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From KPFA in Berkeley, I'm Brian Edwards Teigert, sitting in for Ado Bogado.
And this is radio station WBAI in New York, where the time is just about 7 o'clock.
Time once again for another exciting edition of Off the Hook.
For Off the Hook. Yes.
But if they could, they would.
I hope that's understood.
♪
And good evening to everybody. The program is Off the Hook.
We just performed a technological feat that we couldn't have done a few years ago.
That's actually the theme from last week.
In fact, you're going to hear me start talking from last week, because we couldn't find a theme for this week.
And we had to sort of play the show over the Internet.
So you actually listen to a rebroadcast of last week's show in the background here.
Isn't that cool? I'll bet you never even knew that was happening.
Anyway, it's currently this week's show.
And this is Emanuel Goldstein for Off the Hook.
Joined this week by Mike.
Hello.
And on the other side of the room, not Kevin.
Hello.
Down in Philadelphia, Bernie S.
Greetings from Philadelphia.
And here I am coming back again from last week.
And Mitch Altman joins us from across the room as well.
Well, I want to thank you both for being here and being together.
Mitch, welcome back from Germany.
Yeah, thanks.
It's been a great trip.
Yeah.
Are you still on the same trip?
My brain, I think, is on Iceland time now.
Have you been to Iceland?
No, I waved as I flew over.
It's a cool place.
I'd like to go there.
Now, your little device has been in the news lately.
There's some fun going on at the computer electronics show.
Apparently, some people were walking around turning off TV sets everywhere.
And these guys affiliated with gizmodo.com actually got themselves banned for life
by walking around this huge consumer show, I guess.
It's just nothing but electronic gadgetry and things like that.
Not only just turning off television sets but also in the middle of a presentation,
somebody's describing something and pointing to the TV set, and the TV set goes off.
They've filmed this a bunch of times.
If you go to gizmodo.com, G-I-Z-M-O-D-O.com, you'll see all kinds of video from this.
But, wow.
I imagine you've gotten a lot of mail about this, your device causing all this trouble.
Yeah, yeah.
I've gotten a lot of emails from people I've never even heard of emailing me
and people who I've sort of ran into once saying,
Hey, you've probably seen this, but in case you haven't.
And then a whole bunch of people, of course, who's like, Wow, you're on gizmodo.
And, of course, I've been on gizmodo before.
They called me an a-hole back when TV Gone first started.
That's the ultimate compliment.
Yeah, yeah.
And, of course, that brought a lot of people to my site, and they eventually bought TV Gones.
But this has been amazing.
I mean, there have been so many people going to my site.
This time I'm ready.
The website didn't crash like when sales first started in 2004.
But, yeah.
So, you know, not much happened.
You know, CES is so big.
And I heard that there were actually only four of these people with TV BeGones.
Only four TV BeGones in a huge convention hall like that?
Yeah, and there's no way that four people can cover the whole thing.
It would take, you know, way longer than the time of the show to just visit every spot of the building.
Well, it looked like they were turning off multiple ones at the same time.
Did they have the super high power one?
They had the TV BeGone kit, which can turn off TVs at 50 meters.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, so they had a lot of power in their hands.
But, you know, they have a fairly popular website, and they made a two-minute video.
And it caused a lot of controversy.
And the media being the media, they made it seem way bigger than it is.
But these guys now have a badge of honor of being kicked out of CES for life.
And there's really no great loss because CES really sucks.
I've been there once.
It's nothing but huge screen TVs and iPod accessories.
Although this year probably iPhone accessories, which is way exciting, I'm sure.
But I'll mention all seriousness.
I mean, nobody got killed this time.
But in the future, somebody could get injured when you turn off a TV set at a critical moment, you know?
A TV could get injured.
Anything is possible.
Well, you know, when all is said and done, it's just a TV turning off.
So they can just turn them back on.
Except then they'll turn them back off again.
It makes presentations kind of impossible.
Yeah, the presentation thing is kind of, you know, there's zillions of comments on Gizmodo and Dig and all these other places where, you know,
have you ever noticed that Americans polarize very easily?
