When he's in their operations abroad and to, as far as possible, promote American exports.
Don't pollute my water, don't destroy our mangrove forests, don't devastate our ecology.
They drill and they kill.
Drilling and Killing, Chevron and Nigeria's Oil Dictatorship, a Democracy Now! exposé
will air Thursday, November 26.
That's Thanksgiving Day here on Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now!, 9 to 10 a.m. on 99.5 FM, WBAI.
And you're listening to Radio Station WBAI in New York, where 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.
Bon dilly bonk for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Bon dilly bonk.
Seems like that should violate some fundamental humanity clause somewhere, but no, it's going for it.
It's official. It was made official today.
No question about it.
We have a bunch of experts that have gathered from around the world to analyze this move.
We flew them in today.
Rob from Amsterdam, how are you doing?
Hi there.
The first word, and keep it clean, that comes to mind when you hear that AOL is buying Netscape?
I know the word you want to say, but you can't say that here.
No, but I'm not even sure I want to say it this time.
I think that in order for anybody to be able to fight something as big as Microsoft,
I think it's logical that this kind of thing happens.
I'm not saying that it's either good or bad, I'm just saying in the present conditions it's rather logical.
So basically you're saying that for every United States you need a Soviet Union.
It's just, what else would you expect if you have something as big as Microsoft?
Yeah, but you see, here's the thing.
One of our listeners wrote in to mention this.
We got a lot of mail about this already, and it just happened.
I'm sure by now you know AOL is trying to buy Netscape.
The question is, have you really thought about what this means to the hacker community?
Netscape is one of the few companies that understands the hacker ideal of free software.
Free like free speech, not free like $300.
They release the source code to their primary product.
Not many companies would do that.
AOL, on the other hand, has a record of putting profit ahead of delivering a high quality product.
Netscape isn't perfect, but AOL is far worse.
How does that sound to you?
Very true.
Isaac, what do you think?
What do I think?
Well, I tend to agree.
To come up against Microsoft you do have to team up somewhat.
So far as America Online actually being able to change Netscape policy, I don't foresee that happening.
AOL is an internet service provider.
Netscape makes a web browser.
Maybe it'll be a combination best of both worlds, though I sincerely doubt it.
AOL makes a web browser too.
Yes, but...
What's going to happen to that?
It's probably going to be replaced by a version of Navigate.
I'm just worried about the open source to see if all of a sudden Netscape 4.5, the Mozilla release, is going to be just pulled.
Well, I mean, maybe...
Look at it this way.
Explorer is already becoming much bigger than Communicator.
Explorer is winning over Communicator, in the long run at least.
So Netscape had to do something.
The alternative is Netscape not being there anymore, which is also not good for free software, not good for...
Is that really the alternative? You can't be number two anymore? You have to be number one?
In this field, yeah.
If somebody else owns 70% or 60%, then they can basically dictate what...
But they're being prosecuted for it, you know?
They're being prosecuted for all kinds of antitrust things.
It's got to be hurting them.
I'm not sure I have that much of a strong opinion.
I've seen a change resulting from that too, haven't you?
How long has Microsoft been under the DOJ's scrutiny?
Not too long, only a couple of months.
A couple of months.
Try like ten years of that and you'll see a difference.
Well, that's IBM, but that's another story.
Yeah, what's IBM's role in all this?
IBM's role?
Yeah.
Well, they were prosecuted by the DOJ, much like Microsoft.
A friend of mine at the LXNY meeting last night was talking to me about this.
LXNY being?
The New York City Free Software Foundation.
How in the world does that spell out LXNY?
To tell you the truth, I have no idea.
I went there for my first time last night.
They had a bunch of interesting speakers.
I have a feeling they took out the I, N, and U in Linux.
And NY being, well, I'm not sure.
Probably never yelled or something.
That's a question for the masses.
Another question for the masses.
We have Barry here, also from Amsterdam.
Barry, say hi to the folks.
Hi there.
Well, now, you're a radio expert.
Correct.
And you've come to this country in hopes of finding something interesting to listen to on the radio.
Besides off the hook, you're scanning all kinds of frequencies.
And tell us what you found so far.
Well, I found a frequency that sounds like this.
And I think it is some type of mobile radio thing.
And it's on 478.1425.
478.1425.
And I'm really interested in this signal.
So if any of the listeners can identify it and maybe have some more info on it.
Hold it up to the microphone for a couple of seconds.
Okay.
I think we've transmitted the secret information to our agents.
If anybody knows what that is, contact us here.
212-209-2900.
We'll be taking phone calls a little bit later on.
Or you can email us, oth at 2600.com, in case you don't get through tonight.
Anything else you've found while you're here?
Not really, no.
What's the radio scene like over in Holland and Europe in general?
Well, in Germany, it's not legal.
In Belgium, it's not legal.
What's not legal?
Listening to police radio, using your scanner to listen into information that's not for you.
Really?
Really.
In England, that's the case, too.
That's fascinating, being that these are broadcast mediums and the airwaves are not only around you but going through you.
You never heard of the famous UFO thing from England?
Famous UFO thing?
They broadcast something on police radio saying that a UFO had just landed on a hill.
Then they proceeded to arrest everybody who climbed the hill to see the UFO because they weren't supposed to be listening to that.
It really happened.
No, I've never heard of that.
That really happened.
They did the same thing in Holland, though.
Exactly the same joke.
UFO on a hill?
Without any doubt, yeah.
Well, they just wanted to count how many people listened in to the radio.
And there were quite a lot.
Well, I know people have said many times that they left a $100 bill at a certain place over a cellular phone to see how many people would show up.
I don't know what the results of that kind of experiment were, but it wasn't done for law enforcement purposes.
No.
It's weird, though, that so many things are legal in Holland, but that's not.
That's correct.
Yeah.
What else is kind of weird over there?
Anything else not legal that we might take for granted here?
Ooh, let me think on that.
