Washington's economic blockade of Cuba, lift the U.S. travel ban, normalize relations with
Cuba, respect Cuba's self-determination.
For three consecutive years, the General Assembly of the United Nations has voted to condemn
the U.S. economic blockade of Cuba.
On October 21st, as heads of state from around the world gather in New York to celebrate
the U.N.'s 50th anniversary, and on the eve of President Clinton's address to the U.N.
General Assembly, we will march for an end to Washington's economic war against our neighbor.
Speakers will include Angela Davis, Dennis Rivera, Ramsey Clark, and Lucius Walker.
March to end the economic war against Cuba, Saturday, October 21st, 12 noon.
Assemble across from the United Nations at 42nd Street and 1st Avenue.
That's Saturday, October 21st, 12 noon.
This has been a public service announcement by WBAI on behalf of the October 21st Cuba Coalition.
For more information, call 212-227-3422.
212-227-3422.
You're tuned to Hi-Fi, WBAI 99.5 on your FM dial, New York.
Okay, this is Joe Franklin broadcasting on radio station WBAI.
It's 99.5% all-natural and preservative-free, WBAI-FM in New York.
I love this radio station.
And a very good evening to everybody.
It's 8 o'clock, it's a Tuesday night, and in case you don't know what this is,
it's the program that has moved from Wednesday nights off the hook.
Stay tuned.
So,
broadcasting live from the Empire State Building in New York City, this is Off the Hook,
the program about all kinds of computer hacker-related issues, internet, the telephone
company, consumer issues, Big Brother, and the future.
This is Emanuel Goldstein, and FiberOptic is over there on the other side of the room.
How you doing?
Hi.
And yes, we were just mentioning off-air that there is a new intro on the way for this show.
What you're listening to right now is the old intro.
Well, it just faded away, actually, but we do have a new intro that's in construction right now.
It's actually being made overseas.
It's cheaper to make intros overseas.
I don't know if you know that.
And so we're having it built over there, and it's going to make its way over here.
So you're keeping a pretty tight lid on what exactly this new intro is.
Well, yeah.
In fact, to make things even safer, I don't even know what's going to be on it.
Somehow I was able to work that out with myself where I don't even remember what I'm doing.
So yeah, the new intro has some interesting things on it, but I don't even know what they
are.
So you can torture me, but I won't be able to say anything.
It's kind of like the SAT answers, hermetically sealed in a safe in Albany.
That's right.
That's right.
You never find out in the SATs just what the answers really are.
No.
You're just told that you got something wrong or that you're this smart or this dumb or
whatever, but you never know what you got wrong.
Bothers you for the rest of your life.
And that's the way it's supposed to be.
Anyway, we're here tonight with a special two hour debut in our new time slot.
Tuesday night at 8 o'clock.
Feels different, doesn't it?
Yeah, feels earlier.
I'm up much earlier than I usually am.
Yeah.
It's 26 hours earlier.
We figured this out last week, 26 hours earlier than the usual time slot, which was Wednesdays
at 10.
And tonight we're on for two hours, sort of a special kickoff edition.
And of course, we'll be taking phone calls with all kinds of questions, input, adventures,
stories, whatever people might have as far as net related stuff and telephone company
things.
We've been following over, I guess maybe for all the new people out there that perhaps
have been tuning in for the first time, we might want to do like a sort of a wrap up
of the last few years, because we've been on the air now for several years.
I don't know exactly when the first show was.
I seem to recall we started doing this back in 1989.
I'm sure there's people out there that are diligently keeping records as to what exactly
we're doing.
So maybe they can help us out as far as when the first show was.
But we've been over the years covering quite a few interesting stories.
I remember back at the very beginning, the story, the big story was the FRAC magazine,
the emergency 9-1-1 quote unquote program, which actually was a document that anybody
could obtain for about 10 bucks.
Craig Nidoff was taken to court for that for about I think that was the summer of 1990.
He was taken to court and he was he was facing prison time.
It's unheard of at the time.
He was facing prison time for publishing this document, which was referred to in the media
as a program that could disrupt the 9-1-1 mechanism of phone companies around the country.
That gave us a taste of how the media would distort things over the years.
Fortunately, the government dropped the case against him, but he still had to pay all this
all this money for court court costs, a phrase I've always had trouble with.
So that was the first major thing that that we we dealt with.
Then, of course, Fiber, there was there was your story, which I guess sort of unwound over
the air throughout a couple of years here and culminated in you being sentenced to a
prison term last year, a period from January to around November, where you were sent to
federal prison in Pennsylvania.
We we covered the whole thing on the radio and we talked to you live from prison there.
Have we ever even figured out what it was you were sent to prison for after all this time?
Oh, yeah, it was something along the lines of conspiracy and and computer trespass.
Yeah.
But again, as far as the actual specifics, I was always so nebulous and vague.
Yeah, it was rather vague notions as long as they were they were certain I did something.
I'm sorry, that was me.
So, yeah, no, we we basically I guess we brought a lot of people into the fold
and that particular adventure.
You know, a lot of people sort of went to prison with you in some regard, both online
and over the air.
You got lots of mail from B.A.I.
listeners.
And of course, when you came back, it was a big festive occasion.
Then earlier this year, another one of our friends and writers for a twenty six hundred
magazine, which is the Hacker magazine that we all kind of do stuff for Bernie S.
was apprehended, I guess, in a parking lot of the seven eleven.
He was making some sort of a transaction with other people.
Actually, it was a van filled with black people is the way that it was.
It was described.
And so the the cops down there in Pennsylvania figured it had to be a drug deal because,
you know, people just don't do anything else in that situation.
So they went over and they questioned him.
What they found was that Bernie S. was selling these people in the van some some chips.
There is nothing wrong with selling chips to people, at least not last I heard.
Actually, that could very well be different now.
He was selling chips that could be implanted into a Radio Shack tone dialer, which would
turn that Radio Shack tone dialer into a red box, red box being the device which makes
the phone company think that you put a quarter in the phone using that device.
It was our understanding is what is illegal, using the device to make free phone calls,
making the free phone call.
That is when you break the law.
However, the government has recently and by recently, I mean about a year ago,
expanded the laws to include having the device, having equipment that could be used in any way
to do something fraudulent.
That's illegal to having information, having software, having hardware.
And this is what the Secret Service kicked in Bernie S.'s door for shortly after the
local police searched his his car.
They they went through his house.
They went through his person.
They found software and hardware and things that if used in the in the proper manner or
improper manner could defraud phone companies, could clone cellular phones, say things like
that.
There has never been any evidence or any allegation that Bernie S.
did anything with this information except share it.
However, that is now enough to put somebody in federal prison.
Bernie S.
has been in federal prison now since March, and he is scheduled to be sentenced a week
from today.
He has pleaded guilty because the way he described it.
Technically, he did break that law.
The law is crazy.
The law says that if you possess this particular instrument that can make a beep, you're in
violation.
You've committed a felony just possessing it.
Having software which can do that is also a violation.
So crazy as it sounds, he was forced to plead guilty because had he pleaded innocent and
then been found guilty of that particular crime, he could have gone to prison for a
lot longer.
The way it stands now, he has already served the maximum amount of time he could have been
sentenced for having pled guilty.
So I believe next week, a week from today, Bernie S.
will finally be out of prison.
He has been calling us live on the radio.
However, we won't be hearing from him tonight because we just want to wait till the sentencing
is over just so that there's no nothing else to complicate his life.
I do know the Secret Service was very upset with the fact that he was on the air here
and they tried many different ways to get him off the air, but none of them worked.
But in this particular case, I think that's probably probably the smartest thing.
What do you think of the whole Bernie S.
saga?
Well, I think in light of recent events, he's probably better off if he committed murder.
Yes, yes, that's I guess I could be allegedly, though, allegedly to respect and a double
murder at that.
By the way, let me just let me just issue a warning at this point.
Any callers that call in and mention a certain subject that's being mentioned everywhere
else in the world will be cut off.
This show is not about that.
We're not even going to say what that is.
We all know what that is, but we're not going to mention it, right?
Because we're better than that.
We have our own like, you know, little world here that we stay focused upon.
There's no need to bring in these outside influences and act like everybody else.
So this is off the hook program that deals with hackers, technology, the future and big
brother and surveillance and all that kind of thing, you know.
All right.
So we just talked to Bernie yesterday.
In fact, yes, we did.
He sounded pretty good, didn't he?
He sounded to be to be in good spirits.
Yeah.
And what do you think is going to happen next?
I'm hoping that that he gets time served based on what his sentencing guidelines are.
I think he said two to eight months, I believe.
I think so.
Yeah.
Now, maybe you can explain.
We all become experts on sentencing guidelines.
This is something that hackers didn't used to know about.
But now we all know about this whole point system.
Could you explain the point system?
Well, vaguely, from what I remember, there's various points are given or taken away.
Obviously, you want as many points taken away as possible to put you in the lowest level
of the sentencing guidelines.
So most people listening right now would probably be what point zero.
Well, if you're not we don't want to be if you're not charged with anything,
I don't have any points at all.
OK, we have no point.
So the average citizen has zero point.
Yeah, you want to have zero points throughout your life.
All right.
That's the goal to keep the keep the clock at zero.
All right.
But if you were charged for with a particular crime in the federal system,
then you would accumulate points based on what it is you're accused of.
For example, more than minimal planning,
having committed the crime is worth a certain number of points.
And all these points basically add up.
And points can be taken away based on things such as.
What was it?
That that thing that that everybody does, if you acknowledge responsibility,
that's it.
Yeah.
The acknowledgement of responsibility, i.e. pleading guilty.
Well, I mean, you can plead guilty and not really.
So they consider it if you if you're remorseful,
if you're remorseful, even if you plead guilty,
if you're remorseful and you acknowledge that you did something wrong
and you accept the responsibility, that acceptance of responsibility,
if I recall, is worth having two points deducted.
OK, so you get two points off if you're.
Yeah, that's the most you can get off for acceptance of responsibility.
And those points are not transferable.
Oh, no.
OK, just some points left over.
You know, you don't gain interest or anything like that.
OK.
It's important that we get this straightened out,
because a lot of people are new to this, you know,
going to be thought of as federal criminals.
I think we should all know how the system works,
you know, that way we can figure out ways to get as little points as possible.
Yeah, there's a nice little booklet that lots of lawyers have.
Oh, really?
Yeah, that's the sentencing guidelines booklet.
That's only federal.
Yeah, I don't believe it works that way in state.
OK.
Now, how many points did you have?
Um, gosh.
I forget exactly how many points it was.
I remember I was level 12.
However, it added up.
Maybe the level is the sum of the number of points.
I forget exactly how it worked out.
OK, but you were sentenced to a year and a day because of that.
Yeah, level 12 is 10 to 16 months,
which means that if the judge would go below 10 months,
then he would probably get a lot of arguing from the prosecution.
And if the judge would go beyond the 16 months
and go actually above and beyond the sentencing guidelines,
then, of course, you would have the option to appeal,
I suppose, provided that you didn't agree that you wouldn't appeal.
Well, a lot of the power seems to be taken out of the judge's hands.
He has to stick to certain guidelines.
Well, I mean, he doesn't really have to do anything.
He can give you more or less,
but he's sort of bound to stick between the range of the guidelines.
Now, as far as Bernie S. goes,
I think he's got between six and eight points.
Is that right?
Yeah, I think that's what he said.
It sounds to me almost like the points equate to months
because you were 12 points, you got 12 months.
We're looking at six months for him and he's got six points.