So it's not, you know, wow, this is kind of interesting.
There's pluses and there's minuses.
This brings up all these issues.
No.
It's like, you guys suck!
Or like, hee, hee, hee.
It may just be the people who bother to post to comment boards.
No, people like that in real life, too.
Believe me.
Yeah, we do polarize very easily.
I'm offended by your statement there, and I'm not going to speak to you again for a while.
There was one comment which really spoke for me.
It said, I am so conflicted.
So I think it's really hilarious that they did this.
And the two-minute video is very funny.
And choosing Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies as the background music just fits really well.
Which I hope they got permission to use.
I'm sure they didn't, so they might be in trouble from that, too, if they can figure out who did the recording.
But, you know, turning off someone while they're doing a presentation could be kind of entertaining.
Well, it gets old after the third time.
But, you know, here's the thing, all right, folks.
There's no need for panic or calling out the National Guard or anything like that.
All you've got to do is put a piece of electrical tape over the sensor, and then they can't use the device anymore.
It's simple.
Maybe you should sell a kit of electrical tape for people to stick.
Oh, a TV-B-Gone protector, maybe.
Just a simple stick of tape, and there you go.
Yeah, me and Bernie were talking about this over the phone earlier today.
We could sell 1,000-foot rolls of electrical tape, multi-use, anti-static TV-B-Gone protection devices.
Wait, do you mean you already had this idea?
Yeah.
I just came up with it now.
Well, that's the thing.
When an idea is really good, many people have it.
Yeah, that's what I hate about the Internet.
You know, all my good ideas have already been thought of by somebody in Indianapolis or something, and there's nothing left to think about.
Yeah, well, as an inventor, I know that every idea I've ever come up with, people have come up with before.
TV-B-Gone seems to be the only one where if people had thought of it before, they certainly didn't publicize it.
So, you know, the brain machine, I thought of that independently, and it turns out people have been doing that for 30 years.
That's true.
By the way, good news on the brain machine front.
Those of you who pledged during the last marathon for the assembled versions, they are all in the mail.
I talked to people at the station today.
They are all in the mail.
Kit's taking a little bit longer.
We're still waiting on a part, and as soon as that part comes in, we're bringing it to the station, and they're getting sent out.
And those of you who pledged for the books, those are going out as well.
And shirts, the off-the-hook T-shirts, we ran out.
So we're waiting for the reorder to—reorder was placed in December, and it should be here any day.
So everything is happening.
Everything is happening.
So you can stop calling and writing those complaining letters.
We know it took a long time.
So, yeah, Mitch, you were at the CCC, the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin.
Was that your first?
Oh, it was my third, actually.
Yeah, chaos events are really amazing, some of the better times of my life.
Those guys really know how to be anarchists.
They put on a great show and attract a lot of really creative, intelligent, fun people.
So, yeah, I hardly ever—or throughout the three that I've been to, I've been to hardly any of the talks.
I figured I could download them later just because there are so many interesting people to share ideas with.
And you can download them now.
I believe they're all available at the ccc.de site.
Yeah.
You should go because they're very hard to find.
The one thing the CCC isn't all that good at is organizing their website.
If you go to ccctube.de, you'll find them a lot quicker.
Now, what's that called?
CCC what?
CCCtube, like YouTube, but better.
All right.
And that's where all the talks are.
Are they in some funky format, or can anybody watch them?
They are in some funky format, but they're also in some not-so-funky formats.
WM4 is the—and you can do it with VLC or any number of players.
Uh-huh.
Okay.
All right.
Let's take a look at some of the things that have been going on in our crazy world in the last week or so.
This is a story that we saw in the International Herald Tribune.
That's the newspaper that's owned and operated by the New York Times that you can get overseas.
And you can also get it in New York, but it's expensive.
The conceit in the 1960s show The Outer Limits was that outside forces had taken control of your television set.
Well, next year in California, state regulators are likely to have the emergency power to control individual thermostats,
sending temperatures up or down through a radio-controlled device that will be required in new or substantially modified houses and buildings to manage electricity shortages.