There's an interesting case with listening in on pager signals.
It was determined that the law has a clause that says you can listen in to anything, but you can't make a special effort.
And then special effort is defined as, for instance, placing yourself in between a microwave link.
So it's okay to listen to omnidirectional broadcast signals.
It's not okay to find a high building somewhere in the middle of a microwave link to listen to those signals.
So anything requiring a special effort is not legal.
And they construed it such that current legislation says listening in on pager signals, just hooking the receiver up to your computer, is already such a special effort.
So they're trying to make pretty much listening to anything digital illegal.
Well, as things become digital, that's going to become a point of contention in years ahead, certainly.
That's kind of weird to see these differences popping up, though.
All right, some listener mail that we want to tear through before we get to the main subject of the show.
I'm enjoying tonight's Netcast. This is something from last week.
I'm wondering the name of the song that is the theme for Year 2000 Countdown to Doom.
You know, I've gotten more mail and more calls and more threats about this.
I dig the robotic voice and would like to get a copy of that album.
Well, good luck getting a copy of this album. It's really hard to do.
It's a group called Klaatu, K-L-A-A-T-U, and it came out in the late 70s.
Believe it or not, everybody thought it was the Beatles when they first came out because they didn't have any names on the songs, as far as artists and things like that.
If you want to search for it, I wish you all the luck in the world.
You can probably buy it online somewhere, though. I wouldn't be surprised.
That is our official theme for the Year 2000 Countdown to Doom.
Rob, how's 2000 going over there? You guys are going to get destroyed a lot sooner than we are, like six hours beforehand when 2000 comes.
Yeah, I should give you a call to see how it goes.
Yeah, you might not get billed for that phone call because it might be 1900 that you call me.
Some people actually wrote in to say that maybe things will start happening on January 1st, 1999 because a lot of software looks forward a year.
Oh, there's all sorts of dates. I'm on a few mailing lists that talk about this all the time.
You've probably read that the Canadian Army is completely mobilizing all its forces.
Canada has an army?
Or navy or something.
I didn't know that. I really didn't.
They have warships in all their harbors.
That's one more country I'm not welcoming now for saying that.
So they've mobilized everything.
What are they prepared for? What's going to happen?
Major riots.
What do you think is going to happen? Because we didn't have you on last week.
What do I think is going to happen? I just don't know anymore.
Oh, that's a cop-out.
About a year ago, I thought nothing was going to happen.
And now I'm beginning to worry because the people that used to say nothing was going to happen that I was basing my opinion on are beginning to cop-out as well.
And apart from that, so many people now think something's going to happen that that in itself is going to cause something.
Well, something's going to happen because people are panicking and buying guns and burying money in the backyard and things like that.
So obviously something's going to happen.
But I don't think it's going to be technology-related.
I just don't know anymore.
Yeah. Yeah. At least.
He did break the law and they did catch him.
Now the whole three years without a trial thing is totally stupid, but trying to get him off as if he did nothing is equally so.
How about complaining to get the trial going and work on the whole mischarge of justice lines?
Well, whatever you choose, you're probably not going to air this.
Well, guess what? We aired it anyway.
And nobody is saying Kevin is 100% innocent and we are complaining about the trial thing.
I just think it's like very simplistic when people say, well, he committed a crime, so therefore he has to pay for it.
How much do you want someone to pay for a relatively minor crime?
And how many of us can say that we are not criminals?
I really am kind of disturbed by the way a lot of people are treating this.
I don't mean a lot of people.
Just a few vocal people have been saying this.
And I think it's important to address the issue because that might be reflected somewhat in the American mainstream.
People might say, well, the guy committed a crime, so therefore he should be in prison.
Let's just add, say, 50 years to today.
It's now 2048 and Kevin is still in prison.
He's still a criminal in your eyes.
Does he still belong in prison?
At what point do you say enough?
And we're not saying free Kevin because Kevin is 100% pure and innocent.
We're just saying free Kevin.
You can read whatever you want into that.
We're saying it's enough.
Whatever point has been made has been made a long time ago, and it's time for us to move on.
And that is the whole point of the movement.
Isaac, yes?
I just got confirmation on the 478.125 frequency.
How did you do that?
You didn't even take any phone calls.
Well, I just had a feeling, but I didn't want to blurt it out on the air in case I was wrong.
Does it have to do with that satellite dish on your head?
No, it's the two antennae that are sprouting from the back of my neck.
Actually, I received a cell phone call here.
The 478.125 is the backbone for the NCIC trunked terminals in NYPD patrol cars.
For those of you who are unaware and haven't actually seen one of our wonderful boys in blue here in the city of New York,
you have a small little terminal mounted to the console, which, guess what?
They can type in your license number or anything else and pull up your entire record.
So far as warrants, bulletins, anything else, it's fun.
Yeah, it's a happy little trunk system that spurts that over.
It's pretty spiffy.
Barry, what do you think of that?
Does that answer your question totally?
I would like to listen into it.
We're working on terminals.
Wait a second.
I didn't say that.
Never mind.
We'll just strike that from the record.
Cool.
We'll ignore this last remark.
Precisely.
All right.
Well, we have a special guest with us tonight who almost didn't make it here tonight,
the oldest and I'd say easily the most reliable Internet service in New York City.
Alexis, welcome.
You almost didn't make it.
You were involved in a taxi incident, I believe.
Oh, yeah.
It was a little unpleasant.
The taxi side-swiped a car in front of me, and I had to lay the bike down after braking really hard to avoid running into the taxi.
Oh, you were riding a bike.
Motorcycle.
Motorcycle.
I thought you were in the taxi when you said you had a taxi accident.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Oh, dear.
So, wait, the taxi side-swiped the car.
How were you involved?
They both stopped really, really short.
Uh-huh.
Whew.
So, but you made it.
Yeah.
That's the important thing.
I'm just glad I didn't bend the forks or myself for that matter.
