that much for a phone company van
that had been used for a number of years.
This was, by the way, in 1993 that we did this,
and we saw a number of vans that were similar.
In particular, there was a van right next to this one
that was extremely similar.
The only difference was
the one that we took an interest in
was manual transmission,
and the other one was automatic.
We used that to our advantage
because nobody wanted to drive manual transmission,
especially in a van that had no power steering
and no air conditioning.
It was a workout, absolutely,
but it's a workout that people who drive vehicles enjoy.
Right, Kyle?
We like driving manual.
Yeah, it's actually in pretty good shape,
and we've noted various places
where there is some metal work
that needs to be done long-term.
Yeah, they all had that.
But it's stored safely
and will be in action, I think, this summer.
Oh, yeah, you'll see it at Hope, for sure.
Is that the last Hope?
It'll be at this Hope.
Yeah, the shifting is great, though.
We've dialed that in.
We had some help.
But let me get back to the auction
because the reason we chose manual
was because knowing how to drive manual,
first of all, is a great thing,
and that's something else.
The people disdain manual
because they want the car to do everything for them.
And I say learn how to drive manual
because you have so much more control over the vehicle,
and you'll be able to feel problems a lot easier.
It's another example of how old technology
is being rejected in favor of the technology
that does it all for you.
Also, the cost of ownership.
An automatic transmission has its own implications
as far as maintenance,
the kinds of fluids you need to deal with,
and it requires a different level of mechanical know-how
and cost to buy a brand-new replacement of that.
The convenience, I think, over time
would have perhaps showed the difference,
whereas getting a manual transmission rebuilt or serviced
or just the simplicity of it, I think, makes it unique.
It is cool.
We had to get a new clutch at one point.
I do know that.
So that was pricey.
Yeah, yeah.
But the familiarity with it,
you don't need to be a specialist in automatic transmissions
is what I'm saying to work on it.
And it's funny because after getting a new clutch,
they moved reverse.
Reverse used to be you'd shift to the right and down.
That was reverse.
Now you shift to the left and up.
And the funny thing is,
when I got the van back from the mechanic,
they didn't tell me that.
And so the first time I'm trying to go into reverse,
I'm like, where did it go?
I can't get into reverse no matter what.
And I had to call them to find out what they did.
So then that's when I learned.
But getting back to the auction,
yeah, so the van next to us that was pretty similar
but automatic, that went for thousands of dollars,
and people really got into a bidding war about that.
Our van, the next one, nobody else wanted it.
And we got it for about 900 bucks.
It was a steal.
And something I have never regretted.
That van is a real trooper.
Engine is in great shape.
And it's seen a lot.
It's seen a lot and made a lot of people happy.
And then, of course, the next part of this
was getting it painted back into the colors
that were scraped off
and getting the vinyl put on just the right way.
Funny thing is, we had the colors, the stripes,
that were identical to New York Telephone trucks.
And they'd wave at us when we passed by,
thinking we were one of them.
Everyone thought, hey, that's the phone company
because from the front there were no logos,
just the stripes.
So it definitely looked like that.
And then after a couple of years,
New York Telephone ceased to exist
and just got drawn into 9x.
And they had different stripes.
They didn't have the same stripes.
So all of a sudden, we had the only van with those stripes.
It was pretty awesome that that was the case.
And somehow we won this battle.
Although to this day,
phone company guys still wave at the van.
I don't know if they've been working that long
and they recognize it was just something
that's ingrained in our DNA.
But it still has that feel to it.
Yeah, and it's recognizable, right?
It's that familiarity.
And it probably needs a wash.
But other than that,
we'll get it nice and shiny and polish it,
show off a little.
It's such a useful vehicle
and still proves its use.
Yeah, we've moved many people's homes in that van.
Equipment, phone booths.
We had Club Mate Day with the van.
Soda, magazines.
We drove it to Dayton at least once.
No, we drove it a few times to Dayton.
Dayton, Ohio for the Hamvention, my God.
It's a very interesting model, the inline engine.
It's not a V.