It doesn't necessarily come out that way.
All right.
But so far, it seems to.
Yeah.
Well, if he was, I think he said two to eight or whatever it was,
and he's already been there for almost six.
He's been there over six, over seven months.
He's been there.
I should point out to those people aren't familiar with this case.
He's been held in federal prison with no bail
as if he were some sort of a terrorist.
And this is for carrying around some or not even carrying around.
It was in his house someplace, an instrument that can make beeps.
You know, that's what we're talking about here.
Now, if you're listening for the first time,
you think that we're crazy for talking about this.
We're talking about point systems.
And, you know, we don't sound like the kind of people
that should be dealing with prisons and things like that.
And, you know, sending people away with no bail
for having little boxes that make beeps.
Yeah, it is crazy.
That's the whole point.
That's the whole point that we're trying to bring across here
that we've been bringing across for the last few years.
And you know what?
It's getting crazier.
It really is.
The amount of control that the federal government
seems to want to have over its citizens is scary.
It really is.
Things like the clipper chip and the digital telephony bill
that we've been watching over the years are really quite frightening.
And this latest push to control encryption
is something that I think we all need to keep an eye upon.
That's what we're going to be doing in this show
in the weeks, months, years ahead.
And let's hope we have some good news
because there's been a lot of bad news over the past year or so.
A lot of movement backwards, you know,
where we feel like we just have no power.
But that's where a place like BAI comes in
because we do have power here in numbers by listening together,
by, you know, focusing our resources
on particular objects and things like that.
We have some more bad news.
I mean, I don't want to get people really upset here,
but you do need to know what's going on.
I don't know if many people listening now
were listening a couple of weeks ago,
but we had a guest on who was dropping by from Holland
who goes by the name of Bill SF.
Bill SF is probably one of the most knowledgeable people
as far as the phone systems of the world that I can imagine.
You can drop Bill SF in a country
that doesn't even have a name someplace
he'll go to a phone and he'll figure out
how to make that phone call wherever he wants to make it call.
He'll know what kind of switching technology there is,
what kind of signaling they use,
and he'll know how to build things.
And, you know, this is not something that is bad.
A lot of people will say,
oh, someone can build things, they're dangerous.
Yeah, you can use it for bad purposes,
but what Bill has been doing over the past few years
has been some very good things in Holland,
helping out the Holland internet providers, Access for All.
And basically what transpired a couple of weeks ago
was that Bill came back to this country
because he had been away for quite some time.
Bill was involved in something
that some of you may have heard of back in,
I think, the late 80s.
It was called the BART scandal.
And BART is the Bay Area Rapid Transit System.
We've written that, haven't we?
Sure.
Yeah, they have that little,
it's not like the one they're trying to do here,
which I think is falling apart.
Maybe we'll have some info on that later.
But the Bay Area Rapid Transit System
uses a little magnetic strip.
You put it into the turnstile,
sucks it in and then immediately makes it go out on the top
and prints out on the ticket how much you have left,
which is always nice to know how much you have left.
Unlike the New York system,
which you're supposed to look at the magnetic strip
and somehow know.
So what happened was he and I believe it was Captain Crunch,
and maybe one other person.
They were at his house.
He wasn't really involved with it.
Captain Crunch being the grandfather of phone freaks, I guess.
They had figured out a way to duplicate the cards.
And of course, as most phone freaks and computer hackers,
they didn't make very good criminals.
They weren't able to keep it quiet for very long.
And pretty soon the whole world knew
that they had figured out a way to make fake BART cards.
And so they all got in trouble for that
and were sentenced to various times in various prisons.
So what happened was Bill was out on probation
and he really wasn't very comfortable where he was.
A lot of restrictions.
I mean, you're on probation right now, Fiber.
Yeah.
And I know that a lot of people that are on probation,
not saying that you are,
but a lot of people tend to be hassled in various ways.
A lot of restrictions, a lot of checking up.
Some people have to have drug tests all the time.
Some people are always having their location checked out
and their employers visited and things like that.
And I think Bill was in a situation like that
where he just didn't feel like his life was his own anymore.
So he decided, and it was a very big decision to make,
to move to Holland,
where things are a lot more open and free
and where he could actually play with technology
without fear of repercussions
and where he would be welcomed
not only by computer hackers over there,
but by ordinary people as well,
because Holland just tends to be like that.
People tend to listen to what phone freaks
and computer hackers have to say
because sometimes we're the first ones to get there.
So Bill moved over to Holland in 1989
and he's been living there ever since.
And I visited him a couple of times.
It's really quite amazing the kinds of things that he does.
You know, he builds phone systems
and sort of hooks the whole office network together
and things like that.
And he's revered over there, let's put it that way.
So he came back a few weeks ago to visit his parents
because he had not seen them ever since he left back in 1989.
And, well, he went out to California shortly
after appearing on this show two weeks ago
and he was in Berkeley
and he had some sort of a run-in with cops over there.
I don't really have many more details than that,
but what it boils down to is that they ran his name,
they found out he was technically a probation violator
and now he's in jail too.
And we don't know if he's going to get out anytime soon.
He should have been back in Holland by now.
He's being held here instead.
That's a very sad situation.
What I'd like to do now is,
just so people can hear in case they didn't hear the first time,
the last things that he had to say on this radio station,
that way you'll know what the voice of Bill SF sounds like
and also the kinds of things that he was into.
This is his commentary on the recent Church of Scientology raids in Holland.
You may have heard of this.
The Church of Scientology were able to orchestrate a raid
on the Access for All headquarters
because they had been serving as an anonymous remailer
and they had passed through some information
that the Church of Scientology thought was copywritten
or restricted in some way.
And so in this way that they seem to be doing recently,
they sought to shut them down somehow.
They've been trying to do this to the whole internet in various ways.
Usenet news groups, Netcom, the anonymous remailer in Finland
and now the anonymous remailer in Holland.
And this is something that really angered Bill SF
because I guess anytime you step on someone's freedom,
freedom of speech,
it's something that we should be indignant about
and Bill certainly was.
Anyway, let's listen to the last words he had to say on the subject.
Tell us where it stands.
Where it stands, I talked to Niels,
who is one of my housemates out there,
and he said that basically Scientology is,
I can't say the word here in the States,
it can in Holland,
but Scientology has been totally made to look like dirt.
The Dutch government is going to make moves
and is moving rapidly to revoke them of their status of being a church
and forcing them to pay all back taxes.
Wow.
Watch out, Scientology.
That is something.
And I also heard that that was the Fisher affidavit,
that document they were after.
That's all over the net now.
All over.
They can't stop.
You're all over Scientology.
OK, well, I guess that's what happens when.
All right.
Those are the last last words from Bill SF.
Hopefully Scientology will stay out of this,
but you never know.
We'll keep you updated when we hear more from from him and his situation.
OK, let's let's take a look now at some of the things that are happening around the globe.
There's always all kinds of technical mess ups and foul ups
and blunders and things like that.
We've experienced a few,
and there have been quite a few over the past few weeks.
You hear about the thing that happened with pagers?
No.
What thing is that?
Where all the pagers?
Well, when I say all the pagers went off, I don't mean they beeped.
I mean, they didn't go off.
You know, they shut them down.
For some reason, the pagers stopped working.
OK, you didn't hear about this.
A lot of people didn't.
Basically, according to according to the news item,
the Houston Chronicle.
Let's look at that one.
Uh, the shutdowns were caused when a data entry clerk mistakenly forgot to enter a carriage return
when he was entering in the receiver codes into several paging company satellite uplinks.
So according to this person who works,
I believe, in a hospital,
our page net pagers were out of service from about 1130 p.m.
Tuesday night to 1130 a.m.
Wednesday.
This is this is last week, according to an Associated Press news article today.
This was actually about a week ago.
A technician at Spacecom, the satellite carrier,
accidentally disabled thousands of satellite receivers.
Apparently, the receivers had to be restored individually.
The story indicates that five of the national paging companies use Spacecom.
And the way it works is how it was described on Telecom Digest over the Internet.
When you send a page, the signal gets relayed to a large number of local sites,
which then feed it into local transmitters.
Wireless is designed for the semi-national coverage.
It's often the way your neighborhood paging system works as well.
Your satellite pager does not get a signal directly from orbit,
but rather via a terrestrial relay.
So they shut down the local receivers by remote control.
Problem was they couldn't restart them the same way.
This could be due to two reasons.
A, there was a complete shutdown,
so the receivers didn't get the turn on signal.
After all, they were off.
And the second reason is pager transmitters are designed
so that a group of them spaced perhaps 10 miles apart all go off simultaneously.
Although it flies in the face of everything I know about radio,
they can and do set off multiple transmitters to ensure,
usually, that the signal covers the wanted area.
This requires ultra-precise synchronization.
It's quite possible they were able to turn the units back on,
but did not have remote sync capability.
And that comes from some contributors to the Telecom Digest.
Did we have anything like this happening?
No, but I'm kind of shady on how this could possibly affect people
that don't have satellite pagers.
Yeah, well, I imagine it probably only affected them.
Yeah, that's what it sounds like.
But again, how do you know?
I mean, how do you know if your pager wasn't working?
It's not always going off, you know?
You don't know when it's not going off because it's just impossible to tell.
You can't pick it up and listen, see if it's there.
Unless you hear from somebody that...
I'm always hearing people saying,
oh yeah, I was beeping all day yesterday.
I'm like, yeah, right.
Yeah, but then again, if the transmitters were off,
most intelligent pagers say out of range.
That's true, some do.
Some do, but not all.
Yeah.
Okay, the London Underground is fighting to clean up its computer systems
after one of its own trainees hacked in
and posted an offensive message on the digital displays
located above two platforms around the capital.
How many of you have been to London?
Okay, in London, they have this system.
And I think they should have this in New York.
Of course, they never will.
Where they have a little digital display over by the platform.
It says, next train going to this location will arrive in three minutes.
And I guess they have sensors or something that tell it
how many minutes away this train is.
Because as it gets down to zero minutes,
sure enough, you hear the roar of the train and there it is.
So you always know how long you're going to have to wait for a train
and where it's going.
So computing can reveal that on August 16th,
a message appeared on displays at Piccadilly, Elephant and Castle,
and Regent's Park underground stations,
declaring all signalmen are...
Is that a word I can't say?
It's a British term that begins with W.
Wanker?
Yeah.
Well, you just said it.
Oh, you can say that.
I can say wanker.
Okay.
Because that might be the most horrible word that I've ever...
I've asked around a few people and I said,
hey, you're a wanker.
And they didn't hit me.
So I figured it's not a bad term in this country.
Well, it's not here, no.
Over there.
Over there, it could be the equivalent of saying jerk off.
You can't say that.
You can't say jerk off?
Yeah.
Well, I know what wanker means,
but I'm not going to go into the details after that.
Anyway.
Okay.
So basically the message was,
instead of saying the next train to Elephant and Castle in three minutes,
it said all signalmen are wankers.
The message went unnoticed by tube staff for more than 12 hours before being removed.
There were no complaints from the thousands of commuters.
But despite being clear,
the message reappeared on tube station displays on August 29th.
A full, what is that?
13 days later.
Two days later, London Underground staff were called in to locate the problem.
The message had apparently been saved onto the system
and was randomly generated at the later date.
A London Underground spokesperson told Computing Magazine,
when we train people,
we usually take them around on an induction course.
It seems one of the trainees obviously had more experience than the others.
He managed to hack into the computer,
bypass the input codes,
and put a message on the dot matrix displays.
