Doug, his work in progress is The Strength of the Wolf and Hotel Tacloban.
I think the only way, Tacloban, the only way you can get that, I think, is on Amazon.
Any case, thanks a million, Doug, and I'll be speaking to you, my friend.
Triangle of Death, the thriller, based on the CIA's, Triangle of Death is based on the
CIA's real-life use of unwitting guinea pigs to test mind-control drugs.
The book CIA hates to be reminded of is still, in spite of all efforts, out there.
And next week, we're going to have, well, you know, we're in a nation where the President
of the United States said he smoked dope but he didn't inhale, and you heard myself and
Detective Bobby Johnson say if he did it here in New York, it wouldn't have held water.
He'd have a 19-digit serial number in front of him instead of Commander-in-Chief.
But yet, there are people serving 90 and 100 years in prison in the United States for possession
of marijuana, for what?
To counteract cancer, to counteract multiple sclerosis.
Well, we're going to hear from some of those people next week.
So, guys, don't miss it.
We need you.
This is Mike Levine, expert witness, signing off.
Mucho ojo en la calle, mi gente.
Ten years ago, a finger-snapping, foot-stomping musical lit up the theater scene, and now
Smoke on the Mountain is returning in a new production, and their first performance at
the Lamb's Theater will be a benefit for listener-sponsored WBAI on Friday night, June 5th.
Smoke on the Mountain, hailed by Clyde Barnes and the Post as a totally beguiling theatrical
entertainment and which the New Yorker called perfectly delightful.
Among the many wonderful things about Smoke on the Mountain is that you can bring the
kids or your grandparents for a joyous evening.
Join your friends from WBAI at this special performance of Smoke on the Mountain, Friday,
June 5th, curtain time, 8 o'clock, tickets $35 a pair, and you can make reservations
by calling area code 212-575-0263.
It's Smoke on the Mountain at the Lamb's Theater, reservations 575-0263.
And you're tuned to listener-sponsored, commercial-free, community radio WBAI in New York, 99.5 FM,
Off the Hook with Emanuel Goldstein is coming up next.
Please stay tuned.
If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning, I'd hammer in the evening, all over this land.
On Saturday evening, May 30th, the War Resisters League will honor Odetta, Charlie King, and
the People's Voice Cafe with its annual Peace Awards.
This is the War Resisters League's 75th anniversary dinner and concert with Odetta and Charlie
King singing, and it's held at Riverside Church, 120th and Claremont Avenue.
So join us on May 30th at 630, and we'll sing our way to paradise.
For more information, call 212-228-0450.
That's 228-0450.
This has been a public service announcement for WBAI on behalf of the War Resisters League.
I'd sing in the evening, all over this land, sing out of tune, just sing out of tune.
Hi, this is Harry Belafonte.
You're listening to Community Radio in New York City, WBAI 99.5 FM.
WBAI is listener-supported, so please be generous.
Thank you.
You give yourself to those who don't deserve you.
You go where you are not supposed to be.
I know someday that I am going to have you.
Someday you'll have to give yourself to me.
It's 8 o'clock.
Time for Off the Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a call.
It couldn't get much worse.
But if they could, they would.
The best expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
And a very good evening to everybody.
This is Emmanuel Goldstein.
This is another exciting edition of Off the Hook here,
on listener-supported WBAI in New York,
where we have no commercials before we start.
A word from our commercial sponsor.
When 7up has got me down, when hi-c gets me low,
My Labatt's blue ain't blue, it's brown.
My Nestle's quick just makes me slow.
When my sparkling cider's lost its shine,
My can of sharks is dull.
Hawaiian Punch has knocked me cold.
A feeling hits my skull.
And my mind just turns to Pepsi,
And I couldn't tell you why.
Smart drinks lead me to forget,
And Coke won't get me high.
When constant cum it won't shut up,
I'll sit right down and fill my cup
With Pepsi.
Drink it up.
When diet right to me is wrong,
My country time's expired.
My Minute Maid's an hour long,
My Maxwell House won't get me wired.
When my pet milk turns on me,
And my Five Alive is dead.
When my royal crown's been overthrown,
An impulse hits my head.
And my mind just turns to Pepsi,
And I think of it a lot.
My Swiss Miss just wasn't pure,
And Kool-Aid isn't hot.
When I'm wall of smoothies rough me up,
I'll turn to a bigger cup
Of Pepsi.
Drink it up.
When Samuel Adams makes me ale,
Dr. Pepper's not around.
When sweet success has let me fail,
I crave a flavor most profound.
And my mind just turns to Pepsi,
When I look, I see, I buy.
My crystal light has just burned out,
And Canada's gone dry.
My you who will not call to me,
I am a loyal endorsee
Of Pepsi.
Drink it up.
It's just a funny thing.
Drink it up.
It's just a funny thing.
There's a Pepsi commercial where there's
A sun setting on this farm,
And you hear this guy go,
And you don't know what it is,
And then you see in the back of the barn
There's a soda machine,
And this guy has a dollar bill going,
And then he takes it,
And he goes,
Yes, yes.
Everybody, drink it up.
And a good evening to everybody.
That, of course, was Negative Land.
Negative Land being, I guess,
a band that over the years has been known
for kind of spitting in the face of authority.
And what better face to spit in
than the face of Pepsi?
They put out a whole album late last year
that pretty much was devoted to Pepsi.
In fact, last week we played some of it.
No, it wasn't a real commercial,
although a lot of people seem to think
that BAI suddenly started playing commercials.
I mean, come on.
I mean, hell will freeze over before that happens.
These people put out an entire record.
They didn't name it really in a traditional sense.
They put a bunch of letters together.
S, P, I, E, D, P, S, and I.
And they gave a number to call.
They gave a number to call for people to find out
what exactly the album was called
because a lot of people were confused.
So we're going to call that number
because that's what we do.
We call numbers and figure out what they are.
And this number will tell us
exactly what the letters mean.