It's got some unique quirks.
There's probably some interior stuff that needs some rehab.
And we have a ladder that goes on it.
We don't usually put the ladder on it.
Yes.
We usually put megaphones on it instead.
And we have an amber light that we're going to debut, I believe,
at some point.
I hope that answers all the questions about the van.
Do we have another phone call?
Yes, someone's on the line.
They've been waiting.
Call.
Yes, someone's on the line.
They've been waiting.
I'm sorry about that.
Good evening.
You're on Off the Hook Overtime.
Go ahead.
Yes, I have some comments about things you said on the air.
Go ahead.
I would like to get a television for privacy and security reasons that I
use not connected to the internet.
Okay.
Fair enough.
Yes.
So that means that none of these things would apply as long as it
cooperates with that.
Well, I mean, you can get an over-the-air television set that will just
receive the digital signals, as they are now,
using the right kind of antenna and all that.
Rob, you were mentioning how expensive the actual non-smart monitors are
these days.
Do you have any recommendations here?
No particular recommendations, but the commercial displays that you would
get, and you would get that if you, like,
had a business and you wanted TV screens,
but you didn't want all the smart TV nonsense on them.
And, like, if you go into a restaurant and their menu is on a screen or
whatever, that's the sort of thing I'm talking about.
But there is also the option, which may be a hassle to do,
but that is to get just any TV off the shelf,
take it home, start it up, and just never put it on the internet.
We still have that ability.
And the TV will complain.
You'll switch it on, and it'll go, hey, what's your Wi-Fi password?
And if you just don't enter it, it'll probably keep asking you,
and you may have to say no every time.
But, you know, you do have the ability to just never put it on the damn
net in the first place, and therefore it can't transmit anything to you,
but it also can't transmit anything from you.
And you could just hook a TV up to some sort of other device that will be
showing you, you know, whatever digital stuff you want to watch,
or you could receive over-the-air digital signals if you have the right
antenna.
How often will it ask for my Wi-Fi password?
Depends on the brand, I bet.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I think that's about it.
Depending on the brand, it could be often, it could be just once,
it could be anywhere in between.
And there is, unfortunately, no way to know.
Go ahead.
I want to find out before I buy it whether it will be a bad thing.
Yeah, you know what, for that,
that's something the internet can help you with.
If you ask around and make that clear and ignore the people that say,
why do you want to do this, and this is stupid,
just say this is what I want, can anyone help me?
I'm sure on Reddit or something,
you'll find someone who has done the same thing and can recommend
something, because there are lots of people that want what you want.
Go ahead, Rob.
Another option you might have would be if you're going to go into a store,
rather than ordering online,
if you're going to just walk into a shop where they have TVs on display
and ask the person there to show you, like,
can you tell me what would happen if we start this one up,
but don't put it online?
They might be willing to take one of their TVs and take it offline
and show you what happens.
You know what actually might be kind of interesting on this?
What do prisons do?
Because prisons sure don't want Wi-Fi connected to their TV sets,
and they have TV sets.
I guess maybe they have those expensive ones or something like that,
but that might be a place to look.
I was also going to suggest using projector.
I don't know if people still use projectors at all,
or if that's not satisfactory as far as viewing quality,
but if you're just trying to get information from a source,
that's a possible way to go as well.
I still have my grandmother's old TV set from the 1980s, early 1980s,
and it still works.
It never has broken once.
Of course, I haven't used it in the last couple of decades,
but I imagine there's a conversion that you can apply
that will allow it to receive TV signals.
Am I incorrect on that?
I haven't tried.
You can get a box for over-the-air signals.
I'm sorry?
You can get a box for over-the-air signals.
Right.
Converter box.
Oh, wow.
It's in this room?
I didn't realize.
Kyle has just turned on the TV set,
which apparently has been sitting here the whole time,
and I did not know that.
Wow.
Yeah, it's here.
It's plugged into a Sony VCR.
I don't have a lot of storage.
I got to build some shelves.
Okay.
Yeah.
That's right.
You can plug a VCR into it.