So basically, apparently, the government will be able to make your house warm or cold depending on what they feel like doing.
Now, customers could override the utility's suggested temperatures.
It is the utility doing this now, but I guess the government could control what they do.
But consumers will be able to override their suggested temperatures in emergencies.
The utilities could override customers' wishes.
So it could be a real battle of wills there.
You realize there are times that a member of the Energy Commission very rarely, once every few years,
where you would be subject to a rotating outage and everything would crash, including your computer and traffic lights, and you don't want to do that.
So reducing individual customers' electrical use involuntarily, if necessary, could avoid that.
If you can control rotating outages by letting everyone in the state share the pain, there's a lot less pain to go around.
It's not really the pain I'm concerned about.
It's the control, the control of people's living environments by an outside force.
Well, first of all, this is obviously easy to defeat if you just figure out where the radio thing is and put some aluminum foil around it.
Aluminum foil, again with the aluminum foil.
Yeah, aluminum foil.
You know, you should wear it on your head as well.
Yeah, nice hat, by the way.
Yeah, thank you.
But I'm wondering, like, how long it will be before someone figures out how this system operates
and starts changing their neighbor's temperatures up and down all the time.
What kind of an offense that will be?
Will that be considered a terrorist act or something?
It's also one more thing that can break and will break.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Okay, and then, speaking of controlling things remotely, you have the kid in Poland.
You heard about this story?
A Polish teenager allegedly turned the tram system in the city of Lodz into his own personal train set,
triggering chaos and derailing four vehicles in the process.
Twelve people were injured in one of the incidents.
The 14-year-old modified a TV remote control so that it could be used to change track points.
Local police said the youngster trespassed in train depots to gather information needed to build the device.
The teenager told police that he modified the track setting for a prank.
He studied the trams and the tracks for a long time and then built a device that looked like a TV remote control
and used it to maneuver the trams and the tracks.
He had converted the television control into a device capable of controlling all the junctions on the line
and wrote in the pages of a school exercise book where the best junctions were to move trams around
and what signals to change.
He treated it like any other schoolboy might a giant train set, but it was lucky nobody was killed.
Four trams were derailed and others had to make emergency stops that left passengers hurt.
He clearly did not think about the consequences of his actions.
I'd like to know, I mean this guy is a real moron obviously,
but I'd like to know what kind of a system operates like this, a TV remote control?
Do you have any idea how that could have worked?
Yeah, my guess is that this kid is really a genius in electronics and figuring out these systems
and he really didn't think through the consequences
and he just hacked a remote control because it has a lot of buttons.
I can't imagine that a train system would actually use infrared remote control codes.
Well, here's the thing, it's actually not impossible
because the way these trams work and you saw them in Berlin and a lot of other cities in Europe,
the trams are on the street, they share the road with cars
so a lot of the switching cannot be done centrally.
The tram operator has to somehow be able to control it.
So it's not inconceivable that the means that the tram operator used could be remote.
It's sort of like ambulances used to control stoplights, sometimes that's infrared.
So it's not inconceivable that it's infrared, but it could just be bad reporting as well.
So you're saying similar to what they call a chrome box
where basically you flash lights at a traffic light device
and the traffic light turns green to give the ambulance or police car or whatnot the right of way.
You're saying that a similar type of a system flashing some kind of light,
whether visible or invisible, would make a track change and why?
Why do it that way?
I always assumed that it would be an electrical signal sent through the tracks rather than infrared.
Clearly the system has to allow for variations in the schedule
for trains appearing somewhere at a busy intersection.
In San Francisco I know they have some means where the streetcars can override the stoplights and have priority.
But I always assumed that it was going with electrical signals,
probably radio through the tracks rather than infrared, but I actually don't know.
I just assumed that.
Now, Bernie, you have trams or trolleys down there in Philadelphia.
You think you might be able to step out for a moment and experiment?
I don't know if SEPTA would appreciate that.
But I believe those tracks are switched, as Mitch noted,
to either electrical signals sent by wire either through the tracks
or through the overhead high-voltage lines that the trolleys connect to through a pantograph.