Negativelands, word of mouth line.
The title of Negativelands' new CD is spelled
D-I-S-P-E-P-S-I.
It's one word, and it's pronounced Dis-Pepsi.
The choice of a negative generation.
Okay.
Okay, we don't want to leave a message.
Recording erased.
Thank you.
Please record again after the tone.
No, no, no, no, no.
No, we don't want to leave a message.
Message sent.
Oh, no.
Goodbye.
Okay, well, we've just confused Negativeland,
and that's the last thing I wanted to do.
Oh, well.
That's pretty much what WBAI is about.
That's pretty much what computer hackers are about.
And we know that's what Negativeland is about.
Questioning authority.
And finding out things about corporations
that they'd rather you not find out about.
You know, like Nike, for instance.
Now, there's a corporation.
Probably one of the biggest corporations around.
I mean, it's not Microsoft.
Microsoft, of course, has been subjected to a lot of abuse,
criticism, and unwanted news over the past few weeks.
And the reason being is because they've just gotten so big.
You know, they're incredibly huge.
They're a monopoly, in the opinion of the U.S. government.
And that's something to be concerned with.
But Nike is a whole other story.
They're everywhere, but you don't know they're everywhere.
You know, I only discovered this yesterday when I was in the mall.
And I was playing a little game.
You should try this.
Go to the mall.
Wait till the show's over.
Go to the mall.
And see how many people you can count
that are wearing Nike insignia of various sorts.
Nike, of course, is that little, like, swooshy thing,
which I don't really understand,
but that's what they put on their shoes.
And people walk around with shirts.
They walk around with jackets.
They walk around with hats.
Some people even have it emblazoned on their forehead.
And you have to wonder why.
It's a corporation.
It's a huge multinational corporation.
They don't care about you.
They sell you shoes that are vastly expensive.
And this is why I suggest everybody go out
and see the Michael Moore film called The Big One.
They employ slave labor in all parts of the world.
I believe Asia is the most predominant.
And it's just unbelievable.
Everybody buys into this kind of thing.
So you walk around the mall and you see all these people
wearing these corporate insignias all over them.
I thought maybe, you know, in the space of a couple of minutes,
I'd see five.
Instead, I saw over a dozen.
And some of them are really tiny.
You have to, like, really get close to people to see them.
You know, they have the little Nike things
on the backs of their necks, you know, on their collars.
And the funny thing, the really funny thing about it
was that I wasn't even looking at their shoes.
And shoes are what these people sell.
All I saw were the advertisements for the shoes
that people, they don't get paid to carry around these advertisements.
They pay the company to advertise for them.
It's something I don't understand.
You go to a company and you say,
here's money, I want to advertise your product for you.
And they say, okay, here's an advertisement on a shirt.
You can't have a shoe, you have to buy, you know,
a shoe at the regular list price of a couple hundred bucks
or whatever they sell them for these days.
And it's just, it's crazy.
So let's, let's give Nike a call.
Thank you for calling Nike Consumer Affairs.
For Nike literature and product information, press 1.
For Nike retailers and factory outlets, press 2.
To share your comments and feedback, press 3.
If you are calling to speak to a Nike representative,
our call center hours are from 7 o'clock a.m. to 4 p.m.
If you are calling to speak to a Nike representative,
our call center hours are from 7 o'clock a.m. to 4 p.m. Pacific time, Monday through Friday.
You may return to the main menu at any time during this call by pressing the star key.
Okay, let's press some keys.
For Nike literature and product information, press 1.
For Nike retailers...
For Nike literature and product information...
They have a good system.
For Nike literature...
Goodbye, goodbye, you're no fun.
Well, they leave at 4.50 Pacific time, so that's no fun.
But, you know, try getting a tour of a U.S. manufacturing facility.
You're going to have a bit of a problem.
Because they don't make anything in this country.
Well, maybe they make the shirts, I don't know.
Maybe they make the armbands and the billboards and whatever else.
So that's something that just has always amazed me about American culture.
I was overseas this past week in Holland giving a talk at the 5th anniversary of Access for All, which is now the 3rd largest Internet provider over there.
Get this, it started as a hacker magazine.
It started as Hacktik magazine.
And, in fact, a lot of you were around for this as Off the Hook has aired over the past almost 10 years.
Hacktik was published in the late 80s.
And that turned into an Internet service provider known as Access for All, which became one of the largest providers in the entire country of Holland.
And now they've been around for 5 years.
The magazine isn't around anymore, unfortunately.
Hopefully something else will come up and take its place.
But Access for All has been around for 5 years.
And they had a party last Friday.
And what I tried to do was get word out about the whole Kevin Mitnick case.
Because people over there don't really know about what's going on there.
They don't really know about the fact that somebody in this country has been in prison for over 3 years without any sort of a trial, without any sort of a prospect of a trial.
I mean, it sounds unbelievable when you consider it that way.
And people are fascinated by this particular case.
What's interesting is I went over there with a whole bunch of Free Kevin bumper stickers, which are the exact same style as...
And I didn't know this, I swear.
The exact same style as Dutch license plates.
Now, the possibilities, of course, became quite endless once those got distributed around.
It was pretty amazing how people really were interested in learning, spreading the knowledge of the case.
And the anger they showed towards what was going on to somebody that really was accused of nothing more than some curiosity, some ability to escape the authorities.
So, it's happy and it's sad, but it's something that I think we need to do a lot.
We need to spread the word around.
So, there's Free Kevin bumper stickers out everywhere now.
Got some to Dayton last week, we've gotten some to Amsterdam this week.
And, of course, every 2600 subscriber got one in the mail over the past few days.
And it's only the beginning.
It's only the beginning of a campaign to end this nightmare that we've been talking about now since, gosh, 1995.
Think about that.
That's when he got caught.
He was on the run for a year and a half before that.
It just never seems to end.
And when this does end, I'm sure something else will pop up to take its place.