He added the reappearance of the message was due to a technical glitch
and not a deliberate action.
The trainee is no longer an employee.
So they take swift action over there in London.
That can never happen here because we don't have displays like that.
All right.
What else has been going on?
Well, there was a problem with Netscape.
Now perhaps, Fiber, you can tell us what was going on with that.
Oh, which problem?
Okay, there are actually two.
I'll go over them one by one.
Two Berkeley computer science graduate students interested in cryptography
identified a serious security flaw in the Netscape software
for browsing the World Wide Web.
Netscape says a repaired version was sent out almost immediately afterwards,
as according to the New York Times.
It involved a weakness in the use of a pseudo-random number generator
to create the crypto seed.
Knowledge of the weakness enables the key to be reverse engineered
with significantly less than exhaustive effort.
That's according to the Risk Digest.
Is that one of the ones?
Yeah, well, there's actually three things.
The original thing was the initial discovery and weakness
in the fact that the public domain version of Netscape
that most everyone uses,
the key that was used in supposed secure transactions,
that's when the little key closes on the bottom left corner in Netscape.
Why would you be using that?
Lots of companies want to actually get into commerce on the net,
allowing people to feel secure about buying items,
doing shopping on the net and supplying credit cards,
which otherwise would get transmitted in the clear.
So if the key in Netscape closes in theory
using something called the secure socket layers,
which is an implementation of secure communications in Netscape
between the browser and the web server,
that the transactions would actually be encrypted.
And the problem, the initial, the first problem,
was that in the browser everyone was using,
this key was only 40 bits long,
whereas in the commercial version it was 128 bits.
And this key could be predictively and exhaustively searched
in not a very long amount of time.
And that was the first thing that was done.
The second thing that was done, as you mentioned,
was that these two people from Berkeley figured out
that the random number that was chosen to generate the key
for these transactions was not so random.
And that was strike two.
Strike three, most recently,
was not anything having to do with encryption,
but that if a URL, that's the uniform resource locator,
which actually is the address of something on the web.
We call them URLs.
Yeah, URLs.
If a URL was made purposefully very long,
then two things could be made to happen.
First thing that could be made to happen, most obviously,
is that someone could create a link on a web page
with a URL that's extremely long
that would crash the person's browser.
That in and of itself is obviously annoying.
The second problem related to that is that
what's really happening is you're overflowing the stack.
And time and time again, this keeps coming up.
If you can overflow the stack in a particular application,
you can cause the machine that's running the application
to execute commands against its own will.
Now, we've seen that in mail.
We've seen that in Netscape.
We've seen that in the internet worm.
Just overflowing the stack, that seems to be the secret.
It's the key to everything.
Isn't there a way to stop that?
Well, yeah, it's called balance checking.
But usually the culprit is sloppy programming.
Yeah.
And I grabbed the newest version in Netscape that came out,
which was, I think, called 1.22.
And the URL that everyone was using to test
that was just a really, really long one,
you can't actually type one that long.
You have to actually click on a link
so that the URL is sent directly to your browser to look up.
But the URL in question that previously crashed Netscape
no longer does.
So either the bug was fixed, or they simply
made the buffer bigger.
So you just have to send a longer URL.
But I didn't actually test that myself.
OK.
Well, that does seem to be what the problem was.
So Netscape users, beware.
Yeah.
All kinds of weirdness is happening on the net.
But that's part of the growing pains of the internet.
We see things like this all the time.
You have to kind of deal with it.
One thing, though, that I'm kind of leery about dealing with,
that's the whole encryption issue,
which we mentioned before.
And this is very disturbing.
I'm not sure if people have heard about this.
According to an article in Communications Week
International, the 34-nation Council of Europe
has agreed to outlaw strong encryption products
which do not make keys available to governments.
The article is called Euro Clipper Chip Scheme Proposed.
It's on the front page of the magazine's September 18 edition.
It says that the policy was approved on the 8th of September
at Strasbourg by the Council and coincides with an attempt
by the European Commission to propose
a pan-European encryption standard.
The Council, unlike the Commission,
has no statutory powers to enforce its recommendations.
However, according to the chairman of the committee
that drafted the document, it is rare for countries
to reject Council of Europe recommendations.
The proposal would make telecom operators
responsible for decrypting traffic
and supplying it to governments when asked.
It would also change national laws
to enable judicial authorities
to chase hackers across borders.
It's pretty scary, don't you think?
I mean, this is not just about hackers.
This isn't about chasing...
I mean, they throw that in there to make it seem
like they're just trying to catch computer hackers.
But when you outlaw encryption,
you're basically saying, you know,
the government reserves the right
to invade your privacy whenever they want.
You know, it's...
If somebody opens your mail, you know,
the mail that goes to your home address, to your P.O. box,
you can generally tell.
You see that it's been opened.
And you can get angry.
You can do something about it.
You can at least be aware of it.
However, on the net, that's not really possible, is it?
So it's a lot more difficult.
And it's just very easy for something like this
to be abused, where...
I mean, you wouldn't give your...
I hate to bring up house analogies,
but in this particular case, I think it does hold,
because we're talking about private information,
you know, and if you have private information,
personal things about yourself,
you don't want someone to have the ability to read that,
unless you trust them.
If the government went around and said,
hey, we need keys to everyone's home
so that, you know, we can just come in
and if something's wrong, we can take care of it.
I don't think very many people,
Republican, Democrat, whatnot, would agree to that,
because we all have a sense of privacy.
And that's why this whole clipper chip proposal
kind of fell on its face a couple of years ago.
But what's disturbing is that we're seeing it
being adopted in other countries.
The first was Russia a couple of months ago.
And the funny thing was, it happened in Russia
shortly after the FBI had done a little presentation
over there to try and convince them.
And yeah, they were convinced.
They did it.
It's now in place there.
And now, apparently, other European governments
are following.
So pretty soon, most of the world
will be outlawing encryption.
So what's going to stop us from doing it?
So it's very scary, very sad,
and something that I think is really unenforceable.
How do you do that?
How do you enforce something like that?
How do you tell somebody?
It's pretty hard.
Yeah, I mean, if you have strong encryption
that the government does not have a key to,
are they just going to assume you're a criminal?
They'll probably just draft some law
where it states that mere usage is illegal.
Or mere possession, like with the Bernie S case.
The encryption itself will be like having
a device that makes beeps.
It'll be as dangerous as that.
Possession of encryption tools.
It's almost like I'm living science fiction here.
I don't know what's going to happen next.
All right, how about one more story?
And then we'll maybe take some phone calls?
Yeah.
OK, because we want to hear from some new listeners out there.
Our number is 212-279-3400.
This is off the hook.
This is our new time slot between 8 and 9.
However, tonight we're doing a special two-hour season premiere.
So feel free to give us a call if you have any questions
or feedback or things like that.
And just remember, we're not talking about you-know-what.
All right, this is something which I think is incredibly silly,
but happened nonetheless.
New methods of voting designed to replace
the traditional polling place and ballot box
are a regular topic of discussion in various forums.
The method being discussed usually involves voting
by phone or by computer.
Now, get this.
The state of Oregon is experimenting with a new voting method,
but is using a technology that may be older
than the voting booth itself.
And that technology is the mail.
Yeah.
Senator Packard's replacement, who will be elected on January 30th,
will be the first member of the U.S. Congress
ever elected in an all-mail election.
Well, that's a phrase I wouldn't want to say too many times.
All-mail election, yeah.
Okay, ballots will be mailed out to all registered voters
a few weeks before the election date.
Voters fill out the ballots in their own home at their leisure.
You can do it at four o'clock in the morning if you want to.
That's the beauty of this.
They can then either send them back through the mail
or take them in person to a designated drop-off point.
All completed ballots must arrive by January 30th.
Oregon has used all-mail elections before
for local elections with pretty good success,
but this will be the first time it has been tried in a statewide election.
No one claims to fully understand the risks involved,
so people will be watching this election very carefully.
Election officials like all-mail elections
because they don't have to set up any polling places
or find people to run them.
Most think that voter participation will increase.
The potential for fraud is greater,
but most officials seem to have enough faith
in the general public that they are not worrying about it.
The timing of campaigns will definitely change.
Any last-minute media blitz is useless
because most people will have already voted.
Now, I don't understand how anybody can say
that they don't fully understand the risks involved.
I mean, this is a piece of paper.
There is no way of checking to make sure you haven't already voted.
I mean, what safeguards do they have in place for that?
You could run off your own copies.
You could duplicate pretty easily,
unless they're doing something like American currency,
which is also duplicated.
But if they're going to that much trouble,
maybe that's how they're preventing fraud.
Or, what's that?
They're using some sort of punch card or scantron.
Okay, well, if they're doing something like that,
then all of a sudden anonymous elections are gone out the window
because they can figure out who it is that voted for who.
True.
All right, so that's, you have an opinion there.
Yeah, I'm probably the only person in the room
who's voted both by affidavit ballot
and absentee ballot in the state of New York.
In the same election?
No, different elections.
Okay, that's good.
What an affidavit ballot is,
is if you insist that you've registered
and they have no record of it at your polling place,
they give you a paper ballot and an envelope.
And what you do is you fill out the paper ballot,
which is a relatively simple example of printing.
It's very easy to counterfeit.
It's nowhere near as complicated as paper money.
But they give it to you there.
They give it to you there.
You don't take it home.
You don't take it home.
Right.
And you sign the back of the,
they give you a blank envelope.
You put the affidavit ballot in the regular envelope,
in the blank envelope.
Put that inside another envelope.
You sign the back of it.
Right.
They only open this if the election is tight,
if the number of affidavit and absentee ballots
is larger than the gap between the two.
And supposedly, they're supposed to compare the signature
to your signature on the rolls,
if and when they find it,
to make sure it's you.
Well, now this is a situation, though,
where 100% of the votes are going to be done in this way.
So obviously, it makes a bit of a difference.
I just wish we had some listeners in Oregon,
because I'd like to get one of these ballots
and figure out ways of making our own.
And that's not to say that that's what we want to do.
But you see, this is where the difference
of thinking like a hacker
and being treated like a criminal comes into play.
Because obviously, everybody is curious as to how it's done.
Everybody wants to know how you can possibly
make this whole system fall apart.
And it seems to me, this is relatively easy to do.
All you have to do is,
I mean, even if you go around to all your friends
who don't want to vote and collect their papers,
or you simply get it out of the mailbox or whatnot,
it's very simple.
It's very simple to vote many, many times.
Nobody will ever find out.
So it seems to me that that's pretty apparent
what the risks are in this case.
I hope there's no mail voting around here anytime soon.
But we'll keep our eye on things like that.
Okay, our phone number is 212-279-3400.
And this is our first show in our new time slot.
So let's see who's out there,
see what kind of new listeners we have,
or if any of the same listeners have made the switch.
Do you think the first call will be Rebel again?
I hope not.
It probably will be,
because he always manages to be the first call.
So let's see if he's going to be the first call this time.
Good evening, you're on the air.
Oh, imaginable.
I don't believe it.
How does he do it?
How do you do this?
For one thing, the central office times out
after a certain amount of time.
So you would have to have been hung up on
if you were calling all this time.
I don't know how you do it.
I don't understand.
I think he's like sitting out in the hallway somehow,
and he's just taking over the phone line.
Well, I'm going to give out my new email address.
You're going to give out your email address over the radio.
While people are getting their pens and papers out.
Yeah, I'm sure it's a mad rush to stationery stores right now,
people that want your address.
Well, I'm going to give out my new email address.