Yeah.
Wow.
I'm sorry we moved down here.
We should have stayed up on 35th Street.
It's a lot less traffic up there.
But, anyway, so you run Panix.com.
What year did Panix start?
Well, we started figuring things out in late 86, no, early 87.
But we brought the machine up for the first time at the beginning of May 1989.
So, we're looking at our 10th anniversary coming up in less than, well, about half a year.
And were you on the net in 1989?
We were on a net, used net.
In those days, it was not legal or possible without breaking law,
which is something I'm sure nobody would ever contemplate,
to actually put your computer on the ARPANET,
which was what we used to call what eventually became the internet.
So, we had a not quite real-time feed of news and e-mail with several university
and government-related sites that were on the ARPANET.
And that was all anybody really wanted in those days.
Well, that's not true.
We all wanted more, but that's all you could get.
Shortly after that, it became possible for a commercial entity to connect to the net,
although for years thereafter, there were still all sorts of bizarre regulations
about whether or not commercial content was allowed onto the net once you had connected.
Well, I guess that's been resolved.
Oh, yeah.
And I wouldn't go back, but some days I really longed for the old net culture
when you couldn't count on getting 100 pieces of spam in your mailbox between breakfast and lunch.
No, Panix has been pretty good as far as spam goes.
You guys were able to filter it out somehow.
We work real hard to do several different things.
In terms of what is now known as spam, which is really junk mail,
we have filters that we provide to any Panix user.
They can easily put those filters on their mailbox,
and that will trim out on any day anywhere between 40% and 80% of the junk mail they're liable to receive.
We're extremely careful about what we put in there,
and there are options for aggressive filtering where there is a chance for a false positive
where you actually discard something that you want, but not much of that.
And the less aggressive ones are pretty much guaranteed not to cause that kind of a problem.
You can also, of course, filter all the supposed junk into a separate place
where you can then look at it to make sure that it really was junk before you get rid of it,
or you can just trust us and toss it out directly.
And I don't advocate either position.
It depends on how much time you have.
As far as what originally was known as spam, the spam in newsgroups, we've done a number of things.
We have always been strong fighters against spam on the net.
In fact, we were the first system to catch the first infamous group of spammers,
the Cantor and Siegel green card idiot lawyers, and boot them while the spam was in progress.
This was back in, I think, 1993.
What have they been up to? I haven't heard from them in a while.
I hope they're just sitting quietly on the trash heap of history where they belong.
But we've canceled a number of others in progress because we had very sharp detectors,
both human and automated, to find this sort of thing out while it was being perpetrated
and then prevent it from going on.
But in the last couple of years, we've actually written a significant extension to Usenet News,
the INN software that runs news on most of the net, which prevents spam from ever being posted in the first place.
It's a pretty clever system which was thought up by a friend of mine and myself working together years ago,
and I prototyped it then, never really pushed it forward.
Then a year ago, when I actually had a little bit of time and money to pay one of my programmers
to go ahead and finish it up and do it, and he did a really very nice job,
we've made that software system available for free on the net, and it does a number of things.
It prevents users from posting spam in the first place, so it's proactive as opposed to reactive, which is pretty unique.
It also helps keep sites compliance with Usenet, too, if they care to do that sort of thing.
So, you know, it's a constant struggle.
Well, now, we dragged you down here tonight and asked you to risk your life getting here
because you're offering something that no one else really is offering yet, DSL.
Well, let me contradict that.
I would love to have been the first at DSL, as you were the first with so many other things,
but there are actually a few other sites that sort of have it.
They just don't seem to be marketing it yet.
In New York City?
Yeah, I don't understand, but we had actually a delay.
We'd expected to actually be able to be selling it and delivering it right now.
We had about a six-week delay because of a problem putting in a T3 between ourselves and Northpointe,
which is the DSL aggregator.
They're the people who are responsible for dragging copper all over and making the guts of it happen for us.
But now that that's in progress, we expect to be able to start delivering it in the next four weeks, and that's pretty exciting.
Now, before we get ahead of ourselves, just in terms that an elderly grandmother in Brooklyn can understand, what is DSL?
Well, everybody, I think, who hears this probably is familiar with what a regular modem does,
and many of them are probably familiar, at least in concept, with ISDN.
The difference between a modem and an ISDN is that the modem takes all these digital ones and zeros that computers want to send to each other
and converts them into analog signals, basically sound, that goes over the phone wires.
ISDN is a new take on what to do with a pair of copper wires, which is what a telephone wire is.
It sends all the signals digitally without converting them analog between the sender and the receiver,
or let's say between the phone company and your telephone or your modem or your ISDN device.
So because there's no conversion going on, everything goes a lot faster and a lot more smoothly.
Not only can you get more data down the line, but the latency, the amount of time it takes for a bit of data to get from one end to the other, is dramatically reduced.
Now, DSL just takes that a whole lot further.
It uses a bunch of encoding technologies from several different sources,
and I'm stepping close to the edge here in terms of my own technical expertise, and I am not a signal engineer,
but I believe it uses signal encodings that were created for T1 lines and for other types of digital lines,
combines that with what we know about how we do modems, and basically the bottom line is technology doesn't matter.
It sends a digital signal from one end to the other a whole lot faster even than ISDN,
depending on how far your actual home is or your office is from the telephone company's central office.
Just as ISDN has a distance limit of 18,000 feet, which is about 3.5 miles,
from a telephone company's central office, that's a distribution point where the phone wires for an entire neighborhood are aggregated,
ISDN can't go past that 18,000 feet without special repeater devices, which a phone company generally won't put in for you.
Well, DSL is also distance sensitive, and because it pumps so much more data over a wire than ISDN,
it is somewhat more distance sensitive than ISDN, but it can produce dramatically faster speeds at shorter runs,
and as the runs get longer and longer that it's further out from the telephone company's central office,
the amount of speed that you can get through it is reduced, but it still surpasses ISDN even at ISDN distances and greater.