So, as we've mentioned many times, people over in Holland are pretty fascinated by American culture, by our fascination with corporations like we've been talking about.
And I think it's just kind of a perverse curiosity on their part as far as why.
What is it about us that makes us go for these things?
I don't understand it either.
They ask me these questions.
They ask me all kinds of questions every time I go over there.
Like, you know, so let's get this straight.
Every week in a schoolyard somewhere, some kid shoots his fellow students and the problem is blamed on TV shows?
Yeah, okay.
That makes a lot of sense.
Have you ever considered maybe not having so many guns around?
No.
No, no.
You see, this is America.
We don't think that way.
And the rights of a preteen to have a gun is something that we do not violate easily.
Yeah.
So, we have a reputation.
And, you know, I say this in all seriousness.
We have a reputation in the rest of the world as a bunch of crazy lunatics who happen to be the most dangerous country in the world because we're also the most powerful country in the world.
And it's, you know, it's kind of fun to go over there with that in mind because you sort of are given a wide berth as you walk down the street.
You know, he's an American.
Nobody knows what he's going to do.
But it's also, it's kind of a sobering thing because you realize that, yeah, you know, we are kind of like a bus going down a hill out of control with no brakes.
And one only has to wonder what that's going to lead to.
Well, one thing that I noticed over there, and this was the first time I'd been there in about a year and a half, everybody's got GSM phones.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
Everybody's got these things.
And most of them seem to be the Ericsson models.
You hear the little beeps everywhere.
You hear, you know what they mean.
You know, hey, this person just got an SMS message.
You know, he just got one of these electronic mail things or news headlines or whatnot.
And it's kind of cool, kind of cool to see everybody using these things and knowing how to use them, which is really not what we're doing here.
A few people have them.
They're too expensive here, and not everybody's using them in the right way.
And, of course, I brought my phone over there.
My phone won't work over there because it's a different type of transmission.
This is 1,900 megahertz over here.
They use 900 megahertz over there.
But the little SIM card does work.
I was able to take the SIM card out, plug it into somebody else's phone, and instantly I got my local weather forecast for back in New York and all the New York Times headlines that I had missed.
So that was kind of cool.
And I was able to call back to the U.S., and they were able to call me at my regular number and be forwarded to Holland.
I have no idea how much this is going to cost, and that's sort of the fun of the whole thing.
You don't know what's going to happen.
So in a couple of weeks, I'm sure I'll be raising all kinds of fuss about the price that I got charged for that.
So everybody also, at the same time, while they're using GSM, they're also cloning GSM SIM cards.
Everybody's, I mean, you know, we talked about this a few weeks ago here, but I didn't realize the extent of it over there.
I mean, the software is everywhere.
Everyone's doing this.
Everyone's making copies of SIM cards.
You know, the thing that we were told was impossible, it's not only possible, but very prevalent over there.
It doesn't seem to be really, you know, affecting the service at all.
But it definitely would embarrass some of the companies over here if a lot of people were doing that.
And a lot of people will be doing it over here because, hey, the software is making it to this country as well.
In fact, it's already in this country. People are doing it here as well.
And knowledge will be spread around.
You can't really stop knowledge.
So that was kind of enlightening to see all that.
Some other enlightenment.
Some things that happened last week.
In fact, things that happened right after the show ended.
You must have heard about this.
The entire pager network for the United States went down.
Actually, not the entire pager network, but a good 90% of it.
That's a significant chunk right there.
And, you know, my pager stopped working on Wednesday.
And up until that point, I had no idea, no clue at all that my pager used a satellite.
Because it's local, you know, it only works in New York.
What does it need a satellite for?
Well, they do. They use satellites.
And a very vast majority of the pagers use satellites.
So when that particular satellite got knocked out of orbit,
or just turned in the wrong direction,
it affected just about everybody.
I'd like to hear from some listeners.
I'm going to take phone calls in a couple of minutes.
How that might have affected them.
Did you lose a loved one, maybe?
Or, you know, lose out on a job opportunity?
You know, what's the worst possible thing that happened to somebody
based on that technical fallop?
That's what I'd like to know.
I was away, so, you know, all I knew was my pager wasn't working as I left.
And when I got back, it was.
So I kind of missed out on the whole thing.
I'm not even sure my pager's working now, you know?
Maybe I should check this.
I just wind up doing everything when I come in here,
because I have no time to do things otherwise.
Let's just see if I can...
I'm going to page myself.
Thank you for calling.
Okay, let's see if the pagers are back.
So far, nothing.
Uh-oh.
Well, we might have a problem.
Sometimes it takes a while, you know?
Maybe a lot of people are using the network,
and sometimes it can take...
Ah, here we go.
There we are. Okay.
That's interesting, because that's not the number I entered.
It duplicated all the numbers.
But it got the message across for the most part.
The thing is, you know, you don't know how vulnerable you are
until something like this happens.
We focus on this kind of thing week after week,
and nobody here knew that all it would take
would be a single error in the computer
to make a satellite go slightly away, out of orbit,
point in the wrong direction,
and every single pager in the country virtually is affected.
That was an enlightening experience.
So, it's all working again.
You know, what I don't understand, though, is,
what's wrong with these people?
They had no backup?
No backup whatsoever?
I mean, they must have known.
They must have known that this could happen.
When they realized they only had one satellite
handling all the pager traffic, you know,
that one satellite goes away,
then they have no pager traffic.
It's not that hard to figure out.
So, maybe they learned their lesson, maybe they didn't.
But I think consumers certainly did.
And speaking of enlightenment, Janet Reno,
who is pretty much the face of enlightenment,
well, it's got to be the face of something.
No comment on computers.
This comes from the St. Paul Pioneer Planet.
You know the one Clark Kent works for?
Yeah, that one.
Attorney General Janet Reno confesses
she's only a few steps beyond Abe Lincoln
when it comes to taking notes.
While she hasn't opted for charcoal and a shovel,
Reno is using pen and paper to write
her high-powered legal notes.