But before I do, I just want to make a correction that I,
the last time I called a couple of weeks ago,
I had mentioned that you can dial 10999
and then zero the area code number,
which will connect you with LDDS Metromedia.
I had mentioned that you can make free phone calls
by going to a call card
and telling them to bill it to the phone you're at.
As of last week, they do not do that anymore from any phone.
Well, probably because you announced it
on a 50,000 watt radio station in New York City.
And I saw the movie Hackers twice.
And when I saw the movie the second time,
there was only three people in the theater.
Uh-huh.
Well, I can, I can, I can offer various theories
as to why everybody else might've left.
But what do you mean left?
Oh, you mean you didn't stay for two showings?
No, no, no.
I saw two different things.
Oh, okay.
Okay.
I thought you stayed for a second time
and people saw you there and said,
no, let's go to the other theater.
Okay.
Now my mistake.
It's not doing very well.
But I still liked it.
Well, I don't know if you know this,
but most movies aren't doing very well.
Most people are, you know,
a crowd of like 10 people in a theater these days
is considered a lot for a film
that's been out more than a week.
Well, all right.
Let's give out our new email address.
Yes, let's do that.
Okay.
It is rebel at escape.com.
Okay.
Rebel at escape.com.
And what should people be sending you?
Just anything.
You could finger me.
You'd like that, wouldn't you?
Well, you know what I mean.
I think I do.
All right.
Well, and I'm having trouble with Netscape.
When I try and browse a web page,
it doesn't work.
Well, Fiber, why don't you help?
Oh, gee, thanks.
Well, what's the problem?
Well, all right.
Let me just tell you.
When I go and let me go into
the sound of rebel hacking live on the air.
Let me go into escape internet tools
and I go to a thing called TCP man,
which is the trumpet windsock.
Wait a minute.
All right.
Here it is.
Windsock.
Now I go into windsock.
Windsock.
Windsock.
Not windstock.
Windsock.
Okay.
It dials.
Now, is this supposed to be
logging me in as ppp.rebel?
Um, do you know the,
I think that's system specific.
We should have one of the escape.
Okay.
We have, we have an escape staff person
that just flew by and answered this question.
Field this one.
Uh, yeah.
The way it's set up at escape is ppp.the username
in order to tell it doesn't work.
I tried it.
Look at set up command.
I'm going to set up.
What you should do is call the escape office
during their hours from 10 to six,
Monday through Friday,
and talk to one of the nice people there.
Yeah, because your problem is with the,
you know, the escape service,
not with, uh, WBAI and off the hook
and all the people that are listening right now.
But good luck.
We wish you the best of luck
with your endeavors on the internet.
You know, I guess that's,
that's part of the trade-off of,
you know, allowing,
allowing access to the world
is that the world sometimes,
you know, comes by and,
and ask you all kinds of questions
and, and things like that.
Okay.
Somebody's got to provide,
uh, customer service to the world.
Yeah.
Customer service to the world.
Might as well be us.
Yeah.
All right.
Two, one, two, two, seven, nine, three, 400.
Good old rebel.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
You're on the air.
Yeah.
I was just wondering, uh,
how you guys feel about the current state of,
uh, all 2600 news group.
All 2600 news group.
Well, I don't know how many people actually read that,
but, um, actually, well, okay.
Interestingly enough, just this evening
or last evening,
I noticed that somebody had spammed it again
and made something like, uh,
a thousand messages appear
in the course of a couple of hours.
Uh, all 2600 seems to be one of the,
one of the most highly trafficked news groups
ever to have existed on the net,
which is kind of funny because when it first started,
uh, like about a year and a half ago,
a lot of administrators said,
oh, there's not enough interest for this kind of thing.
What, what, the way I look at all 2600,
that's how information is when it's unfiltered.
You know, basically everybody says
whatever they want to say
and probably 80% of it is nonsense
or is untrue in some way.
And then if you piece it together in some form,
like, you know, with 2600 itself
or with the Risk Digest or Telecom Digest or whatever,
um, then you have some, some semblance of information,
which at least is a little bit more, um, uh, structural,
you know, and that's, uh,
I think that's what we see with this.
It's, you know, all 2600 really is, uh,
it's just a typical, uh,
Usenet news group that's not moderated.
How do you feel about it?
Uh, well, when I first started about six months ago,
uh, it was the only information that I knew how to get.
And it was a good source of information for me,
but now a little bit later,
uh, it's just become more of a hassle.
And I don't know, I felt that six months ago,
it was pretty good.
And it kind of irked me that it's what it's like now.
Well, what do you think are the main problems?
Um, mostly, uh, like people, like everyone complained
after they saw war games that, uh,
all these new guys wanted to become hackers for no reason,
and they just wanted answers.
They didn't want to research problems for themselves.
And now people are saying with the movie hackers coming out
that we're getting the same problem, but...
Yeah, so that's a generational type of a thing.
You know, hacking is never the same as it used to be.
Exactly. I mean, it's, it's, I don't know,
it's a shame though that, that people have to be, uh,
so rude to other people.
Because there is people out there that want to learn
and want to learn the correct way.
Have, have you ever been on IRC?
What's that?
Have you ever been on IRC, Internet Relay Chat?
I think there's the same problem in IRC.
Yeah, because if you're talking about rude,
and, and people that just want information,
and, and people getting kicked off
because they ask questions and things like that,
that happens all the time.
But the advice that I can give you is that
you should never take anything that happens on the net seriously,
or it's certainly not the same as real life, you know?
Right.
If somebody, you know, uh, slaps you around in real life,
that's a lot worse than if they do it on the net, you know?
The net is, you don't know if you're talking to, uh,
you know, to, to a, an 80-year-old grandmother
or a 12-year-old kid, you know?
It's, it's basically everybody is equal
and everybody can act like an idiot if they feel like it.
Exactly. I agree with you totally.
All right.
Thanks a lot.
Sure. Take care.
I guess, you know, part of the problem is the net is just,
uh, it's expanding so much that all these people
that, uh, weren't part of the beginning,
you know, the, the building of the net,
are just jumping in midstream,
and, uh, they expect it all to, uh, you know, to, to follow them.
Well, uh, one big problem I see with, uh,
news groups like Alt.2600 is that, uh,
federal government, specifically law enforcement,
is probably going to believe every single thing they read on there.
Oh, I'm sure they do.
Yeah.
I'm sure they do.
Because they've, they've come after people
and asking them questions about, um,
about all kinds of bizarre things that, uh,
couldn't possibly be true.
Moving satellites and, uh, and, and building explosives
and that's things that people, you know, make up,
but they don't know.
They, they take it too seriously,
which is exactly what I, I stress that should not be done.
212-279-3400.
The program is off the hook.
We're on the air at our new time slot
from 8 to 9 p.m. on Tuesdays.
However, tonight we're going extra long.
We're going from 8 to 10.
So if you have any comments, questions,
stories to tell or, uh, or anything else,
212-279-3400.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Yeah, I have three questions.
One is, what do you think of Wired magazine,
which I, which I subscribe to?
And, uh, the other one is I'm interested,
do you have tapes of your shows?
I'm really interested in the legal questions
that you've been raising about people being arrested
for what would seem to be, you know, rather,
I don't know.
I don't, I want to use the word trivial,
but it seems sort of wild that a guy's arrested
for something he has in his house and he's not using it.
And I'm interested in re-listening
to what you've been saying
or finding out more about this issue.
And, uh, the other, the other third thing is
you had mentioned that there's censorship on America Online
and I wish you would,
you would talk about that a little bit more.
So I'm waiting to hear your answers
and thank you very much.
Okay, thanks for calling.
Uh, to start with, uh, Wired magazine,
well, you know, Wired is not anything
like a, a hacker type of magazine.
It's, it's kind of trendy, kind of into the, uh,
the whole cyber scene as it is.
And I have no real problem with Wired.
It's, it's kind of fun to, uh, you know, to experience.
Although-
Except when you start turning the pages.
Well, when you start turning the pages,
that's when some problems begin
because it's kind of hard to follow the text
because they, they have to be so snazzy with it.
And, uh, sometimes that,
that sort of outdoes the article in the first place.
But there's a lot of people that like that.
So, you know, to each their own.
So I have no problem with Wired in that regard.
Um, second, uh, as far as the, uh, what's the second one?
AOL.
AOL, right.
AOL is a thorough.
Second one was the, uh, was, was the tapes of the show.
Okay, yeah.
Uh, we are working something out.
Uh, we do have all the shows on tape,
um, going back from wherever they, they started.
We just have to organize them
and, uh, come up with some sort of duplication service
and hopefully we'll have some nice historical records
of all the things that have happened, uh,
in the, uh, in the computer underground
in the past, uh, past five or so years.
Uh, AOL.
Is there a censorship on AOL?
Yes.
Well, there is, uh, not in mail from what I understand.
Is that correct?
There's no censorship in, in mail,
but there is because they're not supposed to be reading mail.
However, there's an interesting story about that too,
which I'll get to in a second.
Um, in the forums that they have on AOL,
the, the conferences,
if you use nasty language of any sort
and maybe, who knows,
try using the word wanker and see what happens.
If you, uh, if you do that, uh, you're told, uh, you're warned,
I think once or twice, uh, I think probably only once,
not to do that or you'll be thrown off.
Well, nevermind nasty language.
If, uh, somebody posts something really obnoxious
and you respond to it and get into an argument with the person,
AOL will delete the messages and give you a warning.
That's, that's real nice revisionism there.
That's, that's kind of how, uh...
Nevermind nasty language.
You could just simply argue with someone about a point.
And if the AOL staff didn't like your tone of voice,
then they'll delete your messages.
Now, we were told a couple of weeks ago,
somebody had read this to us,
that, uh, an AOL moderator had said, um,
if you don't hear it on Saturday morning cartoons,
then you can't hear it here.
It's if you don't hear it,
that language not be acceptable there.
It's not acceptable here.
So basically we can refer to AOL as a Saturday morning cartoon
of, uh, of, of the internet, I guess.
David, you have a...
Yeah.
I just spoke with people from Delphi and Internet MCI,
and apparently when they start up their brand new service,
they're going to immediately start filtering messages and content
and not allowing certain things through.
Isn't that amazing how there's this need to control information?
Apparently there, it's a paranoia about, uh, pornography
and they have, their definition of pornography is,
gets wider and wider.
So, um...
Yeah, that's, that's the whole thing.
Now, the interesting thing with AOL and, uh,
involving the raids a couple of weeks ago,
uh, supposedly for child pornography,
AOL let the, uh, the federal government read the mail of suspects
before the raids even took place.
They just opened it wide open to them.
And that's, uh, that's a pretty scary thing in itself.
Jim, you have something?
Yeah.
Uh, from CNN yesterday or the day before,
unfortunately I didn't catch all of it.
Apparently someone who runs the scuba resort
is suing AOL to learn subscriber names
on the forum dealing with scuba diving.
Uh, people essentially disparaged his resort
and he's going to sue them.
And in order to do this,
he's suing AOL first to get the names of subscribers.
Okay.
Well, there's, uh, there's millions of AOL subscribers.
Well, he wants particularly the ones that post
that he's got the copies of the usernames.
He's got copies of the messages.
All he needs is AOL to match them to a real person or an address.
Why doesn't he just email them?
Well...
You can email them and ask them who they are.
You know, they may lie and say...
Oh, that's true.
But that's the whole point of being on the net
is that you can be anonymous.
You know, being anonymous is not a bad thing.