That would be much harder to hack.
I think Mitch is right.
This is not an infrared remote control of these tracks.
There are too many other variables, too.
Like if it was snowing heavily, it wouldn't work because it would block the light beam.
If it was dirt and grime and the light sensor,
it just defies logic that they would use a light beam to do this.
It just doesn't make sense from an engineering standpoint.
All right.
Well, I guess we'll find out more about that as the prosecution continues in this case.
But, wow, I mean you have this knowledge and there are ways of using it and ways of not using it.
Who would in their any kind of sanity, any kind of state of sanity,
would think that moving trams around with people on them would be a wise thing to do for experimental purposes?
I mean, you know, there is a limit.
There is a limit.
Now, obviously, this is something that should be exposed that this is how it's done
and that this is the potential problem that could happen.
But this clearly goes over the line of responsibility when there are human lives in the balance.
Yeah.
I do hope the city, which is pronounced with a W or something, will purchase new signaling equipment soon.
Yeah.
A little bit more security would be nice.
All right.
Now, Wisconsin taxpayers are a bit upset right now because apparently their government did something incredibly stupid.
And it's the second time.
Second printing gaffe in a little more than a year caused about 260,000 social security numbers
to be put on the outside of envelopes and mailed from a state agency.
Stunning recipients concerned about the risk of identity theft.
The State Department of Health and Family Services said Tuesday that a private vendor based in Plano, Texas,
made the mistake while sending informational brochures for state Medicaid services in the past few days.
Recipients found their own social security numbers on the envelopes.
EDS Corporation caught the mistake late Monday and stopped the mailings, which were supposed to go to 485,000 people.
We are appalled that EDS made this mistake, said Karen Timberlake, deputy secretary of the State Department.
We take our responsibility for protecting the confidentiality of our members very seriously,
and we expect our contractors to do the same.
It's unbelievable that in this day and age, 2008, these kinds of mistakes are still being made.
Back in the 80s, this would be something considered incredibly stupid, yet it continues to happen.
I mean, why is that information even part of the mailing in the first place?
Why is it even in the same computer?
It makes absolutely no sense to me.
Emanuel?
Yes, go ahead, Bernie.
Do you ever notice how the government spokesperson always says,
we take our responsibility for protecting the confidentiality of our citizens very seriously?
They always say this, yet when they hire subcontractors to do work that they really should be doing but are too lazy to,
there's no oversight.
There was obviously no oversight here to make sure this didn't happen,
because this is like the third time it happened with this system.
People complained about it every time.
People got loudly complained about it this time.
Well, guess what EDS is going to do to make up for it?
One free year of credit checking, after which it's $69 a year.
You have to wonder, are they tied in with these people?
Anyway, it costs, and they're telling us how much it's going to cost them to do this,
$711,925 to monitor the credit for more than 20,000 residents that were affected.
Of that, the vendor paid $110,000, and the state paid the rest.
I mean, that's insane.
Why?
EDS should be paying all of it, and we shouldn't even have to hear the number they have to pay.
It should just be something that they're expected to cover.
Well, this is less than $5 per person, so when they sell it to you for $30, you know you're not getting a very good deal.
That's true.
Yeah, if you do the math, you find out what it really cost them.
And the state didn't pay this.
The taxpayers of Wisconsin paid this other $600,000.
Everybody thinks the government is just like, oh, this government will pay for it.
No!
This is coming out of your pocket, people.
So a government agency screwed up and screwed your identity information so that it's easily stolen,
and they charge you for it twice.
That's what's happening.
Yeah, I know.
And according to EDS, the mistake occurred when the data file was created during a routine mailing that was sent in the past three or four days,
and he said the error was being corrected, but he did not know how the company was made aware of the problem.
And here's the kicker.
They say, and this is serious, they actually say this, that they are not aware of any reports of identity theft as a result of this mistake.
This happened several days ago, and they're telling us now that, yeah, no need to worry because there's no evidence of it.
Who does identity theft that quickly?
They always say that, too.
You ever notice that?