At this moment, I do not have a personal relationship
with a computer, she said at a recent press conference.
She tried one, but, and here's the quote,
it got so confusing as to what was on the computer
or what wasn't on the computer,
what was on the hard drive,
what was on the soft drive,
that it made it easier for me
just to do my work with pen and pencil.
No paper, just pen and pencil, she writes on the desk.
Soft drive, yeah.
Janet Soft Drive Reno,
that's what we're going to call her from now on.
All right, speaking of government, boy,
we talked about the loft thing
for just a couple of minutes last week.
You know that quote that everybody's been quoting?
I don't know if it's really a quote
because I haven't seen it in context yet.
We haven't been successful getting a hold of those people
because I imagine they're in demand
after things like that got out.
Basically, the idea was that hackers
could take down the entire Internet in 30 minutes or less.
That's right, a band of seven hackers from Boston
told the Senate committee last Tuesday
they could bring down the foundation of the Internet
in 30 minutes.
And one of the people is Mudge,
who was on our radio show a few months ago, actually.
You know, it's an interesting thing.
I mean, you're there in front of Congress.
They can be kind of intimidating.
And I guess, you know, things come out
that maybe you don't want them to be interpreted in just that way.
I can tell you right now,
hackers are not going to take down the Internet in 30...
I mean, I've been getting calls from reporters now
for the past couple of days, ever since I got back,
wanting responses to this threat
that the loft poses to the Internet.
Of course, you know, it doesn't take a rocket scientist
to realize that saying,
I can take down the Internet in 30 minutes
is going to be perceived as a threat
by some dim-minded media people.
But there are certainly security problems
that could result in somebody with the proper access,
and access to a lot of different things,
and knowledge to achieve a desired effect.
And the desire to do something bad.
All that wrapped together.
And yeah, somebody could cause significant mayhem.
And that's never really been an issue.
Thing is, is it a threat from hackers?
The answer is no.
Hackers are not going to take down the Internet in 30 minutes.
So, no need to panic.
But, definite need to increase security
because there are all kinds of technical problems,
all kinds of security issues that are definitely relevant.
And things as stupid as, you know,
satellites that don't have any backup,
same mentality goes into some aspects of the Internet.
And that's what you have to take into consideration,
is that a failure in one way can lead to a failure somewhere else,
and it just keeps multiplying
until you have a complete breakdown of communication.
That's what you have to watch out for.
And that's, I think, what the people at the loft
were trying to warn Congress about.
Of course, you know, I've been there,
I've been in front of Congress,
I know that you say certain things
and it doesn't exactly get interpreted
the way you want it to be interpreted.
So, I think we know what the interpretation was meant to be.
The boneheads in the media, of course,
will get it wrong every time.
Probably the best thing to do is just to seek knowledge
and play around with systems
and you'll know for yourself what's possible
and what isn't possible.
I don't think reading the paper really will give you much
in the way of knowledge as far as that goes.
Okay, and finally, before we take some phone calls,
212-279-3400,
a new software package will be released on Friday
that allows parents to secretly monitor
their kids' internet usage.
While products have been used to clock net surfing
at the office for a couple of years,
some people question whether or not covert supervision
is a healthy way of keeping an eye
on where kids are going online.
The product called Prudence
tracks all online destinations
visited by youthful net surfers,
recording URLs, bookmarks,
cache activity, graphics, and cookies
at intervals determined by the user.
Prudence can be configured to simply log the information
for parental perusal
or to download and encrypt all graphics,
storing them in a hidden file on the user's hard drive
for later scrutiny.
And for the concerned parent
who doesn't want to wait until the end of the workday
to discover that little Ashley or Leo
has been dropping into erotic.com,
the Aryan Nation, or gay.net,
Prudence will email logs to a parent at the office,
issuing an update every few minutes.
I don't know about you,
but that makes me feel so much more secure.
All right, 212-279-3400 is our phone number.
We're listening, incidentally,
to some music I brought back from Holland,
the sounds of Rotterdam.
There's quite a rave scene in Rotterdam.
You thought it was all shipping.
No, there's a lot more going on there.
And I'm out of strength.
You ain't ever gonna beat me now.
I am a four.
And I'm out of strength.
You ain't ever gonna beat me now.
Okay, are we ready?
212-279-3400.
And you know, I have a feeling,
I have a feeling that I won't be saying that number
very much longer.
But we'll get into that a little bit later.
I'll be thinking.
I'll be thinking.
I'll be thinking.
Good evening.
You're on Off The Hook.
Yes, good afternoon, Emmanuel.
I'm sorry, good evening.
Yeah, it is evening,
depending on where you're calling from, though.
Oh, no.
It could be afternoon, it could be morning.
No, it's definitely evening where I am.
Let me just immediately interrupt you by saying
that when I was in Amsterdam,
I was talking to some people,
and you know what?
There are listeners over there.
Some guy came up to me and said,
hey, I listen to your show every week,
and you know, it's the most amazing thing
to be in a foreign country
and have people come up to you
who can hear the show.
And of course, that's thanks to all the people
who help out in coding the show on the Internet
and get it out there to those people
who otherwise would never hear it.
Yeah, you may speak now.
Oh, okay, thank you.
Sorry about that.
Quick question.
I was just wondering if you know if it's true
that Bodver and Rebel got married
and moved to Hawaii.
No, I don't think that's,
I think that's true.
I don't think that's true.
And again, it's another instance
of how the media botches everything.
So just keep that in mind.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Well, so far the second caller
is more intelligent than the first caller.
Let's see if the third caller can top that.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Hello.
Yes.
Finally.
Can you give me that number
which you gave out a couple weeks ago
with the substations?
That number?
Why, huh?
When you call the number
it tells you, you know, 13th Street.
Oh, oh, you mean to identify your central office.
Are you in New York?
Yes.
Okay, you dial your exchange
followed by 9901.