I'm not quite sure why, uh, people can't see that.
I mean, I am sure why people can't see that.
Being anonymous is, is something that, uh, you know,
the control freaks are very upset about
because they want to know where everybody is at all times.
Oh, we're moving into some, some rather, uh, rather scary times.
Well, speaking of, uh, control freaks,
let's not to mention the, uh, the situation with the internet.
That's, uh, yeah, that's a, a good thing to mention now.
The internet is that agency that pretty much controls
all the names on the network, uh, 2600.com, uh, netcom.com.
You know, all of them.
Right.
They're, you know, the EDUs and the nets and the govs and the mills.
They're all controlled by the internet, which up until now was what?
Uh, well, just a little brief history on the NIC
as it was originally known as the Network Information Center.
Uh, the NIC was originally, uh, well, not originally, originally,
but, um, for a very long time was maintained by the Stanford Research Institute,
SRI in Menlo Park, California.
And, um, after, uh, they saw fit that it was growing at such a substantial rate,
what they did was they separated the, uh, the NIC as it was, uh, originally on the ARPANET.
And, uh, they took it off the, off the, uh, defense data network and, uh, sort of, uh,
put it in charge of the private sector.
And, uh, the company that was, uh, it was originally handed over to AT&T,
if I remember correctly, only temporarily.
And, uh, that was when it first became the InterNIC.
Then, uh, it was actually, uh, for a while now it was being, uh,
taken care of by a company called NSI, which I believe stood for, uh, network, uh.
Solutions.
Network Solutions Incorporated.
Right.
Uh, that company was fairly recently over the past few weeks acquired by
a rather spooky company known as, uh, SIAC.
S-I-A-C.
And, uh, SIAC, uh, is, um.
S-A-I-C, not SIAC.
It's S-A-I-C?
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
S-A-I-C.
Um.
That'd be S-A-I-C.
S-A-I-C?
I don't know, but SIAC, whatever you want to call it.
Yeah, S-A-I-C.
Um, the, uh, the people who actually make up this company, incidentally, uh, and strangely
enough are actually, uh, people like the head of the CIA, the former head of the CIA,
various, uh, former deputy directors and employees of the NSA.
Oh, better people to be dealing with.
Yeah, as well as, uh, various military people.
Uh-huh.
Okay.
And, uh, a lot of people see this as, uh, first really, uh, vile attempt by, uh, the
powers that be to, uh, take control of the net by seizing control of, uh, the very entity
that's in charge of, uh, domain registration.
And another thing that's interesting is that just before this happened, the, uh, NIC announced
that, uh, the volume of domain registration was so high that they were going to start
charging.
So, uh, I don't know how they're actually going to organize this, but in theory, they
claim they want to charge everyone who is registered domain $50 a year subscription.
Yeah.
Now, uh, where this money is going to be going, if the NSA and the CIA are now in charge of,
uh, the NIC along with the military, um, I don't know that if they really, uh, need
$50 from every person that has registered a domain.
Now, we recently got a listing of all the, uh, the .com domains.
Well, everything else as well.
Yeah, but, uh, just the .coms and I think there's, there's well over a hundred thousand
of them.
Yeah, that was the, uh, the biggest, uh, top level domain is .com.
Now, you know, add all that together and put $50 on each one of those.
And yeah, you got a tremendous amount of money every year.
Yeah.
And what do they have to do once you register your site?
You know, it's, it's basically they've done the work.
They don't have to do anything else after that.
No, not really.
I would just assume that, uh, also that they have to track down the address that, uh, that
was given the actual physical address, the mailing address of the person who registered
the domain.
And a lot of them are fake addresses.
So they'd have to like hire some staff to go through hundreds of thousands of registered
domains to see which ones are real.
Right.
And I suppose they would attempt to cancel the ones that weren't registered with, uh,
with real info.
What do you think this is going to wind up going?
Are they going to put an iron clamp on the net somehow?
Sounds like it could get really ugly.
But what I, the only, the only solution I could see happening is, uh, maybe in the future,
there'll be all these, uh, islands of, uh, of root name servers and maybe there just
won't be one anymore.
Um, and, uh, I mean, lots of things could happen.
There could be people running around as they are now with just phantom IP numbers that
don't translate to any, any, uh, name address.
Well, one thing I think is, is certain and that's that, uh, we've gone too far at this
stage.
Uh, individuals have been running things for quite some time.
We have a sense of what real freedom is through the network where millions of people are able
to talk uncensored to each other and not have big brother looking over their shoulder.
Uh, this of course is, uh, is very upsetting to the people that want to be able to control
things.
But I think, uh, in the end, you know, the individual will win out.
That's the most important thing that we can all hope for.
Otherwise we wind up with a society like Singapore and I think that's where a lot of us
are heading.
We'll be back in a minute or two and we'll take some more phone calls then.
But, uh, in the meantime, might be a good idea to think about this and what we can do
to prevent it.
One, two, three, four.
I'm sorry not to happen.
There will come a time for the undeniable.
Undeniable.
Boom.
If the future looks bleak and bleak and bleak and bleak
If the future looks like anything, it looks like Singapore
There are no homeless, there are no poor
And you're listening to WBAI New York
That's a new from Big Audio Dynamite song about Singapore
If the future looks like anything, it looks like Singapore
There are no homeless, there are no poor
And there are very few free thinkers as well
You know, I know someone just came back from Singapore a couple of months ago
And there's this shirt that they have that says all the things you can't do
You can't urinate in an elevator
I hear rumors that if you do, there's a sensor that closes the door on the elevator and calls the police
And so you're trapped there in the elevator
So there's a urination sensor
Something like that
And of course, you can't throw gum in the street
You can't chew gum in the street
You can't chew gum in the street, which is what leads to throwing it in the street
But I think you can have gum in Singapore
I think there is some gum allowance
But you can't do certain things like that
You can't smoke in public
There's all kinds of things
And you can just bet what they do on the net
All kinds of controls they have over there
So yeah, if you're into control, look to Singapore
And I'm sure you'll find all kinds of neat things, ideas
Alright, let's take a look at the newest 9X thing
We got our 9X Extra with our phone bills
And apparently they're not making nearly as much money as they want to make
With the dial-it service number
So they're offering it for free
On like a free sample type of a thing
So if you call 1-800-INFO-PHONE
You can sample a wide variety of programs in each of the following categories
Exciting, weather, sports, finance, lottery, racing, horoscopes, news, traffic, and time
We can sample time!
So let's give a call
Got our dial tone there
Okay, let's call 1-800-INFO-PHONE
Is that what it is? Yes
Of course there's an extra digit in there
And the phone is spelled with an F
And I'm not going to dial the final 3 there
Let's see what we have
Thank you for calling the 9X Infophone Information and Free Samples line
This call will enable you to hear samples of New York Area 976 programs
Or be transferred to a live operator for more information
Please be advised that these sample programs are for demonstration purposes only
And may not reflect timely information
Please press 1 to hear samples of 976 programs
Please press 2 to be transferred to a live operator for more information
Or to receive a free 976 program guide listing all of the current 976 programs
Rotary callers remain on the line for an operator
Okay, let's get a sample, 1
For finance programs, press 1
For horoscopes, press 2
For lottery programs, press 3
For racing programs, press 4
For sports, press 5
For wrestling, press 6
For time, press 7
For traffic and mass transit, press 8
For weather, press 9
For Spanish programs, press 1-0
Alright, let's press 7 to get the time
For exact time online, press 1
For time, press 2
What does that mean? Exact time online?
Let's try that
For exact time online, press 1
I just did
Alright, I'll do it again
The correct time is 1.56.10.00pm
The correct time is 1.56.20.00pm
The correct time is 1.56.20.00pm
This has been a recorded sample of 976-1000
The exact time online
When you need the exact time all the time
Call 976-1000
That's 976-1000
The exact time online
If you would like to hear another sample from this category, press 1
To return to the main menu, press 2
To find out how to receive written information on 976 programs
Let's try another time thing
For exact time online, press 1
For time, press 2
Okay, let's do time. We'll press 2
Don't be late! Call 540-Wake
Or a friendly wake-up call
Eastern Daylight Time
4.50.30
How hard would it be for them to have the real time there?
I guess 9X doesn't want us to get the real time
Because you have to pay for that
Yeah, time costs
So we're not going to give you the real time
We're just going to let you hear what it sounds like
Do you think this time advances?
Eastern Daylight Time
4.50.50
Okay, it's 4.50 now on this particular time thing
What we're going to do is we're going to call back in a few minutes
Alright, it's 4.50 now
So we'll call back later and we'll see if it's advancing
And if it's advancing, I'd like to know
I'd like to know why the Dickens, they can't make the thing have the real time
And make that advance too, you know?
It would be good for the people of New York
To get free time
Used to be able to get the time, you know?
Call the operator, ask what time it is, she'd be happy to tell you
Now they want you to pay 40 cents for it
Okay, that's the free sample there
212-279-3400
That's just a local phone call
Give us a call
Good evening, you're on
Hi again, it's me
Oh no
Now wait a minute
You're on the same line again
I think you've cancelled all the other lines
And somehow you've made this your own
Alright, alright, what is it?
First of all, when I was on the net
I do all .2600
How come there are a thousand things?
Why is it, is it like
Well, the thing is, if you had listened before
You would have heard that somebody spammed the news group last night
And there's about a thousand worthless topics in there
So what I think you should do
Is go through each and every one of them
And look at them to make sure that they're all the same
Once you've determined that
You should delete them one by one, not all at once
And by that time, you know
You should be old enough to collect retirement
Okay, now how do you post onto the alt.2600?
You want to post a message
What news reader are you using, Tin?
I think Elm or something?
No, Elm is your mail reader
Tin is your news reader
You're probably using Tin
Tin, that's it
Tin, that's it
Okay, in which case there is a
There's a follow-up
If you hit F
That'll allow you to follow up to a message that's already there
That's probably the easiest thing to do
And you can say W to post a new message
Yes, say W to post a new message
And it'll ask you what news groups to put it on
You can post it on any news group you want
You can make the name rebel.escape.com
Be a part of every news group if you want
And you can just make your own news group called rebel.
Well, no, you can't make your own news group
You have to be a news administrator to create a news group
And I don't think you're a news administrator, are you, Rebel?
I don't think so
No, I don't think so either
Thanks for calling
Good evening, you're on the air
Hello
You okay?
Yeah, hi
My name is Mike, I live in Brooklyn
Hey Mike from Brooklyn, how are you?
Well, I'm just coming back to normal now
I am recently a survivor of the conspiracy between 9X and AT&T
To drive you nuts when you order ISDN
Oh, that conspiracy
Let's talk about that
I made it, it's done, it took one month
But I lost the dial tone for nine days out of the month
They couldn't find it
But now at the end of the month I have it all hooked up
I went with PSI and it's working pretty well
You went with PSI, huh?
Yeah, well that was
The confusion was that 9X and AT&T would not agree that it was available in this area
And there was a lot of buck passing
Yeah, I know
Well, 9X has been having some problems recently
We'll talk about that in a minute
But tell me the kind of service you're getting from PSI
Now you're not taking advantage of the 56K thing, are you?