So we are selling DSL service at speeds ranging from 160 kilobits per second,
which is a bit better than you can get out of a full ISDN line using two channels,
all the way up to past a megabit a second, which is two-thirds of a full T1.
Around the beginning of the new year, we'll actually be able to offer full T1 speeds,
that is one and a half megabits a second in each direction simultaneously to our customers,
but of course the highest speeds will only be available to customers who live within a mile or so of their central office,
and then as they get further away from their central office, the maximum speed available to them decreases.
So say if you live two miles away, how much does it decrease?
I don't have the table of distance versus speed in my head, but I'm trying to remember,
and I'm guessing it's about 400 kilobits a second, which is pretty nice, and that actually is sort of a sweet spot in terms of pricing.
We are constrained in the prices we can charge based on what we have to pay a bunch of other people to work with us on the service,
which includes Belt-Lanik, Northpointe.
We actually, we send all our money to Northpointe, and then they send prices up to Belt-Lanik and so on.
But the minimum cost to us for a circuit is a bit shy of $100 a month for that 160-kilobit circuit,
and it goes up past $200 for the fastest speed circuits, the one megabit and higher.
And then, of course, we're also paying them backhaul fees and a bunch of other stuff.
Basically, the minimum price that we can charge to our customers, therefore, for the 160-kilobit circuit is $150 a month.
So this is not, lest anybody get the wrong impression,
this is not yet a, you know, any old guy who's living at home and just wants an Internet connection.
It's probably not priced for you just yet.
This is still priced for high-end users and companies.
We hope and expect to be offering a different kind of DSL service with somewhat lower performance,
but still much better than ISDN in a few months when it becomes available in this area, but it just isn't yet.
So for now, this DSL service is available to businesses and those who pay for their need for speed.
And as I said, it goes for $150 for 160 kbits a second up to $450 for a megabit a second.
So it gets faster quite a lot for a few extra bucks.
The sweet spot, as far as I'm concerned, for most people, will be the 400-kilobit service,
which you can get for $250, which is way, way faster than ISDN and not much higher price than what you'd pay right now.
My understanding is that SDSL is back and forth about the same speed.
Yeah, let's clarify that.
This service that we're offering right now is SDSL.
DSL stands for digital subscriber line or loop or L something.
I forget what the L is.
And the S, sorry?
Line.
Yes, line.
And the S stands for symmetric.
Symmetric as in the same amount of data can go in either direction and at the same time.
If you've got a 400-kbit line, you can send 400 kbits to yourself from the Internet.
You can also send 400 kbits from yourself out to the Internet.
This is dramatically different from the ADSL service that Bell Atlantic has been illegally pushing when it puts you on hold when you try to buy ISDN
and which it's expected to offer to the public early next year and which we will also be offering at approximately the same time.
Why is it illegal for them to do that?
Because they are supporting a, what's the word, untariffed and unregulated service with monies that are supposed to be spent only on regulated services.
But that's a very, very sorry topic for another time.
Perhaps we should pick that up later.
In any event, back to ADSL, the A in ADSL stands for asymmetric.
And in asymmetric DSL, your download speeds may be as good as the speeds in SDSL,
but your upload speeds are going to max out at some number that the phone company picks,
which I believe they have specified as 90 kilobits a second,
but which will in practice often be less since they're not guaranteeing full bandwidth.
What this means is that for the average home user, SDSL really isn't a good fit at this time,
although hopefully the prices on it will also come down soon.
But ADSL is.
On the other hand, ADSL won't let you conveniently and smoothly do, for example,
well, it won't let you serve a lot of web pages from a web server up to the Internet
because your upstream bandwidth is comparatively low.
You wouldn't be able to do really nice, smooth, two-way video.
Whereas with SDSL, you can do that.
So if you're running a site, SDSL makes more sense for you,
but if you're just surfing the web, ADSL probably is better.
Absolutely. At this point, that's the breakdown.
This is subject to change as prices change, but that's the way things work right now.
Let me add one to that.
Small web servers are going to be perfectly fine on ADSL, for that matter, in ISDN line.
There'll be some delay, but if you're only getting a few hits every minute or a few hits every hour,
it's not a big deal.
If you're getting a lot of hits, then, yeah, you want something better.
You want some sort of SDSL, or in the old days, at the very least, Centrix ISDN,
but thankfully we're getting past that now.
SDSL is just better.
So is this going to kill ISDN?
I hope so.
I mean, I like ISDN. I use it right now, and I'm a big booster of it,
but this is just a newer and better technology in just about every way.
There are a few ways in which ISDN is superior.
ISDN has the – but you know what?
None of them are particularly important to the home or small business user,
so I doubt you really want me to go into that right now.
They're mostly of interest to big businesses, and, for example,
I, as an Internet service provider, use ISDN lines, which are not like home ISDN lines.
They're called PRIs for primary read interface, and they run at the same speed as a T1,
and they carry 23 or 24 simultaneous ISDN channels all at once.
We use these to carry both our ISDN traffic and our actual regular modem traffic as well
because they can do that.
This is convenient and gives us a bunch of things that we like,
but nobody else in the world probably cares about that at this point.
There's other DSLs, too.
Yes, there are, but ADSL and SDSL are the only ones really worth talking about at this point
because they're the only ones that are likely to be available around here in the near future.
What are the other ones?
God, alphabet soup.
There's HDSL, which I think is high-speed DSL,
which is actually used by 9X quite frequently to replace T1 lines
because they use a pair of them.
They run at the same speed as a regular T1.
So often when you order a T1 from 9X and pay these outrageous prices,
you're just getting a pair of HDSL circuits.
There's VDSL, which is, I think, very high-speed DSL,
which is, I believe, generally an asymmetric DSL that runs faster than ordinary ADSL.
There's RDSL and RADSL.
XDSL?
Actually, yes, we should talk about XDSL.