9901.
Okay, oh, so on a phone bill question.
Mm-hmm.
Every month we're going to get
this 95 cent surcharge.
What 95 surcharge is this?
Oh, you know what I'm talking about?
I don't, every surcharge that happens
catches me by surprise.
There's something,
hold on, I've got to get the phone bill
here in front of me.
If you have a phone line,
they charge you per phone line now.
Yeah, they charge you for every second line.
But I only have one phone.
And I get a 95 cent bill.
Where is it?
There's a number you can call up
in the recording.
I think you once recalled it up on the air
several weeks ago.
Yeah, I was told,
I'm not sure, it might be a different surcharge,
but I was told that...
Oh, here it is.
How are your line charges?
Okay.
For an explanation,
please call 1-800-532-2021.
Okay, and did you call that number?
Yeah, there's a whole thing.
It goes on for a couple of minutes.
Is this every month I'm going to get this?
If that's what it says,
how is it defined again?
What kind of a surcharge?
Carry a line charge.
Okay, well apparently that's just for your line,
but I was also under the impression
that there's a couple of dollars,
maybe it's $1.50 every month
for every additional line.
And for people who want to avoid that,
the way you avoid that
is to have different lines in different names.
You know, if you're clever,
it's not that hard to do,
and you don't get charged that extra fee.
Yeah, I know.
You have non-jumping numbers too.
You get a bunch of different numbers.
Well, you don't...
Yeah, you mean hunting.
Hunting numbers, yeah.
Right, right.
There's no way to get rid of this crazy stuff.
Well, they just keep adding these crazy fees.
They just do.
And another fee is going to be added pretty soon,
having to do with wiring up the Internet
to our nation's schools.
Now, you know, nobody would deny that.
Nobody would deny our little kids the right
to have the Internet.
No one learned anything before the Internet.
Right, so of course,
we're going to have to add that to the phone bill,
and that'll be a couple more bucks.
The tape you played in the beginning
from that phony Pepsi commercial?
Yeah.
Is that in the stores, that CD?
Well, you know, that's an interesting thing.
When you question corporations,
you find yourself not being carried
in various places that the corporations run.
Where can I get that?
What I would do is do a web search for Negative Land.
I think you can get it from CD Now,
which is a website.
I'm pretty sure you can just get it over the net,
if you can't find it in an independent record store.
What I would suggest doing,
what part of New York are you in?
Brooklyn.
Brooklyn, okay.
There are all kinds of independent record stores.
Go to one of them, ask them if they have
the new Negative Land record,
and I'm sure if they haven't heard of it,
they'll try at least to get it.
And if you fail, as far as that goes,
try the web.
Yeah, okay, thanks a lot.
Great show.
Okay, take care.
That is interesting.
You know, nobody questions you
if you walk around the mall
with the emblem of a company
that enslaves all these people
in various parts of the world.
But try walking around with a pro-choice shirt
or something like that,
and boy, will you get dirty looks.
This requires thinking.
This requires some sort of, you know,
controversial dilemma here.
Or go around with something that, you know,
criticizes Nike,
and I'm sure you'll get attacked for that, too.
You know, the corporations have to be protected.
Nobody wants to offend them.
It's just sad.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Hello.
Go ahead.
I'm on the air?
Yes, you are.
All right.
I have a question.
I don't sound like this if I'm on the air.
Hello?
Trust me, you're on the air.
Okay.
My question is concerning the PCS phones
and the cellular phones.
I just wanted to know the basic difference
between the two,
if there is one, in fact.
And I've heard young kids talking about
how they cloned phones through laptop computers.
I was wondering how that was done.
Right.
Well, there are programs that capture ESNs
and all kinds of information
that allow you to clone the old-fashioned cellular phones,
the ones that operate at 800 megahertz.
Right.
Those phones are insecure.
They're bulky.
They're expensive.
And, you know, you can listen to them
just by turning on a scanner,
which is illegal, of course,
but you can do it.
The new PCS phones operate in the 1900 megahertz,
and there are two different kinds of those.
There's CDMA, which is Sprint PCS,
which, believe me,
they have oversold the area like nobody's business.
Right, because I always hear Sprint PCS.
Yeah, but I'm saying they can't handle
the number of customers they have.
You have to wait to make phone calls.
Most of the time you don't get your phone calls
because there's not enough circuits.
Really?
So they have to expand a bit
because they've been overselling so much.
And then there's OmniPoint,
which is the GSM provider in the area.
GSM and PCS, meaning what?
PCS encompasses both CDMA and GSM.
It's fans of personal communication services.
It's basically the more intelligent types
of mobile phones.
You can get things like, you know, email.
You can get news headlines and weather.
And, of course, stock quotes.
You can get all that.
Really?
More importantly, you can make phone calls.
And they're cheaper.
They tend to be a lot cheaper.
In theory, they're supposed to be a lot cheaper
than they really are right now.
But it's what the whole world is moving towards.
Yeah, I see a lot of advertisements
saying that there's no credit check,
like you can get a...
Well, that's not true.
There is a credit check.
I mean, you can get probably a pay-first plan
where there is no credit check.
But if you get the kind where you want to get a bill,
they do a credit check.
Oh.
And one question concerning
the coin refund department of Bell Atlantic.
Previously, you could just make a phone call, right?
Right.
To the operator,
and she would just bill it to your home phone.
Now you have to go through a whole process
speaking to an automated service,
and you have to give your name, your address,
the phone number of the public phone which you're using,
and sometimes they don't even have a phone number,
and the amount of money that you lost.
And then you would have to wait probably a month or so
to get a measly 25 cents or 50 cents check in the mail
instead of just crediting it to your bill.
Do you know why they're doing that now?
That could be a Bell Atlantic thing
as opposed to a NYNEX thing.
Really?
I'm not sure because I don't use pay phones anymore,
so I don't have to worry about credit anymore.
But I would imagine if that's the case.