We have no evidence that any of this information has been misused.
They always say that, like right after these events, because the identity thieves, they're not going to use it right away.
They're going to sit on it until after the credit checking is over in a year, and then they're going to go gangbusters with it.
It's like being exposed to radiation.
You know, nothing happens to you this week, but maybe next week something will happen, or maybe 10 years from now something will happen,
and you have to be held accountable when you do something like this.
Okay.
I think we've made our feelings clear on that particular issue, but it's incredible how this just keeps happening.
Okay.
What else?
As far as information being left exposed, a government website designed to help travelers remove their names from aviation watch lists
was so riddled with security holes that hackers could easily have stolen personal information from scores of passengers,
according to a congressional report released on January 11th last week.
Now, it's incredible how they point to the incompetence and lay the blame on these imaginary hackers that haven't done anything.
Yeah, the information was wide out there, you know, wide open, right out there, and hackers could have done this,
never mind the fact that it was out there in the first place and it never should have happened.
Thousands of people used the website.
As many as 247 submitted detailed personal information between October 2006 and last February.
A spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration, our friends at the TSA, which established the site,
said the agency was not aware of any travelers who used the site and became victims of identity theft,
who, of course, would want to be stealing the identity of somebody who is already on the watch list.
I mean, I was going to say, these people are already victims of identity confusion, at least.
So, to say they're just fine and dandy is misleading.
Now, this company that was awarded the contract, I don't know how to say the name.
It's spelled D-E-S-Y-N-E.
Let's say it's called Design.
Design?
Design.
Design.
Design.
Design spelled wrong.
Okay?
And security implemented wrong.
It's a packaged deal there.
Design Web Services, a small firm in Boston, Virginia, to really throw people off.
And…
Wait.
They spell it wrong, they get the implementation wrong, they get the state in which they're based wrong.
What is it with these people?
Well, anyway, the deal with this is that the firm that was awarded the contract,
it was awarded the contract by a TSA employee who was once employed by that firm.
Incredible, huh?
And the contract was drawn up, and it was just basically made so that this company would get the contract.
And the TSA continues to use Design on various projects
and has awarded the company no-bid contracts worth about half a million dollars.
The report also found that the TSA conducted little oversight of the website.
Representative Henry Waxman of California said it is mind-boggling that TSA would launch a website with so many security vulnerabilities.
The handling of this website goes against all good government contracting standards,
reveals serious flaws in oversight, and potentially exposed travelers to identity theft.
A TSA official said that the issues raised by the report were old news and that the problems have been addressed.
Things could and should have been done differently.
We have learned from those issues.
That was great use of the passive voice in that sentence.
It really was.
Okay.
And there's all kinds.
Yes, Bernie.
I just want to say, first of all, this site that was set up by the TSA subcontractor was not even on a .gov domain.
And the half-million-dollar contract was a no-bid contract, as you pointed out.
And the guy who runs the company was – oh, I'm sorry.
The guy who awarded the contract to this no-bid – or awarded this no-bid contract at the TSA used to work for Design Services,
the company who got the bid.
And Design Services is owned by a high school friend of this guy who awarded the contract and had drinking buddies.
So this was – the other story, the buried lead in this, is this is just government corruption,
where you have buddies awarding a no-bid contract to each other.
And this is what happened.
All right.
While we're talking about people on no-fly lists and things like that, here's something fun.
Before Boeing's new 787 jetliner gets the green light to fly passengers,
the aircraft maker will have to prove that offering Internet access in the cabin won't leave the flight controls vulnerable to hackers and hijackers.
Isn't it great to see the two of those together?
Those two words so closely together, it's unbelievable.
We always knew it was coming.
Now, Boeing claims it has engineered safeguards to shut out unauthorized users,
but some security analysts worry navigation and communication systems could be vulnerable.
Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer at the security services firm BT Counterpain, says the odds of this being perfect are zero.
It's possible Boeing can make their connection to the Internet secure.
If they do, it will be the first time in mankind anyone's done that.
Boeing spokeswoman Lori Gunter said the 787's aviation electronics are not connected in any way to the Internet.