Yes, that's what I'm doing, I'm taking advantage of everything
Alright, tell us exactly what it is you're doing
I use their configuration manager
And there's a little problem with that
This software for PSI came with Chameleon
Which comes with the BitSurfer
And there's a book that comes with it
So after I'm banging on it and I'm following the instructions
But I mean to the letter
I give up and I call support
And the first thing they tell me at support is that
When you go to set up for ISDN
You don't set it for ISDN
You set it for PPP
Regardless of what the book tells you
So that kind of left me lost for a couple of hours
And forced me to call for help
Which I didn't want to do, but I did
And they told me, like, ignore the book
The version behind the software
Now when you use the BitSurfer
You can't set for ISDN because
It's not a card
The software looks for a card
So you have to set for the PPP
But once you set for the PPP
It goes in
And once you're in
You can do the bonding, anything you want
But you have to understand that
Even though you're setting up for ISDN
You mustn't, you must set for PPP
Now wait a minute, what speed are you connecting at?
Right now I'm going in at
57.6
57.6?
That's the speed he's setting his serial point
Okay, but you're not
You have to pay that penny a minute to 9x, right?
Yeah, right
I'm giving it to them for this month
Until I figure out how to take advantage of everything
Well the problem is
You're not going to be able to figure that out
Last week you would have heard our horror story with PSI
Where they told us that it was possible
To do that, to connect
At 56k
And not pay the penny a minute
With 9x
That trick is basically what?
The trick is basically
That you could
Complete a call as either a speech
Or an audio call
And pass 56kb data over the connection
And thereby
Avoiding the penny a minute surcharge
But PSI does not support this
Right, but they didn't tell us this
Until after we had signed up with them
Well, I'm glad to hear about this
But I've got to tell you something
I really feel emotionally shattered after this month
With these people
And I'm so afraid to touch anything at this point
I'm so glad that the thing is working
I feel like I've been tortured
I've learned, I've relearned the fear
Of the mechanism
Again, because of all the disappointments
Over the month
It's going to take probably a week or so
Before I calm down and can really
Be relaxed with this thing
So I can explore it
But right now, I'm so afraid to touch anything
It's been a nightmare
I'm telling you, it's been a nightmare
It's something to hear you on this end of the spectrum
Having gone through all this
And kind of shattered by it
And then on the other end of the spectrum
Is Rebel there with his internet account
Posting a thousand messages onto the Usenet
I don't know, between the two of you
You know, I want to tell you
It's beautiful once it's working
Once I calm down, I'm going to go in there
And really have a good time with it
But it's been a nightmare
They don't have any service people
Who understand anything
And all that they do is
They keep coming over and saying
Listen, when we're done here
Could you write a letter to this person
And say that we were wonderful
They just sent supervisors to my house
For two weeks in a row
And nothing was getting done
There was an argument of whether or not
An ISDN signal can coexist
With a regular analog signal
And because the dial-up number
For PSI here in New York
Is just a 212 number
When they listened to it
They were telling me, no, that's not the ISDN number
And they wouldn't bring over a guy
With the Tektronik ISDN reader
Until I changed the number that I wanted to use
But in fact, that number
That they have for the dial-up
Can't be used for analog or ISDN
The thing is, yeah, you can
But with PSI, with the service you have now
You will not be able to take advantage of that analog
Or, I guess, audio calls
Yeah, audio calls
They don't support that
So you might want to consider that
The other thing that they don't support
Is the alias
They give you this really hard to do
U.S.
They give you a number for an identification
For an identifier
You have to get a third-party
Piece of software
To change it to an alias
So you can get a real username
Or a regular username
There are some things to be desired
But I guess they're coming along
Anyway, I'm sure I've held you guys up enough
Thank you for your time
I feel better just telling somebody that I survived it
Well, we're here for you
Thank you very much
Thanks for sharing, take care
We're like a support group here
Why don't you update us on your IST?
My current situation is that
I've sort of
Graduated into the
Category of wanting more features
And
Fortunately or unfortunately
9X has graduated into this
Category along with me
Where, obviously
One would hope that they would have been ahead
But, unfortunately, they're figuring out
How these features are added at the same time I am
So, for the past
Couple of weeks, I've been trying to order
Features such as call appearances
And three-party conferencing
And so on and so forth
Call appearances basically
Allow you, through
Simulating what's known as
Electronic key telephone service
What it allows you to do is
If you have an ISDN telephone
Or if you have an ISDN terminal adapter
That you connect to your computer
That supports custom calling features
Which are known as supplementary services
ISDN lingo
Call appearances would basically let you make
Or receive up to a certain number of calls
Say, if you ordered 10 call appearances
You would be able to make
Or receive a combination of up to 10
Calls simultaneously
By putting people on hold
And, obviously, you could only ever talk to one person
At a time
Only one person? You can't have three-way?
If you had three-way, then that's a separate feature
Then you could talk to the person on the call appearance
That you're talking to and then conference someone else in
Now, why is it you can't bond them all together?
Because you can only actually talk
On one B-channel at any one time
The call appearances are actually managed at the switch
So you can only actually talk to one person
On a B-channel at the same time
When you put them on hold, they're not still there on your line?
No, they're back at the switch
And you can have
Either three-party or six-party
Conferencing on ISDN
Okay, so you can have six-way?
Yeah, there's such thing as six-way
Is that very expensive?
I don't know what the tariff was on six-way
I wonder how you would manage that
Because you hit flash now to go to three-way
What, would you hit flash four more times?
No, actually it's
You'd have to do something else
You'd probably flash and
File some sort of a code
Yeah, most likely
It's a really good question
I think you should order that too
And be in for another six months of hell
But now, the last word that I heard is tomorrow
I actually had somebody from Northern Telecom
Northern Telecom is getting into the fray
Yeah, I happen to be served by
A Northern Telecom switch
DMS-100
David, you had something on 9x and ISDN
Right, a while ago in the com2com.isdn news group
I posted a message asking people
To send me email
About anecdotes about their installations
Of ISDN with 9x
Just recently
A couple of my friends had ordered ISDN
And they spoke to 9x business office
Personnel
And for some reason
They were directed to a third-party company
Out in Long Island
To manage their ISDN orders
And from the two people I've spoken to so far
This has been a total nightmare
As our last caller had alluded to
Yeah
What I would like is
If you're out there
And you've ordered ISDN from 9x
In the last couple of months
I would like to get some reports
Because I'm speaking regularly now
From 9x business office
Please send me messages
To my personal address
David at david.com
And if you could just make the subject
9x underscore ISDN
You got david.com
Yes
Unbelievable
So all the other Davids in the world
Won't be able to get that because you took it
You got it
So please send me the mail
Because I am speaking to these people on a regular basis
And I've got a lot of issues that I'm bringing up to them
Okay, thanks for the input
Here's a nightmare story from Telecom Digest
And Fiber
Maybe you can
Lend some insight on this particular problem
This person says
They have
I believe they're on the west coast
They use Pac Bell
We have 26 lines, residential pots
And one ISDN line into our house
For the curious
We have an internet cooperative amongst 20 people
They take it to my house and then 20 modems
Take it all over town to the members
Pac Bell told us when we ordered our last three lines
That we could only have one of them
And that we were then maxed out
Their story is that we've used all the pairs up on my street
Except for the spares to each other house
And the allocations from one to five pairs per house
I called the office on Monday
To inquire as to the cost to get two more lines
I told them that engineering
Had told me no more unless I pay for trenching
Etc
They told me there are nine pairs to your area available
And three available to your house
I found this hard to believe but decided to test it
In order to align
And she assigned me a number and date for install
And then an engineer came out and was rather rude with me
Telling me that there's been a block placed on my address
And that we can have no more lines
He said we can pay upwards of $10,000
To have the area rewired
Even though I got a firm commitment from the business office
Kind of interesting
Have you ever heard of that kind of situation
Where they say you can't have any more lines
No I haven't
In fact 9X
It might not be the quickest thing in the world
Obviously Manhattan is really bogged down with orders
Being the busy city that it is
But 9X is constantly running new lines
And
A company that I used to work for
We ran out of phone lines
And 9X came and chopped up the street
And ran some more pairs
Well I know with a business
You can always get more lines
This was at a residence though
It was actually a business run at a residence
But was it a business line
At the residence
I believe they were business lines
Yeah because you have to pay more for business lines
So I think they give you more preferential treatment
Well they certainly didn't tell us that we have to pay for chopping up the street
Well the thing is when you're in a residence
I mean there are residential uses for many phone lines
The way I understood it
You can get as many lines as you want as long as you pay for them
I'm not sure if there are any kinds of restrictions on that
26 seems like a pretty high number for a residence
But who knows
I don't think there's a good reason for that
I mean like you're running a BBS or something
This has long been a point of contention
You know a BBS is not considered a business
It's basically just for receiving incoming phone calls
There's no money exchanging hands in most cases
Well if these people in question are charging subscribers
To connect to their BBS
Then it is a business
But really what business is that of the phone company
What you use your phone line for
I mean maybe there are some advantages to having a business line
If you want to take advantage of that
Then you do
But if you don't
And there are certain areas of town that are offices
Where you have to have business lines
That's understood
You don't live there so you can't have a residential line
But I don't think that the phone company
Should be deciding for people
Well this is a business line because you do this on it
In your own home I think you can do whatever you want
Back in 93 when Esoteric Resources
Was trying to get some lines
We didn't want to pay for business lines
And we were told by the phone company Nynex
Here in New York
That you could only get three lines
Without paying for
If you wanted more than three
Even if you had them registered
Or whatever you like to call it
In the individual's name
You'd have to pay as if it was a business
I think that might be that representative's interpretation
Because I hear all different stories from all different people
And one representative told me very firmly
That Nynex doesn't care if you run a business out of your home
It's really your choice
If you're in a home you can do whatever you want
You can have as many phone lines as you want
Okay, 212-279-3400
This is off the hook, a special expanded edition
Our new time is from 8 to 9
On Tuesdays
And tonight we're on until 10 o'clock
And here's a little story
Talking about irresponsible behavior
McMaster University in Canada
The computer services group continues to use
The student number as logon ID
And email address in spite of the fact that
Many professors post grades
Quote unquote anonymously using student numbers
As the equivalent of the social security number
You're using that as your logon ID
People just keep extending the boundaries
For privacy invasion
It's 25 minutes after 9 o'clock
Let's take some phone calls
Good evening, you're on the air
Hey, hi
I'm so glad to get through
How are you doing?
Pretty good, pretty good
Okay, I have a question for you
I sent you a letter a few weeks ago
But I guess it got lost in the shuffle
I'm trying to dial like
800, 900 numbers
I'm trying to dial some
0891 numbers
In England
Oh, that's going to be difficult
It's the equivalent of a toll service over there, right?
Yeah, but I'm willing to like
Pay for the cost of the call
And lots of people over there are willing to pay
To get to an 800 number
A lot of people over in England or France or somewhere
Want to call an 800 number over here
They have no translation for it
But many times there's just no way to do it
So you don't know any tricks?
Well, the only trick I could think of
Is to find somebody in England that has a two-line phone
And is willing to front it for you
And will simply connect you
And will dial for you
So you don't know any access codes or anything
That I could do it directly?
As far as I know, that's blocked from all countries
Except that particular country
You would have to do it from within there
And certainly there are ways of tricking the system
And forwarding it, of course, if you have a blue box
And you figure out ways of routing
Okay, thanks for your time
Alright, good luck
Bye bye
Should be able to get it from...
800 information, yeah
Let's see if that actually works
800 information
One of my favorite numbers
800 directory saying
Hello, I'm trying to find the number for
I believe it's called UK direct
It might be England direct
A moment
Thank you
Bum bum bum
Bum bum bum
Nothing either way, sir
Really, it's the service that allows you to call
England direct and get an operator over there
You've never heard of it?