What I suggest people do,
if you spend an inordinate amount of time
getting what is rightfully yours,
you add a little fee.
Because they add all the fees they want.
Nobody ever questions that.
Why can't consumers have their little fees as well?
You made me spend five minutes on the phone
going through your voicemail systems
trying to figure out how to hit the right key
to get the right option.
Right.
Five dollars.
That's five dollars right there.
You know what I mean?
And sometimes when it says press one,
I forget what it asks,
and then you press one
and sometimes there's some kind of feature on the phone,
some electronic feature that says invalid option,
and it just disconnects your phone,
your conversation.
So you have to dial operate again.
I'm like, what the hell is this?
I didn't understand that at all.
It's like, are they really trying to deter me
to get what I'm due?
I mean, come on.
I've lost, like, who knows how much money on public phones.
You just have to keep at them, you know,
because eventually, if enough people complain
about what the problems are,
something will happen.
They need to stop taking complaints
or they might actually fix them.
Right, but the original manner
in which they took care of that problem
was so much simpler.
The operator would just be like,
I'm sorry, and I'll credit it to your phone bill,
and you would see minus 25 cents,
minus 50 cents, minus $1.25 on your bill.
Right.
And that was just so much easier.
Well, you know, it must be taking them longer
to do it this way, too.
Really?
They have to print up checks, after all.
They have to mail them.
Right, right, right.
Right.
I mean, I really think that there are premises
that I guess this is going to deter people.
You know, you have to spell your first name,
spell your last name,
give me your complete address, including zip code,
give me your telephone number,
give me the phone number of the public phone
in which you lost your change.
I mean, sometimes, like I said,
they don't even have a number.
It's enough to make people want to give up,
and I think that's sort of what they're shooting for.
I think that's their mentality.
Yeah, but my advice is you just sort of save
the amount of times into one major time that you call.
Right, right.
And then just do it once a month or something like that.
Yeah, I think that's the best way.
Do you know anything about the MetroCards?
What about the MetroCards?
Sometimes I swear I'm getting jerked.
I'll buy like a $6 prepaid MetroCard,
which means I have four, right?
I have four fares.
And the other day, I'm running.
It's like 2 o'clock in the morning.
I hear my train.
I run, and I swipe,
and then it tells me I have an insufficient balance,
and I knew I had at least one more fare.
I mean, what's going on?
What's up with that?
It's a bad system because you really have no way of proving it.
Yeah, they tell you hold the card, keep the card,
remember the time and date.
I mean, I don't have time to do all that,
and then mail it in.
The onus is on the consumer, and that's just not right.
I mean, that sucks.
And one more thing.
Is this show prerecorded today?
What kind of a question is that?
You're on live, aren't you?
I mean, that sucks.
No, no, no, because I don't hear myself on the air.
Well, you must be listening to the wrong station then
because you should be on the air.
You definitely should be on the air.
There's no question about that.
What are you hearing?
I'm hearing 99.5.
Yeah, but what's on 99.5?
See, that's me.
I just said that.
That's the delay.
It's the delay from the transmitter to your house.
Oh, I see.
Okay, well, listen, thanks for calling.
We've got to go to the next call.
No, it's not the delay from the transmitter to your house.
It's the digital delay we have that radio shows do.
That's just the way it works.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Hello?
Yes, go ahead.
Hi, I have a question about the article you printed in the winter issue.
Okay, the winter issue of 2600, I assume you're talking about.
Yeah.
Okay, turn down your radio a little bit
because it's kind of confusing there.
Well, the blacklisted issue, Blacklisted 411,
you know what magazine that is?
Uh-huh.
They printed the same Walmart phone issue that you guys did.
Do you guys, like, track that or whatever to make sure it doesn't happen?
Well, in that particular case, I believe what happened,
and again, this is just from memory,
the person without telling us submitted it to another magazine,
and I don't think they had any way of knowing that we printed it
because they came out with it shortly after we printed it.
Basically, you know, we count on people to be honest
as far as when they submit things, sometimes it doesn't work out.
Sometimes we get people that, you know, don't follow the rules,
and there's really not much you can do about that.
We had an article a couple of issues ago where a lot of people wrote in
to say that it was also available on the web, you know,
something that somebody read a year ago.
There's no way we can know that something is on the web, you know,
because we don't read the entire web.
It happens.
Yeah.
And sometimes things get printed that shouldn't be,
and when it happens, we try to acknowledge it
and encourage people to do better next time.
And also, there's sort of a little dispute between me and my friend,
the movie hackers.
What's going on with your name in that movie and that character?
Okay, well, tell me what the dispute is.
I'd just like to know what the dispute is first.
He says that you were, like, basically helping out making the movie
and that they named the character after you
because it was supposed to be a model of you,
and I think that it's just a name.
Okay, here's the story, all right?
And I want everybody to take note of this
because I'm going to say this once,
and I want it to be recorded for all time,
and it's going to be backed up by previous issues of this show
where you can listen to it on the Internet
and see the people who put out the film.
The author, Raphael Moreau, wrote this years ago,
and he came to many 2600 meetings,
got all kinds of material by hanging out with the characters there,
and basically we got to know him.
He became kind of a friend to us,
and people helped him out who worked for 2600,
and it was kind of like, you know, I guess sort of like a joke,
just putting a name in there.
That's really all it was.
Yeah, you know, I gave them some technical advice and some things,
most of which they didn't follow, unfortunately.
Some of the things I would have liked would have been
to not have that silly graphical interface
and also to use real red box tones.
I think that would have driven it across a lot better
than those fake things they had.
Using the name was just, you know, it was just a joke.
Nobody is mad at them for using the name.
Nobody got anything from them for using the name.
It was just, you know, kind of like a nod,
like they say in show business.
And that's it. That's really all there is to it.
So you really weren't involved?
I don't look like that guy.
I try not to act like that guy.
Although, you know, he was a lot of fun to hang out with.