Now, does anybody actually think that they would have a system where Internet access somehow ties into the navigational system of the airplane?
Is that something that we really think is possible?
They probably didn't do it this time, but I bet you when Internet access on airplanes becomes more common,
someone will discover that it's really great if you hook up the avionics to check the weather on the Internet or something.
And maybe 20 years down the road, we'll have real vulnerabilities in this area.
But I believe them that in the first case, they actually did manage to keep them separate.
I mean, it's not hard to separate systems.
I've done it myself.
You have one system for one thing, one system for another.
They don't connect because you don't want them to ever connect.
I find it unbelievable that this is even an issue, that they're worried about this.
I mean, obviously, based on the kinds of stories we've just read,
it's certainly possible that some dumb person will be in charge of this and will tie everything together,
and you can control planes from your home.
But, boy, I sure hope not.
It would be nice to have Internet access on airplanes.
It would be kind of past the time.
I'm sure they'll charge a pretty penny for it.
I've done it.
Go ahead. What?
I've done it.
There was a Boeing, ran a test marketing, something called Connection,
sold with a couple of Xs, like Exxon,
that Laszlo and I, when we flew back from Germany one year after attending CBIT,
they were trying to get people to use it,
so they gave us free cards that allowed you to use it for like half an hour.
So we were checking it out.
It was a pretty low bit rate, though.
We tried to do voice over IP from the airplane, and it just wasn't happening.
But it was kind of neat to be able to check your email from the plane on it with a Wi-Fi connection,
and I would like this to catch on as long as they don't connect it to the avionics.
Yeah, we'd like to add our voice to that.
I'd be more impressed if they put power outlets on the planes.
Wouldn't that be nice?
Wouldn't that be really swell if we could charge something while you're on the damn airplane?
Because every time I'm on a plane, everything I have,
whether it's my MP3 player, my computer, well, I don't use my phones,
everything is slowly depleting,
and by the time I either get to the first stop or to the end of the journey, I have nothing.
And it's really hard to plug in at the airport
because sometimes they don't let you do that at all or other times all the plugs are taken up.
Well, here's the thing.
The airplane, as you know, is a closed system.
You can't get electricity from like the coal plant on the ground.
You have to generate it on the airplane,
so you have to put more fuel in if you want the passengers to be able to charge their electronics,
and I guess they're deciding that it's not worth it.
They could use solar power, you know.
They're pretty close to the sun.
Okay.
Yeah.
All right.
So that's pretty much it as far as—
there's more crazy stories that we can go into,
but, you know, I think you get the idea.
So Mitch and Bernie, I know you guys were working on some hacker space down in Philadelphia.
Tell us something about what you guys were up to.
Well, Mitch was down here visiting Sunday.
Unfortunately, he didn't get a chance to check out The Hacktory,
which is a new space here in Philadelphia by and for hackers.
That's sort of an outgrowth of the Make Philly group.
People like 2600 Meetings.
They're very loosely affiliated with 2600 Magazine.
Make Magazine, which is another great magazine,
has a loose affiliation with these groups around the country,
and Philadelphia has a great group called Make Philly.
You can go to makephilly.org for information about that.
Well, some of us who I was involved with from the beginning with Make Philly
decided to start a hacker space,
and I volunteer at a nonprofit called Nonprofit Technology Resources,
which takes donated computers from corporations
and puts them to good use in homes of poor people and that sort of thing.
We were able to convince them to give us the whole third floor
of Nonprofit Technology Resources as this space.
So last weekend, I spent a lot of time stripping old paint and painting.
Hang on. Hang on one second, Bernie.
You said you were able to convince them to give you the entire floor?
Yes. This is completely free. No rent.
Wait a minute. How in God's name?
I mean, we had a hacker space here in New York for a number of years,
and we could barely convince the landlord to keep accepting our money.
So how do you get swing for free?
The director of Nonprofit Technology Resources, Stan Pokris,
is a very progressive individual,
and he just thinks this is a great idea,
and these rooms were not used, and he just said we could use them.