That'll still work.
And you can get converters, as was mentioned, I believe,
that will take sort of widescreen,
like 16 by 9 aspect ratio stuff, and will squeeze it.
There's lots of different products available to do that.
We've done that.
We've also hooked up, like, the DV camera,
which was the original Freedom Downtime camera.
That's right.
And we've projected that through the VCR and out of this TV,
and through other monitors, like smaller monitors.
This is why you don't throw out old hardware.
You can always have fun with it.
You can play with this stuff,
and make it retrofit it with some of the tools
and devices that we have now, and repurpose it in fun ways.
Did we help with your question?
I think you helped with some of the things you said.
By the way, about Freedom Downtime,
on the WBI website, when you click off the hook on the schedule,
it says that you recently directed Freedom Downtime.
I guess that's an old description.
That's the only thing I can think of, because that was a while ago.
That was at least, what, 20?
No, more than that, 25 years ago.
About VPNs, which you also talked about,
there's a warning on EFF.org.
There's an article about a vulnerability of VPNs
if you use them in unfamiliar networks.
Does anyone want to talk about the security,
possible security risk to the user of VPNs?
I will say it's one tool that you can use,
and it can be a part of a combination of things that you use.
But, yeah, buyer beware for some of these services,
and be on your toes.
And, of course, don't set unrealistic expectations
of something that is sold to you, especially if it's free.
And, yeah, the ways and the kinds of networks
that you use this on and for what purposes
could leave some gaps in what your expectations might be.
Again, go online, see what's recommended,
see what has a good track record.
See what's been around for a while,
and make a decision based on that.
We're going to move on. Thanks.
VPNs are vulnerable to something called tunnel vision,
an attack that you can do done in the article.
And you used to be able to just,
if you wanted to be as if you were in a different geographical location,
you used to be able to just find a proxy server
somewhere that you could connect to or through.
Right. Yeah, that's gotten harder, that's for sure.
Yeah.
All right.
And, like I said, it's not foolproof, and there are attacks,
and it is because it is used for so many different purposes,
it is something that is desirable for gleaning information
about how it's used or what kind of information is traversing it.
Thanks for the call. We're going to move on.
Take care.
Okay, thanks.
And we're going to take one more phone call,
because we're tired, and we've been at this for a while.
802-321-4225, 802-321-HACK, be that last phone call,
and we will conclude after that.
Yeah, HOPE Conference coming up.
We have received all of the speaker entries.
And, wow, we have some great speaker entries,
and we're looking forward to publishing the rest of the schedule.
A good part of the talks are already announced.
I think we're about halfway through at this point.
So there'll be a lot more showing up there.
We have Cory Doctorow coming.
We have all kinds of amazing people speaking.
And that's not all.
We're having workshops.
We're having villages.
We're having all kinds of fun at St. John's University,
July 12th through 14th.
All the information is on hope.net.
And I think we have another phone call coming in.
This will be the last phone call of the night.
Good evening.
You're on all of the Hookover time.
We have received email.
Yes, go ahead. You're on.
Please turn down your device.
Yeah, I just wanted to ask a quick general question.
Where do I get information on the upcoming HOPE Conference?
Is there a website or something?
It's funny because I just said that.
I guess you were calling at the time.
Yes, the website is hope.net, H-O-P-E dot N-E-T,
and that should tell you everything you need to know.
Okay, okay, okay.
That's all I need to know.
Thank you.
Okay.
Well, that was an easy phone call,
and that means we're going to get out of here a little bit earlier.
Thank you, everybody, for calling in, for listening.
Of course, you can write to us, O-T-H at 2600 dot com.
Plan ahead.
2600 meetings.
Not this Friday, but the one afterwards.
Right, Rob?
Absolutely.
And also keep showing your support for WBAI at give2wbai.org.
Yes, and pledge for that off-the-hook thing, the collection.
Every show we've ever done on a flash drive.
It's pretty interesting.
Anthology.
Anthology, that's the word I was searching for.
Thanks for listening, everyone.
Good night.