He was definitely, you know, one of the characters of the film.
Because my friend was telling me that you were like basically
helping out making that movie, telling them kinds of stuff,
and I was like, well, how could he let them use Mac's?
Well, yeah, you see, the reason,
and here we go with the corporate stuff again.
Mac donated computers to them, and they got to keep the computers.
So, of course, every time you see a film,
you're watching a lot of commercials,
and see how many of them you can pick out.
Oh, yeah, there's Pepsi.
People drink Coke and Pepsi,
and they're wearing their Nikes and all that.
You know, watch a professional sports team,
and you'll see all the endorsements.
You know, everything is corporate.
They name the stadiums after corporations now.
And that's why a station like this and a show like this
is important because we don't have any of that.
You know, we just speak our minds.
And you may not always agree with what we have to say,
but at least, you know, nobody is standing over us with a whip
saying, you know, you have to mention this company every few minutes,
you know, and collect your check and all that kind of thing.
Yeah.
So, does that answer your question?
Yes, thanks a lot.
All right, take care.
Digital focus, STEM, and high voltage.
Okay, all right.
All right, enough shout-outs there.
212-279-3400 is our telephone number.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Hey.
How are you doing?
I have a couple of comments.
First off, it's Apple.
It's not Mac.
Well, okay.
The company's name is Apple.
Yeah, I know, I know.
Okay.
Okay.
Figured somebody would jump on me right away for that, but go ahead.
Okay.
Second, I have a Nike shirt on me right now, and it says,
Made in the USA.
Okay, the shirts are made in the USA.
Now, let me ask you something.
Where did you get the shirt?
A store.
Okay, all right.
Like JCPenney's or something.
All right.
How much did you pay for it?
I assume you paid for it.
Yeah.
They didn't just give it to you.
Over $20, I suppose.
All right.
Now, my next question is the most important one.
Why do you wear a corporate endorsement like that?
Peer pressure.
Peer pressure.
Peer pressure.
So, it's kind of like smoking, but it's wearing a shirt.
Yeah, something like that.
So, your friends informed you that you would no longer be welcome in their circles
unless you wore that corporate endorsement.
Well, no, but I mean, it's just everybody wears it, and I know some people who say,
Yeah, your shirt's gay because it doesn't say Nike on it.
And, of course, gay means bad in this day and age, right?
Yes.
Well, now, that's interesting because if you just try and count the number of people,
I had no idea.
This is sort of pervasive.
You didn't know it was creeping up on you like this until you actually looked for it
and said, How many people are wearing these Nike emblems?
And it just added up so fast.
It was scary.
It's scary enough for me to be in a mall in the first place,
and I'm sure it's scary for some of the people in the mall to see me there.
But when all of this was happening, you know, one after another,
I was like, you know, picture like the point of view camera angle
where you're like swimming through a sea of faces,
and you're just trying to get out, and everything becomes blurry,
and everything coming towards me was a Nike something or other.
It was scary.
It was really horrible and scary, and I don't ever want to go through that again.
I just don't understand why.
Why is this happening?
I mean, buying shoes is one thing.
People need shoes.
People have to buy shoes and, you know, sneakers.
You know, I can understand people buying that,
but why the advertisements for the shoes on other parts of your body?
I just don't get it.
The peer pressure, I don't see where, you know,
where you have to endorse a company to be accepted in a social circle.
I don't know.
Are there other companies that you wear?
Well, I mean, there's like Adidas.
Well, Adidas is the competition of Nike, you know.
Yeah.
Don't your friends criticize you for wearing the competition of that
which they want you to wear to be accepted by them?
Well, some of them.
Uh-huh.
All the soccer geeks wear Adidas, though.
Uh-huh. The soccer geeks wear Adidas.
Okay.
See, I don't know much about Adidas,
and I'm sure someone else is going to come along and make a film about Adidas
that, you know, explains just what goes on in their factories.
But did you know that Nike doesn't make any shoes in the United States?
You do know that, right?
Well, yeah.
Yeah.
Because according to the film that I saw,
nobody wants to make shoes in this country.
Nobody.
Do you believe that?
It sounds about right.
Uh-huh.
Well, I don't know.
And, of course, the people who make the shoes,
they make about $0.30 an hour, I think?
Or is it a day?
I think it's a day.
It's not very much.
Yeah, it's probably a day because they're in Indonesia and places like that.
Yeah.
And they work in sweatshops.
And, of course, Nike has just raised the minimum age from 14 to 18,
and that's after a considerable amount of pressure.
I think in South America it's $0.30 a week.
Uh-huh.
$0.30 a week.
That's certainly enlightened.
The thing is, you know, a lot of people justify this.
I've been talking to a bunch of people about this over the past few days, actually.
And the justifications you get are really kind of funny.
You know, it's like, well, you know, somebody else would do it if they didn't do it.
You know, somebody else would open up a factory there.
It's their way of life.
You know, it's their way of life, and it's how they've grown accustomed to living.
And, you know, who are we to take away from their culture?
It becomes, you know, like we're supporting their culture by paying them $0.30 a day
or whatever to make these shoes.
And it's the most roundabout logic, you know, I think I've ever seen.
It's like, you know, you have to prove that all the other manufacturers aren't doing the same thing
before you can say these people are guilty of it.
You know, okay, Nike is guilty of this, but all the other ones are guilty too,
so I'm going to buy Nike because they're just like everybody else.
You know, it's distorted logic.
Sorry?
Oh, nothing.
This has got nothing to do with telecommunications or computers, by the way,
but I think, well, actually it does because it has to do with the corporate mentality
and the mega-mergers that are going on and, you know, the whole Microsoft industry that we're seeing.
I have a question about a mega-merger.
Okay, go ahead.
In Minnesota, St. Paul Pioneer Press Land, the cable company.
Is that where you're calling from?
Yeah.
Are you the person that sent us that Pioneer Press thing?
Yeah, I'm Co-Creator.
Oh, thank you very much.