And he's a very cool guy,
and it's fortunate that I happen to sit on the board
of Nonprofit Technology Resources too, but that's just a coincidence.
Anyhow, we have plans to...
We already had someone donate a milling machine to this,
and we'll be building a vacuum former
where you can actually mold anything out of plastic to make things.
And we have a room we're going to set aside as an electronics test bench.
There will be a whole bunch of electronics test equipment and computers,
and there's already Wi-Fi there in the building.
So this is great, and I think unlike a lot of hacker spaces
where they fail because people can't pay dues,
I think this might actually succeed
because there's not a lot of money going in to pay for the upkeep of the place.
It's just all volunteer work, and it's going to happen.
Well, you could have the opposite problem
where there's just way too many people coming by
for you to have any kind of control over the situation.
Have you had a plan for that?
Well, it's a good question,
and Mitch noted all these other hacker spaces
that seem to be popping up like mushrooms
around the world almost simultaneously.
Isn't that right, Mitch?
Yeah, it's pretty cool.
You know, I came back from Chaos Camp this summer
totally excited about what I'd experienced there
and wanted to create something that I'd seen
or talked with people about that are all over Germany,
these hacker spaces in towns all over the place.
Like, why not do that right here in our own country
and right in my own city?
And it turned out that there were a lot of people in San Francisco
independently talking about the same thing
we didn't know necessarily about each other.
And after posting it in various lists, we got together.
And then from talking about it,
we noticed that there were other cities doing the same thing.
So on this trip, I've been visiting a bunch of forming hacker spaces,
all of them forming right now, all independently.
And so I've been talking to people,
why don't we collaborate as much as possible, share ideas?
Of course, a lot of the projects that people are doing,
if not all of them, are going to be open source.
But maybe we can collaborate in other ways as well.
So in Berlin, there's a lot of hacking space scene going on.
You know, Emanuel, when we were there,
I was talking off the hook from Boot Lab,
which one of their projects is Micro FM,
a radio station that streams.
They pass out a bunch of little FM transmitters
and ask the people to broadcast the content from the web on the air.
It's all legal, and it blankets portions of Berlin.
I also went to Seabase, a chaos group there,
and just so many incredible projects, people doing really cool things.
And I went from Berlin to Paris, where I went to Templab,
a hacker space forming there.
Really interesting group of people.
And one of their projects is an open source phone system.
So Verizon beware.
And then going to Providence, when I got back to the United States
just a couple days ago, where there's a forming space there
that's going to be part of a nonprofit artist space,
which is very well.
They've been there for like 25 years or something like that,
the artist space, and they're really a bunch of hackers,
but sort of art geeks.
And a lot of hacker-type geeks have been involved with this for a long time,
and it's just now that they've decided to actually spawn
specifically a hacker space.
And they've got a floor there.
And in San Francisco, we call ourselves Noisebridge.
Oh, and the one in Providence is called DC401.
That's the area code, 401.
Yeah, so DC?
I don't know what DC means.
I don't know.
It could be many things.
Yeah, maybe it's different things depending on the time of day.
So we call ourselves in San Francisco Noisebridge,
which is a technique for debugging circuits.
And we're possibly getting a space to start off very inexpensive or free
and then build up as we can afford it with the owner of No Starch Press.
And we're all talking about that now with him.
It's not a done deal, but he's part of the group,
and maybe he'll be our landlord as well.
Nice.
Bill Pollack.
Yeah, Bill Pollack, who was on the last fundraiser here.
So now to what do you attribute all of a sudden all these hacker spaces
coming into existence all around the world?
I don't have a definitive answer for that.
It seems to be yet another thing when an idea is ready,
many people just come up with the idea independently.
Like I was talking about earlier just with inventing.
Other than that, the CCC Congresses and HOPE as well,
it gets bigger every time.
Maybe it's just sort of reached a critical juncture
where enough people know about it, enough people really love it,
and it's becoming more international.
They made a decision from the chaos events a few events back to be international,
so they have most of the talks in English,
which is for better and worse the international language,
and that got a more international crowd to come and be excited about it,
spreading around the world and talking about it.