It's through AT&T
Might be AT&T UK direct or something
Okay, let me try that
No, I don't show it
No, I don't show it, sir
Let me give you a service assistant
Maybe she knows how it is
Okay, thank you
Hello, we're trying to find the number
For a service called UK direct
It allows you to call an operator
In England
UK direct
No, I don't find anything under that name, sir
Really, you don't know of a service run by
AT&T that...
Sorry? It's like USA direct
Except it's not
That's the name of it
Or is it actually called
The Ukraine direct
No, I don't think it's called that
Alright, I'll look it up
Somehow, I'll find it
Thank you
Well, I guess that's pretty much
What I expected
I don't know what it's really called
But I thought they were all familiar
I have a whole list
I have that list, too
We all have that list
We don't have that list here
That's the problem
Maybe one of our trusty listeners
Yeah, a listener might want to try
Calling AT&T customer service
They most definitely have it
Yeah, there's a special number
That they have
No
I don't know what that number is
Find AT&T
They're always there
I don't think so
Do you want me to try that?
Well, I'd tell you to try customer service
Before I told you to try that
I'll try that
1-800-FIND-ATT
Yeah, that number sticks in my head
Let's see where this takes us
Thank you
Thank you for calling the
Find AT&T Center
An easy to do business with initiative
And service for AT&T employees only
Our hours of operation
Are 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
It's illegal for us to call this
It must have been from one of my past adventures
If you'd like to leave a message at the tone
We'll return your call
On the following business day
Please leave your name
Area code
Telephone number
And details of your request
The Find AT&T Center is not equipped
To handle external customer referrals
Or callbacks
And is not an employee locator service
Please refer to your regional
Intercompany directory
For the employee locator office telephone numbers
Thank you
Well, I think that's about enough
Rejection for one night
Alright, let's take some phone calls
Hi, I'm calling back
And just asking
If I gave you one of these
0891 numbers
Or another type
Would you be willing
To give it a try?
We'll give it a try
Do you know what we're talking about when we say UK direct?
I know, I know
For a second there I thought
What is a typical number?
I could give you two numbers
Give us one or two numbers
Go on the net, you could post this question
To compdcomtelecom
And you'd get an answer in a shot
You give me a computer and I'll do it
Well, that's a mighty tempting offer there
But I'm not sure
Alright, let me give you two numbers
Both of these are for nightclubs
In England
The first one is
0891-919-621
And the other is
The famous club
The Hacienda in Manchester
A different code
It's 336-404-960
So that last one
Is not a
0891
It's a 336
But they're both billed at
What they call 39 pence a minute
Cheap rate
And 49 pence a minute
At all other times
So wait, 336 is another premium service?
Yes
I wasn't aware of that
Yeah, it's a new one
Okay, well, we'll see what we can do
Alright, good luck
I don't know
If we had that number, we could try it
We can still call AT&T customer service, you know
Yeah, and waste a lot more time with them
Oh, okay
If someone wants to go outside into the hallway
And call them, that's fine with me
But I think, you know, we put our listeners through enough
Trying to get through AT&T
They can do that, you know, anytime
You know, we've all called AT&T and put on hold for 10 minutes
Our listener should call us with the information
That's right
Well, if he was able to call us right back like that
I'm sure, you know, people can get through with the information
Good evening, you're on Off the Hook
Hi, how are you?
Pretty good, how are you?
Alright, am I on the air?
Yes, you are
Right now, you're on the air
Oh, hi, you know, I've been listening with great interest
To your discussions of ISDN
And just wanted to ask if
If you could to sort of step back from your own
Experiences and perhaps give some insight
On the options
That people looking for
Internet service providers
With ISDN service
Might be choosing from
And on the equipment
The hardware that we might be choosing from
Well, the equipment we've been experimenting with
Is the Motorola BitSurfer
That's one of the things that we've been playing with
And are you located in New York?
Yes, I am
There's lots and lots of service providers in New York
And quite a few of them
Offer ISDN
I know Escape has ISDN
Escape does, the Internet Channel does
Are you familiar with
An app called Walrus.com?
Walrus.com
Can't say I've heard of them
No, I have not heard of them
Why, are they in the city?
Yeah, they're down in the financial district
Okay, and do you know if they have ISDN?
Yeah, they do
I don't know
The resources that are on the web
Do you have more to say about PSI?
Well, I mean
Just to sum up
Our problems with PSI stem from the fact that they told us one thing
And then it turned out something else was true
The thing that you really want to do
Unless you're a megacorporation
And can afford all kinds of things
You want to be able to avoid
That ridiculous penny a minute surcharge
That NYNEX puts on ISDN connections
And you do that
By simply having
What's known as an audio call
Where you're able to push up to 56k
On a single line
I just read that PSI is offering
$29 a month
Up to two channel
Connections
With
Their usual
At the same rate as their usual
28.8 or lower
You know, this is something kind of funny
And I think we paid something like $500 installation fee
And we're paying $250 a month
They send us this little
Advertisement right after we do that saying
Hey, there's never been a better time to sign up for ISDN
Our rates are cut in half
And you know, you've already signed up
For a year's contract, you can't take those rates
So they're sort of like mocking you
And rubbing your face in and saying
If you had only waited a couple more weeks you could have saved all this money
But doesn't that indicate that
This is the coming thing
And over the next year you'll see a lot more
Competition
And if you're paying through the nose
For a 28.8 connection now
I hope so, and I also hope that a lot of the
Smaller companies get into this
Because they're the ones that can really offer you good deals
I mean, as far as what we were trying to do
With the 56k connection
You know, the people at PSI
When they finally figured out what it was we wanted
They were acting like we were asking for something bizarre
And this is something that
I mean, Farber, you've been doing this for months now
It's not a problem, it's not a big deal
And anybody that knows what they're doing
Can provide you that service
So you can connect to internet via ISDN
And not pay the penny
And then a surcharge and be connected to 56k
It's not illegal, you're not cheating anyone
You are using the resources
In the way they're supposed to be used
Also, another note on that
Is if you actually live close enough
To an internet service provider
That, say for example, you're served by the same switch
You could actually
If the company is smart
If they offer ISDN
What they could do is set up their ISDN dial-up lines
To be on Centrix
And they could add your ISDN line
As part of their Centrix group
That's a really good deal
Yeah, if that's the case, you can actually connect
It's 64kb, 128kb
Because then it's considered an internal call
Yeah, it's considered an internal call and there's no penny a minute charges
Is that something you think will be likely
You'll be likely to see
Providers
Going to the trouble of doing
Yeah, they will because they're getting business that way
And it's a minor thing for them to do
But it's kind of innovative
But if they're smart, they will offer that
Thanks so much
Okay, take care
These are definitely interesting times
We're sort of forging ahead through unexplored territory
Here with this whole ISDN business
212-279-3400
Good evening, you're on Off the Hook
I have one question
Listen, listen, listen
You've exceeded your maximum time on this show
Maybe for all time
Good evening, you're on the air
Hello?
My question is
What are the three digit numbers
That when you dial on the phone
You get a recording
What phone number you're calling from
Oh, you mean
Your automatic number announcement thing
Yeah, it starts with 9
But what are those two other digits
958 should do it
Are you in New York?
958?
Thank you very much
Good evening, you're on the air
Hello?
Yeah, hi, I called before
I forgot to ask you, I was so excited
I'm interested in getting an ISDN phone
Since the BitSurfer
Doesn't allow the caller ID
Actually
It's funny you should mention
We just had an adventure with caller ID and ISDN
In fact
If you're serviced by a DMS100 switch
And if you don't know this
You can find out
You can also find out
By calling your exchange
Yeah, but in a lot of cases
They only say it's digital
Like DS0 or DS1
But in 100% of all cases
You're going to be a national ISDN1
What you want to find out
Is if you're on a 5ESS or a DMS100 switch
Which are the two most prevalent switches
If you are served by a DMS100
You'll have caller ID
As part of your basic service
This is a perk of being on that particular brand of switch
If you're served by a 5ESS
You'll have to subscribe to caller ID separately
Well, I have the service
But the BitSurfer in its present state
I hear that Motorola
Is putting out the BitSurfer Pro
At the end of the month
Which will acknowledge the caller ID
This guy knows his stuff, doesn't he?
Yes and no
I am very impressed
Okay, what you will get
You can receive caller ID for data calls
If you get a lot of data calls
If you want to receive caller ID
For voice calls
It will actually log it
And it will store it
Which you can recall with an AT command
And
You won't be able to do it
What you need to do is upgrade your firmware
And I just got this
Brand new firmware today myself
And among other things
It supports caller ID for voice calls
Caller ID blocking and screening
So you can reject calls from numbers
You don't like
And various other things
Including asynchronous bonding
Which you can use to connect
At 112 or 128 kilobits
To another BitSurfer
And various other features
As well as support for
Custom calling features
Including the simulation of 3-way and call waiting
Which is extremely handy
A simulation?
In SDN it's not actually known as 3-way and call waiting
Call waiting is actually simulated
Through call appearances
And 3-way is actually
Accomplished by ordering a 3-party conference calling
And where did you update
What you want to do
Is call Motorola Tech Support
800 if you have a pen
The number is 800
Yeah, 221-4380
What you want to do is
Tell them that you want the latest
Revision of the firmware
For the BitSurfer
It's revision 1F
Yeah, F as in Frank
And they'll just send it out to me?
Yeah, they'll send it out to you
If you're well versed
In taking things apart and putting them back together
Then you shouldn't have a problem
Otherwise you might
Be concerned about breaking the BitSurfer's case
Because it has invisible snaps
Right
And it's not hard to open at all
Once you know how
Once you know how
Yeah, there's no screws
It actually snaps open
Okay, so now I've got it open
And what do I do, is this just a plug-in module?
Yeah, there's two PROMs
What you want to do is pop out the two old ones
And bearing in mind that
The one on the left is even
And the one on the right is odd
And what you want to do
Is keep the proper orientation
Like it's left and right
Depends on which way you hold the thing up
There's two different chips
One will say Z7 and one will say Z8 typically
Keep track of which socket the Z7 one is in
And make sure that when
The two new ones that you get
You keep the same orientation
Basically you can pop out those two old chips
They're in sockets
And they're small square surface mount chips
You can pop them out with a paperclip
Just by leveraging it out
You pop in the two new ones
Keeping the proper orientation
Which isn't hard to do
Because you can't put them in backwards
And pop the lid back on
And you'll be up and running
The problem is that
In documentation
If you're a tinkerer, you might be able to figure out
A lot of these features
Otherwise, what they basically are
Are a lot of the BitSurfer Pro features
Condensed to work on the BitSurfer
And the BitSurfer Pro is not officially out yet
And neither is the manual
Now, the only features that really differ
On the BitSurfer Pro
That are important
There's two phone jacks
You can plug in two telephones
Not just one, like on the BitSurfer
It supports multi-link PPP
Which is a more universal means
Of asynchronous bonding
And I use the term bonding loosely
Not referring to the bonding protocol
But the ability to use multiple B channels
For one connection
And
It supported one more thing
That was important
Oh, the upgradeability
You won't have to be popping the thing open all the time
You can actually upgrade it through software
So, these things
Are coming fairly soon, I hear
In only a couple of weeks
In fact, the technicians at Motorola
Just got the BitSurfer Pros
Well, you know, the idea is
I'm trying to avoid putting out another near 400 bucks
Just to get the call ID
If I had to do that, I would have just went for an IFDN phone
Right, well, here you can get
Your BitSurfer upgraded for free
And it'll log the numbers
One other thing, when I do connect to a PSI
It's giving me a connect message
Of connect 57.6
Right
I suppose I should be happy with that?