XDSL isn't anything at all.
It's a moniker for all these different things.
Oh, really? Okay.
XDSL describes the whole class of DSL technologies.
I thought DSL described that.
It does, too, but XDSL is often the variable X,
and you can plug your own letter in there.
That's what it means.
And that's IDSL, too.
Oh, yes, that's another good one.
And actually, that has some relevance.
I'm sorry.
I just learned this a little while ago, and I haven't really internalized it yet.
IDSL is this really strange hybrid.
It stands for ISDN DSL.
Oh, boy.
Basically, what it does is it gives you a dedicated permanent circuit,
sort of like ISDN Centrix, at the full speed of an ISDN line with both B channels.
But it's different from ISDN in that it doesn't get processed by the phone company
on its main switches in the same way that an ISDN call does.
Instead, it goes to a different piece of equipment there that handles it instead.
And so this doesn't really make much of a difference to the consumer
in terms of the difference between this and nailed-up ISDN circuits that are up 24 hours a day.
But it makes a big difference to the phone company in that it's much cheaper for them to run that sort of thing.
Now, the reason why this is important for consumers to know is that, unfortunately,
a lot of people in this city, not the majority by any means, but quite a number of them,
especially some of them in large, high-income buildings,
are going to find out when they order ADSL or SDSL that, lo and behold, there's no copper to get it on.
NYNEX has put in fiber and is demuxing the fiber onto copper in the basement of their building,
and there's no solid copper run that goes from them all the way back to the central office.
Well, guess what? If there's no copper, you can't do DSL.
Aren't they required to run copper if you need copper?
I don't know. In the old days, that was certainly the case.
But I think that since DSL is not a regulated or a tariffed service the same way that regular POTS phone service is tariffed,
they have leeway to refuse to offer it.
I think that they may have some leeway to refuse to sell unbundled copper loops, which is really the issue here.
But this is not something I really know completely,
and this is something that's going to be of extreme interest to me, obviously, in the forthcoming months
as I try to find out whether or not I can actually get this for people who want to be customers
and who may not be able to get the service they want because of that.
But there is a way out, although it's not a tremendously good one, and that is this IDSL.
You can get IDSL even if there's only fiber between you and the phone company's central office.
The good part is it's comparatively cheap.
The bad part is it's really slow. It's about the same speed as ISDN,
which was considered fast until DSL came along and is now slow.
So why would you do this? Why wouldn't you just get ISDN?
Because for business, certainly, it would be cheaper if you needed to keep the line up all the time.
There's no per-minute charge.
Yeah, you're paying your $150 to $200.
Actually, you're paying about $150 a month.
There's no per-minute charge.
You're not paying the phone company anything beyond that, and it's nailed up 24 hours a day.
There's much less likelihood of circuit failure because the inept idiots at BA are unlikely to screw it up,
although they can get their fingers in there by fiddling with it.
You have a real good relationship with these guys, I can tell.
Don't get me started.
So IDSL, it buys you something.
Not a lot, but more than nothing.
Okay.
Yeah, there's ADSL in Holland, too.
The phone company just started something called Snellnet, which means Fastnet, which is their...
Snellnet?
Snellnet, yeah.
It's their ADSL thing, and it's not that bad, but they started doing a lot of their own content.
They have big disks and servers and movie content.
They rebroadcast part of the Dutch TV, which is really silly.
But they had to do that.
They had to do this because bandwidth with us is so much harder to come by.
Well, that, of course, is of their own making as well, isn't it?
Well, Europe has less Internet bandwidth to go.
There's less...
Right, but the reason for that is that the cost of putting in E3s and E1s in Europe
is much higher than the cost of putting in T3s and T1s here
because we have a really good, comparatively good, unregulated long-distance market.
It's not really good.
It's not really unregulated, but it's comparatively good.
That's true.
And if you guys had, in Holland, if you had high bandwidth lines available at equivalent prices here,
I think you'd have a similar environment.
True, but it's all changing. It's all changing.
And there's also cable.
We have lots of Internet through the cable.
In Amsterdam, the local cable company provides Internet at good speeds.
It's just that they provide good speed within their own network,
and then the connections to the net are usually where the bottleneck lies.
Well, I imagine you have the same problem with cable moments that we do here.
The more people that sign up in your area, the slower it gets, and there's not much...
Yeah, but that's bottlenecks inside the systems.
There's bottlenecks inside the system where if your area gets overloaded,
you may have only 10 megabits or 5 megabits or whatever in your little part of their network.
Or much less.
And then there's, yeah, or much less on the older systems.
And then there's the issue of the Internet connection of the provider that provides you the cable service.
Their Internet link may be slow, and that's less likely to be a problem here.
It still happens, but it's less likely to be a problem here than it is in Europe.
That actually points out a really good, really important issue that people should be aware of
when they're getting any kind of DSL is...
What's it hooked up to?
Yeah, where do all the wires go and how do they get there?
In the case of Bell Atlantics, a DSL service, well, it's priced to move.
In fact, it's priced to cut the throat of everybody else who'd like to be in that kind of market,
and possibly illegally as well.
That's something that I guess we'll all find out over the next year.
But in any event, I'm sorry, by the way, lest anybody think that I'm in favor of higher prices,
it's not illegal that they're charging a low price.
It's illegal that they are charging such a high price to people who like to resell in bulk.
But we'll come back to that some other time.
Once you've got your data to them on the other side of your DSL loop, what do they do with it?
Well, the answer is apparently BA plans with their ADSL service to aggregate it
without guaranteeing any particular amount of bandwidth to each individual user,
much like some cable systems.
And this means that you could, you might, or you might not,
see really bad performance with DSL at different times of day or in different neighborhoods
depending on how capable BA is at running their internal IP network.
And, of course, in addition to that, there's the question of whether or not they'll be capable
of doing a good job connecting up to the rest of the Internet.