You're welcome.
We actually found it on the web page, but it's an excellent quote.
Oh, thanks.
You go to the Mall of America, right?
Yeah.
That's quite a place out there, biggest mall in America.
Yeah, well, my parents are like, they don't like that.
Okay, so anyway, go ahead.
So US West has always owned the cable companies out here,
and they merged them all into one company called Media One.
Media One, yes.
And now they claim to be installing broadband, which is digital, voice, and cable all in one line.
I was in Dayton and I saw a Media One advertisement that was saying broadband, you know, broadband this, broadband that.
And they're everywhere.
These trucks, I see them every day installing stuff.
I asked a couple people, what's the deal?
And they're like, oh, we have money and we can spend it on all this hype broadband stuff.
But it's still, right now it's still part of US West.
And I'm just wondering, how can one company control what you see, what you hear, what you say, and your data?
Well, I mean, that's what we're moving towards.
We're seeing, you know, SBC taking over Ameritech, you know, and it's just merging into one company doing all these things again.
You know, we break them up, they just come right back together again.
And when they come back together, they're even bigger and more powerful.
You know, you have these cities.
I don't know what the situation is in St. Paul, but you have cities where the majority of all the stations are owned by the same people, same corporations.
And you put on a little radio station of your own and all of a sudden you're the threat.
You know, you're the threat to society because someone's going to hear an opposing view.
Of course you have to have opposing views, otherwise there's no society.
It's as simple as that.
Just US West?
Just what?
Just US West.
Yeah, US West.
Until they get taken over by SBC or whatever.
Quite possible.
All right, listen, thanks very much for calling.
You raised some good points.
Yeah, okay, thanks.
By the way, quickly, someone on IRC on the channel Off the Hook wants to know what kind of shoes you wear.
You know, that's an interesting question.
I don't wear Nikes, all right?
I'll say that right now.
I don't want to say what kind of shoe because I don't want to give an endorsement.
But as far as I know, and, you know, I didn't think about this when I bought them, admittedly.
I'll think in the future.
I don't think they're made in one of those places by slave labor.
I don't think.
I'm going to look into it, though.
And if they are, I certainly won't get them again.
Okay.
All right?
Thanks.
Take care.
I think people need to do that.
They need to think a little more when they buy things.
You know, you don't have to do without.
You just have to think a little bit and buy something that, you know, isn't quite as evil and nasty and takes advantage of people in bad ways.
Okay, let's see if we can squeeze in one more phone call.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Okay, well, that was a fun phone call.
But let's try to have even more fun with this one.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Oh, sorry about that.
That's okay.
Nice real audio delay there.
Uh-huh.
It's not that bad, actually.
That's interesting.
Anyway.
Where are you calling from?
I'm calling from Pennsylvania.
Uh-huh.
I just wanted to talk about phone companies for a little bit real quick.
Okay.
I had a couple interesting experiences today.
Okay.
Mostly with Sprint.
And, actually, I should tell you about GTE first.
Well, you only have about a minute.
I have a minute, so I'll talk fast.
Yeah, go ahead.
GTE was making an announcement that they were going to have ADSL all over the place, right?
Yeah, yeah, what happened?
So, anyway, I call in and kind of ask when it's going to be in this area.
Uh-huh.
And the lady on the other end didn't even know what ADSL was.
Uh-huh.
In fact, I thought it was ISDN or something like that.
Uh-huh.
I tried to explain to her it was for residential customers.
She wouldn't believe me.
And she insisted that I call the business office in the morning.
So that didn't work out too good.
Anyway, with Sprint, we tried to order an analog lease line today.
And they didn't know what they were.
So it seemed to be something that was going around.
Anyway, they gave me about 10 different phone numbers to call, all of them long distance.
And I never, ever got through to anybody that knew what a lease line was.
But you had fun.
You met people.
It was fun.
And you played with voice processing units.
Yes, it was great.
And I've heard, you know, I've went through just about every switching system in the world now.
They actually were transferring me.
So it was great because I was through probably about seven different switches.
And you can hang out in a bar after work and talk about it with other people and be social as a result.
It was wonderful.
You know, I thank the phone company.
You know, my kudos to them.
Well, I hope things work out better.
Yes.
But can we really expect that from all these nice conglomerations we have out there?
Yeah.
We'll see.
Okay, listen, thanks very much for calling.
Hey, no problem.
All right.
And you know what?
That's our last phone call.
It's really our last phone call because we're not going to be here.
Well, okay, it's kind of not really not going to be here.
But we're not going to be here, you know, in this area anymore.
Yes.
The whole time, the whole time we've done this radio show since the very first one in October of 1988,
we've been in this neighborhood on 8th Avenue and 35th Street.
And as of next week, we are moving.
We are moving.
I don't know if I should tell people exactly where we're moving to,
but we're moving to an area which is kind of a strange place for this station to be.
And maybe I'll just tell you that next week.
Yeah.
We'll tell you where we're going to be next week.
It's kind of a strange place.
I've got to find out exactly where it is.
Maybe I got the address wrong, but I went there and it was a cemetery.
So I think maybe they were trying to send me a message or I just got it wrong.
But hopefully next week we'll be on the air from the new location
and there won't be any technical problems.
But, you know, there probably will be.
And that's sort of what we have the most fun with.
And unless something really weird happens, we'll probably have a different phone number
because it's not really close to here.
So, oh, I'll tell you.
Because it's just so ironic.
Wall Street, can you believe that?
Can you believe WBAI is going to be in the middle of the financial district?
Watch out, megacorporations, because the voice of BAI is going to be right in the middle.
We're going to be radiating our voices right through your stock transactions.
And maybe that will give you some pause.
Until then, though, we'll see what happens.
Stay awake.
Send us an e-mail if you see anything interesting worth reporting on, oth2600.com.
And we'll see you again next week for another edition of Off The Hook.
Until then, Manuel Goldstein, have a good night.
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