If you're connecting at
You're using a PC or a Mac?
PC
What you want to do is
If your computer is fairly new
You should have a higher speed serial port
You should be setting your serial port
To 115.200
To get the best use of the throughput
Of the connection
Thank you very much for your time, gentlemen
Oh, by the way, can somebody give me the number of Northern Telecom?
You have that number in your head?
Oh boy, off the top of my head
Where are they located?
You can call Northern Telecom in Valhalla
New York, upstate
Funny that they're not in the 800 directory
What's the area code up there?
800, there's an 800 number
Well, they give you an address
It's a 914 number
It's to another company
Right here, I found a number
For Northern Telecom in Valhalla
It's 914
773
2772
Okay, good luck with that
Thank you very much
I think that's probably the most advanced discussion
Ever to take place on ISDN on these airwaves
While the two of you were going at it
I just hope everybody else didn't fade away there
But
I think he's getting to where he wants to be
Yeah, I think once people actually
Get over the initial frustration
Of actually getting the service
And they actually get the chance to play with their hardware
A little bit, I find that people are really
Eager to figure out this whole new service
Yeah, but hopefully it'll be made easier
For people in the future, so they don't have to worry about
All this, they just know what they want in the end
They want a fast connection
And we've already done the work for them
To make it work just the way they want it to
Have caller ID, have six call appearances
Or whatever we call it
That's, I guess, what we're figuring out
It is worth mentioning, as far as ordering
Vanilla ISDN service, it is no longer
Very complicated
The only problem is that the
Representatives at the
Average run-of-the-mill business office
Don't really know much about this
But 9X actually has an ISDN tech center
In downtown Manhattan
Who is trained and specializes
In taking ISDN orders
Now, I don't want to give out their number over the air
Without checking with them, because they're extremely helpful
And I wouldn't want them to be deluged with phone calls
Right
I will just tell you they're there
You have to find them
If they want their number given out
We'll give it out next week
Let's take some more phone calls
212-279-3400
We don't have to just talk about ISDN
But I do want to say
That I'm very impressed with all of our callers
So far, for not talking about
The one thing that none of us want to talk about
What is that you're drinking over there?
No, I'm not going to say it
I'm drinking fruit juice
And that's all I'm going to say it is
I'm not going to say what kind it is
Or anything like that
And I'm not going to say that name or anything
And I hope none of our callers do either
212-279-3400
You're listening to an extended edition of Off the Hook on WBAI
Normally will be on from Tuesday nights
Tuesday nights from 8 to 9 p.m.
Good evening, you're on the air
Um, hello
Hi, how you doing
After such a wonderful
Advanced discussion about ISDN
I hate to bring the conversation down a peg
But I was going to ask if you guys had any
Pointers for those of us out there who are
Interested but maybe don't
Actually know anything about ISDN yet
Are there any good
References for those of us who would
Yes, there is
ISDN for dummies
No offense, but I mean
Fiber even bought this book for himself
Basically because I wanted to review it
It's comprehensive and understandable to the lay person
So I could recommend it to people
And I am recommending it
It's very easy to grasp
And it's very easy to read
It's a quick read and it provides
A lot of information that will be extremely useful
In understanding what ISDN is
Why you'd want it
And how you can order it
As well as reviews of various products that are available
If you read that book I think you'll be in much
Better shape
Great, thanks a lot
I should read that book, shouldn't I?
I think you should, I think everyone should
Of all the dummy series
I think that's probably one of the most helpful
It should be in the drawers of every night table at every hotel
Well, yeah, it'll certainly be what's there now
Good evening, you're on the air
Hello? Yeah, go ahead
Yeah, this is another ISDN question
I live in New Jersey
And I hear with Bell Atlantic
It's a lot easier to get the service or something like that
But the question I want to know is
Is there any local providers in New Jersey?
And also I would like to be able to use both channels
Okay
What can you tell him?
I don't know about really any local providers
I know about the national providers
All the major providers
Most of them
That offer ISDN obviously cover New Jersey
I think Panix is in New Jersey
Oh yeah, that's true
Although Panix doesn't have ISDN yet
Do they have a local access number?
Or would it be like a long distance call?
Where are you in New Jersey?
201?
Are you in 201?
908
I'm not really sure what the calling patterns are over there
You'd have to check
If you call a system like Panix
See if they have a dial-up in your area
If it's a local call for you
Otherwise, it's not really a secret
I'm sure there is a service in your area
What city are you near?
As far as a big city?
Yeah, what's the biggest city you're near?
Newark?
Newark, yeah
Is Newark a local call for you?
No
You need a city that's in your local calling area
Are there any?
I'm not sure
You need to find out about that
That's the most important thing
There are providers here
But I don't know if any have ISDN
They will if you call them and pester them to have it
Because ISDN is the future
We've known that for a while
But it's only this year that we've started doing something
Do you have net access right now?
Well, I'm a consultant
So I have it at my job
What you might want to do
Do you have Usenet access?
Can you read newsgroups?
The easiest thing you could do
Is post a message on the newsgroup
comp.dcom.isdn
If you post a message
Asking about service providers in Jersey
That have ISDN
You'll definitely get responses
Fast and furious
I have an ISDN phone at my job
And it has like 8 lines
It's kind of like a
It has buttons for each line
Was it a ROM phone?
It's AT&T
Was that Meridian?
No, AT&T
Was it one of the 8520s?
Or is it an older one?
I'm not sure of the model number
It's pretty big, it's got several
Fluff touch buttons on it
It's kind of like brown
Oh, brown
I've got caller ID that comes up when people call you
I think that's one of the newer ones
I think it's the 8500 series
Do you get caller ID for outside calls or just inside calls?
When it's inside, I actually see the person's name
Wow, which you will do
You'll see people's names soon when caller name
Service comes around
Caller name delivery, sure
Alright, well thanks for the call
One other question
I'll hang up
BRI is what 9x terms
Is basic exchange service
BRI actually stands for basic rate ISDN
And is
Basically
What a normal subscriber would order
Not a business
It's more geared towards residences
You get two B channels, no frills
A PRI is actually ISDN
Provided over a T1 line
T1 line being
Approximately one and a half
Million bits per second bandwidth
And that actually provides
23 B channels
And a T1 obviously
For people out there that are aware
Actually has 24 channels
The 24th being used for signaling is your D channel
And that's used for
Usually corporate high volume
ISDN service
And is obviously more expensive
Okay, good evening
You're on the air
Yes, go ahead
I'm concerned about a couple things
First of all, thank God you guys are on the air
Second of all
I'm a service provider
In New Jersey
And actually we're just going to start doing ISDN
This is incredible
So you're a service provider in New Jersey
And you're about to provide ISDN
What's the name of your service?
We're cruso.net
And we're in the 201 area code
How do you spell that?
C-R-U-S-O-E dot N-E-T
We got it
Basically I was listening to your conversation
About Centrix, etc.
And I wanted to know
Since we're ordering our PRI right now
Are there any special features
I should look for on it?
Uh
They're going to give us a laundry list of
Order what you want on your PRI
The thing is
If you want to get it as quickly as possible
It might not be a great idea
To order Centrix right off the bat
It's something you could always order later
And I think that right now
You should just be concerned with getting set up as quickly as possible
In which case
You basically want a vanilla PRI
And obviously you want
If I were you
I would want to have a directory number
Uh
At least as many directory numbers as B channels
In which case it would be 23
Yeah, we're getting that
But other than that
You shouldn't have to worry about anything
Another thing on what to switch your service by
Is make sure that you have
Audio or speech bearer capability
Available on your B channels
So that subscribers can connect
On a speech or an audio call
At 56 kilobits
And that's what you guys were talking about earlier
Yeah
And you'll get a lot more customers that way
Yeah, a lot of happy customers
Alright, good luck, let us know how you do
Okay, the other question I have for you is
What's your feelings on Java
I haven't heard anything about this yet
Well, it hasn't really exploded yet
No, I don't suppose it has
No, but as far as Java goes
I would expect to see
And hear a lot more about hot Java
Once the newer version of Netscape comes out
Netscape 2.0
Which is supposed to have hot Java support
And I think once that happens
You'll see a lot more organized effort
In developing
Java
Web based Java
I have no idea what hot Java is
Hot Java is basically
A really advanced
Web presentation
Language as well as browser
That was developed at Sun Microsystems
In California
And hot Java goes well above
And beyond what a
Typical web page can do now
Which is basically an over glorified
Magazine page
Hot Java brings various things like
Like animation
And
All kinds of really powerful
Tools in the hands of web
Developers simply because
It's not just taking a page and marking
It up and making it
You know, it's basically
An actual programming language that allows
People to do really powerful
And creative things and artistic things
Okay
Let's take a few more calls
Good evening, you're on the air
On the air? Yes, you are
Do you want to be on the air?
Okay, well you're
No longer on the air, there you go. Good evening, you're on the air
Hello? Yes, go ahead
Yes, you're on the air
Okay, you're off the air now too
What's with people out there? I don't know
It's like
They're being beeped with our number or something
And they think that they're supposed to be
Talking to somebody. Good evening, you're on the air
Hi, it's Pam, guys
I'm calling with more information on 800 number
Direct to England
Oh, I wonder if we still have time for that
Okay, well let's see if we do. What do you got?
Well, I'll give you the short, sweet version
British Telecom call direct
Is 1-800-445-5667
But unfortunately
They won't allow you to call 891
Or 336 now. Oh, you've already checked into that?
Yes, sir. Oh, well, then great
You've done all our work for us. I tried
Now, they said that even with a
Even with the right kind of card
Yeah, they didn't care
They won't allow you to call
To go through to 891 or 336
Okay, well hopefully our listener is out there
And he's heard the bad news
Yeah, and AT&T really couldn't
Find UK direct or anything like that
So this was the best they could do
I don't know if that's the number you guys were talking about
That is it, yeah. That's definitely it
Okay, cool. Alright, thanks for the call. Have a good night
Take care. Alright, that's
An indication of BAI listeners coming through
I think we have time for one more call
Good evening, you're on
Could you tell me if there's any sites
For finding information on
Bernie S.'s case? Because I'm interested
In presenting it in a law class
You know, just
With fellow students for discussion
You know, a listener called earlier
And asked about maybe you had tapes of the show
I'm wondering if there's any hard information
On the net or... Yeah, in fact, I'm very glad you mentioned that
Because I forgot to mention it before
If you finger Bernie S.
B-E-R-N-I-E-S at 2600.com
It'll give you all the information
The updated information on his case
If you email that address
You'll be sending him a letter that will be forwarded to him in prison
Which hopefully he won't be in past
Next week. We have the same
Service set up for Kevin Mitnick
The address there is kmitnick
K-M-I-T-N-I-C-K at 2600.com
Okay? Thank you
Thanks a lot. And also this reminder
There's a 2600 meeting this
Friday coming up at the City Corps Center
Right there in the lobby by the pay phones
Where you can meet and talk with computer hackers
And learn all kinds of things like this
And who knows, maybe somebody will bring a BitSurfer with them
And you can see what that looks like
Anyway, that's going to do it for us
On this, our first Tuesday night
Of the Expanded Edition
We'll be back again next Tuesday
From 8 to 9 o'clock
So hopefully we'll hear
From most of you then
And keep in touch
This is Emmanuel Goldstein for FiberOptic
And everybody else, have a good night
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But if they could they would
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