They have in the past proven to be not the most inept of all providers, but they are far from the best.
Well, 9X was the worst, but now there is no 9X.
Well, of course.
The problem is that when we heard about the BA 9X merger, we all said,
oh, if only, you know, BA's efficiency could be gained here, we'd all be happy.
Of course, BA wasn't really efficient.
It was only efficient by comparison, and it wasn't good.
It was only good by comparison.
But, in fact, they've sort of merged now, and all the people here are still 9X people.
And, you know, some of them are wonderful people.
I mean, there are two occasions I can think of when I would have been out of business
had not some heroic individual at 9X not made tremendous efforts to save me.
But, of course, those efforts were only necessary because of massive screw-ups on the part of many other 9X individuals.
So, you know, let me not, you know, appear like I'm condemning every person who works for 9X.
Well, maybe when Bell Atlantic takes over GTE, they'll bring in some of the GTE people.
Notice how it's just becoming one big company all over again?
Yeah, I thought we fought a big battle 20 years ago to deal with this,
but it looks like we're losing the fight 20 years later.
In any event, the point of all this is that you've got to be aware about your connection.
It's not just the bandwidth between you and the thing on the other end of the wire.
It's all the bottlenecks and potential bottlenecks between there and the rest of the Internet.
We've got our phone number, 212-209-2900.
We're speaking with Alexis Rosen, the owner, starter, president, whatever, of Panix.com.
Been around since 1989, was it?
Don't forget, janitor, yeah.
Janitor too, yes.
And we have Rob here from Amsterdam, Barry from Amsterdam as well, and Isaac from Queens, right?
Yeah, we've flown in all the experts tonight.
And also, Alex, what's your position on the Netscape thing?
Actually, before I say that, just so that people have something to chew on while they're waiting to get their calls heard,
if you're curious about the SDSL stuff that we're offering, there is a URL for it.
Actually, best is just to go to Panix's homepage, which is www.panix.com.
Panix is P as in Peter, A-N as in Nancy, I-X.
Click on the Corporate Services link, and then you'll see a DSL link over there.
And there's a whole lot of information there that people may find interesting,
whether or not they're actually interested in getting SDSL right now.
A whole lot more stuff is due to show up on those pages in the next couple of days.
Okay, what's the URL again?
www.panix.com, and then just look for the Corporate Services link.
Click on it, and you'll see an SDSL thing.
All right, let's do this right now.
We have enough people here that we can, like, make a decision, all right?
I'm fed up saying www all the time.
Now, I've decided that myself, personally, if you just say w, people know there are three of them.
Does anybody have any other suggestions as to how to get around this?
Because I feel like an idiot saying www all the time.
Well, people have been saying 3ww, 3w3 is my favorite, but it's not really cubed.
That's four w's.
Well, w cubed would be, like, w times w to the w, which gets really funky.
No, it's not. It would be www.
Well, all right, yeah, I could see that. Fine.
No, I mean, if you're talking algebraic, that's the way to go.
Actually, my favorite is www, but not too many people use that.
No, I don't think that's going to work out very well either.
Just picture, like, David Letterman trying to do it.
Well, why can't we just change it to w anyway?
You know, we could just do that.
Anybody can do anything.
You can do anything you want, yeah.
There's no rule that it has to be that, but that's pretty common.
MIT, for instance, changed their main website from www.mit.edu to web.mit.edu
just to really make people very confused.
Well, other people take out the www.
They put, like, cnn.com.
You know, you don't put the 3w's in front of that.
This company that's going to host the thing at the Javits, the Bazaar, has no www.
It's just thebazaar.org.
And when they have new top-level domains.
They've got a link there, though, so that if you hit www, you hit a c name, which takes you back.
It's probably an alias that'll bounce you through, but still.
But the new top-level domain is going to be .web, so you won't even need it.
If that ever happens.
Well, yeah, if it ever happens.
All right, so are we any closer to figuring out something?
Absolutely not.
Just do what you feel like everyone else is.
Okay, then we want input from people out there.
oth2600.com, just mail us or mail us here at the radio station.
Off the hook here, WBAI, 120 Wall Street, New York, New York, 10005.
Let's take our first listener phone call.
Good evening. You're on the air.
Hello?
Yes, go ahead.
Oh, boy, I'm on. Thanks.
My wife is at her work on a new phone system where they're tracing all the calls,
and she has to put in a code or password or something to get on that,
or they can trace who she's calling and stuff like that.
Is there any way to beat such a thing?
Well, I don't know if trace is the right word.
They just want to keep track of all the phone calls.
Yeah, exactly.
So they know who's making what phone calls.
And where.
She's upper management level, and she resents it.
I can't say I blame her.
Well, it's an accounting system, right?
I think so.
Yeah, so they know who's making the most phone calls.
Well, I mean, sometimes it depends on the system.
Every system is different.
Sometimes, you know, default codes are 12345.
Sometimes you can just dial an operator, dial 10102880,
and you'll get AT&T operator, and they can dial it for you.
There's almost an infinite number of ways around systems like that,
and sometimes there aren't ways around it if they're really good.
Yeah, most of the good systems will prevent you from doing things like that,
but often they can, but they're not configured to do that
because people are lazy or don't bother to learn how to control them properly.
That's true.
God bless ignorance.
Well, we have a system like that here at BAI.
That's all I'm going to say on it.
We have a system like that.
All right.
We're talking with Alex Rosen from Panix,
and we talked about ADSL or DSL, SDSL, whatever DSL.
Let's try to stay on that subject.
And, of course, the Netscape takeover by AOL.
Did you give your comment on that?
Yeah, you ducked that question.
Just that, well, it seems kind of grim,
but the alternative these days being Microsoft seems even grimmer.
So I'm just, I don't know.
I'm not too pleased with it, but I kind of understand why they had to do that.
Just for the record, why is Microsoft so bad?
Microsoft was not always so bad.
I think, though, that at this point, for every true innovation they deliver
or for all the value that they bring to their customers,
they take so much more back.
I mean, this is a religious argument that you can war over for years,
but a couple of years ago, I keep a Mac on my desk.
That's the machine that I prefer to use.
So I am not a Microsoft lover by any means.
But a couple of years ago, I felt, well, more power to them.
They seem to bring out a lot of stuff and innovate a lot of things.
It just works pretty well.
At least you've got somebody reasonably competent
running this barracuda, shark, whatever monster it is.
These days, I have changed my mind,
or I think that situation has changed, really.
They have such incredible market dominance
that they no longer need to innovate in order to dominate
and to destroy their competitors.
Just from my own experience using Microsoft products recently, which I do,
I think that they've become more dangerous to our future than they are helpful.
I think that what was done to AT&T, actually,
is probably what needs to be done here in a sort of analogous fashion.
Their OS dominance is virtually complete,
and even though the Mac is making a really strong resurgence right now,
and I'm cheering that on, I think that the new OS X
that will be due out shortly in server form and in a year in consumer form
is an amazing operating system as it combines the best features of Unix and macOS.
For all of that, they own the corporate market.
Yeah, open source is making some headway too,
but that's going to be a long time coming,
and they're just going to consolidate that hegemony with new products like Office 2000.
Those two huge factors, their Office suites, their OSes,
and probably beyond that, their programming tools,
they work together too well for Microsoft
and too obnoxiously for the rest of the world.
The odds are, if you're looking at a computer screen right now,
somewhere on that screen is something Microsoft.
Think about it. It's really pretty scary.
Oh, certainly.
Yeah, and even if you try to avoid it, it's almost unavoidable.
Yeah, I'm so sick and tired of getting attachments in Microsoft Word format in my email.
I can't begin to tell you.
As a magazine editor, it's a real pain.
I used to think that HTML in email was the worst possible sin,
and now I know it better.
It's not that I can't read the damn document.
I, unfortunately, bought a copy of Microsoft Word, a legitimate copy,
put it on the machine, and use it sometimes.
Oh, you're the one.
But, you know, I don't like using it,
and just the notion that I have to download the damn email from my Unix-based mail reader,
which is what I still prefer, open it up in Word just to see it, is just intensely annoying.
More often, I just browse through it looking for the ASCII embedded in the garbage.
That's also annoying.
It does work, though.
Well, you know, I'm just concerned that everything is turning into these big megacorporations.
Now, you've got Panix.
Panix has not yet been taken over by one of these big major things.
And, you know, they're doing that.
We've been turning down buyout offers for the last seven years.
Are you allowed to say who's been trying to buy you?
I can't count that high, and I wouldn't remember any particular name right now
because I didn't really care enough to pay attention, really.
I was never interested in selling out.
Well, what makes you want to stay independent of all these big mega people?
Because if I had been in this for the money, I would have stayed a consultant.
I mean, not that I wouldn't like to make some money doing Panix.
And, you know, we actually, we run in the black every year.
Not by a lot, but we do, which is almost unique for small ISPs.
But this isn't about money.
This is about doing something cool and doing something new
and doing something that lets people do things they've never done before.
I mean, it's sort of annoying in a way.
In the old days, five years ago, seven years ago, we had much more impact than we do now
because everything we did was an innovation that nobody had seen before,
and we significantly impacted the way the entire world works today
just because we set off a trend.
We set off these little ripples, and here we are five years later.
Everybody's doing them.
Nobody's even heard of us anymore because the industry's gotten so big.
But that's okay because, you know, we've had this tremendous impact.
And, you know, sometimes, some days I feel a little frustrated.
I step back and I go, gee, well, you know, we did some pretty cool stuff,
and its impact's still being felt.
But isn't big business ruining the net and what people like you are trying to do?
Well, it has in some ways.
I mean, the spam and the junk mail and all that.
But other than that, you know, they can't ruin the net.
There's just packets.
You see the packets you want to see, and you ignore the ones that you don't.
But if they control those packets, if they say, well, you can't send these packets,
you can't say this.
Well, that's a very dangerous issue,
but I think that has somewhat less to do with Microsoft's dominance of the computing platform
and more to do with potential dominance of the network entry points
by things like large cable companies and phone companies.
That's a much scarier proposition, actually.
All right, let's take another phone call.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Hi.
Speak up, please.
I literally worship Microsoft guts.
And I've been able, with Office 97, to literally create my own websites
and do things that people sweat,
that is done with Photoshop or professional web tools and everything
because Microsoft is, to me, a gift from heaven.
And as you probably know, there's absolutely more potential now with IE
as it gets to IE5 and with Netscape's latest version
because they're gearing towards XML and a higher level of DHTML.
I don't think that's a forgotten conclusion by any means.
Another thing I wanted to find out, I'm interested in Panix
because I am looking for another ISP,
but could you tell me are you compatible with server-side scripts
and would you be compatible with XML?
If you mean if you would like us to run web service for you,
the answer is we can do most things,
but I don't want to turn this into a sales pitch on the air,
so I suggest that you take a look at our website
and see for yourself whether or not you think we can do the stuff that you want to do.
I will tell you that we are not a big NT house.
We've got a few NT boxes. We understand how to run them.
We're not particularly in love with them, but we don't really hate them.
And we don't offer a whole lot of specialized Microsoft tools,
so if you're a big ASP programmer, we're not the right place for you.
On the other hand, if you love Perl, you'll never want to leave us.
That's a choice that we made. We're not trying to satisfy the entire market.
It may be that sometime in the not-too-distant future we offer more NT services.
We may, we may not.
It's important to us primarily to be the best at what we do,
and to the extent that we can do more things, we'll do it,
but we're not going to lose the focus on being great,
and we're not going to roll out an NT service unless we can be great at that.
Thanks for the call. Let's take another one.
Good evening. You're on off the hook.
Oh, okay.
He is off the hook.
I guess he is. Let's try. Let's go over here.
Good evening. You're on off the hook.
Hi. I'm Manuel.
Hi. How are you doing? Where are you calling from?
This is Bellman. I'm calling from New York, and I went to the 2600 meeting last time.
Okay. Can you speak up a little? Speak up a little more. Okay.
I went to the last 2600 meeting, and I saw you there with the jacket that said CCC on it.
Yes.
What does that mean?
CCC is the Chaos Computer Club.
They're a bunch of really cool people over in Germany.
Yeah?
Yeah, and they're really cool because they sent me that jacket.
That's pretty funny.
Yeah, well, okay. Thanks. Everyone's entitled to their opinion.
Good evening. You're on the air.
I'd like to ask you a question about...
Go ahead.
I'd like to ask who invented DSI or...
DSL.
DSL.
Who invented DSL? That's a good question.
I don't think there's any one invent there.
I mean, as I said early on in the show, I am not particularly a proficient expert in the technology of DSL,
and I don't believe that any one person put it together.
There are a whole bunch of different variants.
Each of them had different proponents and engineers involved in their creation.
If there is somebody who deserves major credit for this,
then I apologize to him or her because I don't know who that person is.
I'm sure we'll be getting letters.
Good evening. You're on the air.
Hi. I have a question for Alex, is it?
Alexis.
Alexis.
Hi. Could I run a Quake II server off of an ADSL one?
Actually, you probably could.
I don't really know how much bandwidth the average connection of a Quake II user is,
but one really cool thing about SDSL, at least, is that it has very low latency,
latency that is in fact comparable to a T1, and that's very important for network gaming.
So you could indeed run one.
How many people you could have on it at once would depend on how much bandwidth you bought.
But consider that you can get most of a T1 for $450. That's not bad.
No, that's not bad at all.
What's the cost of a T1? The cost of a T1 today is what?
Well, we're pretty cheap, although no longer the cheapest at T1s.
We charge $1,000 a month plus whatever the loop cost from the telco is.
And that could be a lot too.
Well, actually, we have a pretty damn good volume deal with Teleport,
and that costs us, depending on how far you are from our network locations,
anywhere between $300 and $400 a month typically in the city.
Right. So as the average person, that's well out of bounds.
Correct. On the other hand, you can get that 400k-bit service for $250.
That's still expensive, but if you're really into doing the service stuff,
that is at least one-fifth to one-sixth of what you might be paying for a T1.
Okay, I'll squeeze in one more phone call. Good evening. You're on the air.
Oh, hello. My suggestions are for your friend from Amsterdam about listening to interesting radio.
I suggest he goes lower in frequency and he listens to some of the illegal things that they do on AM
when the engineers are running tests, but those are very seldom and hard to get a hold of.
What frequencies are you talking about?
Just AM broadcast.
AM radio stations?
Yeah. Some of the very small ones sneak on.
There are less and less of them now because they're all owned by conglomerates,
but some of the small ones across the northern border mostly do some pretty interesting things.
Really?
And shortwave, especially around 80 meters, like the AM crowds and stuff like that,
and the Canadians, they're always doing some pretty interesting things.
You could probably get that over in Holland anyway, couldn't you?
But I have another suggestion. If he wants to hear good radio signals,
I suggest he makes them with things like tape loops and linking services that were not meant to be linked
and things like that and tapping into things.
It would be nice if he got a hold of a small television transmitter
because here in the United States you go into Tompkins Square Park or wherever it is
and they've got these cameras spying on you and you can get a hold of them
and just broadcast them on the air.
Sure.
Tape them first. You don't do it live. You tape them first.
Get the highlights.
So it's too late for them to turn them off.
Get some pretty good highlights there.
Or better yet, you just feed the taped highlights to the people watching the camera.
That way they get the wrong information. That would be kind of funny too.
But anyway, that's devious plotting there. We don't mean to do that.
Also, we don't mean to run over our time, which we're out of now.
Alexis Rosen, thank you very much for stopping by.
Thank you very much.
Good luck to you on Panix.
I hope sites like yours spring up all over the place
and countering this whole big mega corporation takeover blitz we're going through.
Thanks. Let me remind people that although I don't think that most consumers are going to be going for SDSL,
they may still find some of the material on our webpage is interesting about DSL stuff.
There will be more and more of it over the next couple of weeks.
And the URL again is?
www.panix.com.
There will be a link for SDSL right on the main page in a couple of days.
Right now it's in the corporate services menu.
Okay. And Rob, thanks very much for stopping by from Amsterdam.
Good seeing you again.
Okay.
Hopefully we'll see you soon. Barry, thank you for coming by.
Okay.
And Isaac, thanks for making the trip from Queens.
Yeah, it was a really long and tiring trip.
Until next week, Immanuel Goldstein. Have a good night.
In a post-Thanksgiving pre-holiday season activity,
the Patrice Lumumba Coalition and Africa Ladder School will present
an emergency African internationalist forum and rally
in defense of the Democratic Republic of Congo,
the new challenge for progressive activists in the U.S.,
why we must mobilize to avoid a regional war in the Great Lakes area
and central and southern Africa,
and restore the goal of the African renaissance.
Sunday, November 29th from 6 p.m. until 10 p.m.
Sunday, November 29th from 6 p.m. until 10 p.m.
at the Iberia Dempsey Center, 127 West 127th Street in Harlem,
between Malcolm X and Adam Clayton Powell Junior Boulevard.
Special invited guest speakers, Martin Anjaba,
Namibia's Ambassador to the United Nations,
and representatives from Angola, Zimbabwe, and Congo,
with Viola Plummer, December 12th Movement,
Samori Marksman, Behind the News,
Annie Lambe-Brath, Patrice Lumumba Coalition, and Moderator.
For further information, call AfroKaleidoscope at 212-209-2946.
That's 212-209-2946.
Thank you.