People have been getting together and doing projects,
open source projects online, but why not have a physical space
like me and Bernie and you have seen in Germany?
Why not have a physical space where we can do that at home?
It's interesting because you say it's an idea whose time has come,
but of course in the past we've seen things like The Loft, New Hack City,
and of course what we tried here in New York.
I just wonder what's different now that wasn't working then
as far as just getting people together to share a space.
It seems like this is something we've always wanted.
It's great to see it happening, but I'm just wondering
what's the driving force and how can we make it grow even more?
It's an idea whose time has come now I think for many reasons.
Make Magazine is sort of a symptom and a driving force for this as well.
There are all these people now hacking in hardware as well as software.
The hardware hacking has become much bigger now more than ever.
It had a big lull for a couple of decades as there was
mass integration of circuits and things were really cheaply built
and you really couldn't do much with them.
You couldn't go out and buy a chip and do anything with it.
They're getting more and more specialized,
but at some point these products became so cheap
and why not go in there with alligator clips and probes
and hack them to whatever you want?
A video display costs how much if you go out and buy one,
but you could go out and buy a keychain with a video display
that's sold at Walgreens all over San Francisco for $15
and use it for whatever purpose you want.
There are so many examples of things like that now
and you can also buy chips again that you can do all sorts of projects with
like PIC microcontrollers and AVR, Atmel microcontrollers.
I've been doing all these workshops to try to encourage people
to get excited about doing fun things with microcontrollers
and that's been catching on a little.
But again, I'm not the driving force.
I'm a symptom of something that's going on.
But another thing that's going on and was going on
is community is something we need.
It's something we lack.
There's so much isolation and alienation in our culture,
in our Western culture, and I'm sure in other cultures around the world too.
So much has changed, so much has deteriorated
as far as community goes through the last many millennia
and certainly in our modern day.
How do we get community?
It's like in our DNA.
We evolved for 2 million years to support one another in community
so we can survive on our planet
and in our modern day we have some poor substitutes.
We're not well trained to deal with community
and that's a real challenge
and I think that's one of the reasons
that so many of these hackerspaces failed before.
So what can we do this time now that we have a lot of energy
coming together to keep community alive?
That's an open question.
Go ahead, Bernie.
I think it would be a good idea
to start having all these hackerspaces collaborate.
There's a lot of things that could be done
not only to share ideas about how to keep a hackerspace running well,
make it self-sufficient,
but how to share resources,
maybe pool their efforts
and maybe their limited funds to buy supplies in bulk.
I think we're at a tipping point, I think,
where all these hackerspaces around the world
could really converge and help each other out
and ideally form a global hacker network of spaces
where it's a physical network,
where there's actually physical spaces anywhere in the world you could go.
There's going to be a hackerspace you can check out and build something,
have access to physical resources
that would let you hack and build things.
There's a few URLs I have.
Is there time for me to read just a few URLs
of some of these hackerspaces around the world?
Read a couple, yeah.
Okay, there's dc401.org in Providence, Rhode Island.
There's thehacktory.org in Philadelphia.
There's noisebridge.net in San Francisco.
There's nycresistor.com in New York.
I think they're still looking for a space.
Have they found one yet?
Not yet.
They are.
It's a group right now.
They don't have a physical.
It's the only one on the list here that doesn't have a physical space yet,
but the more people that are involved,
I think the more likely it's going to happen.
If you're in New York City and you have a lot of space,
contact us, othat2600.com,
and we'll pass it along to those folks,
and maybe we can help them out as well.
There's just a couple more.
In Paris there's templab.org,
which Mitch just recently visited.
That's tmplab.org.
In Berlin there's seedbase.org,
that's seed-base.org.
And in Berlin, Mitte, there's bootlab.org.
And there's more around the world, too.
This is really, I think, sort of a movement of sorts,
where people just sort of got the idea,
just yelled in their heads around the same time to start doing this.
And I'm really enthusiastic about this.
I have high hopes.
Is this something that you think the general population will be afraid of,
the fact that all these hackers are slowly gathering spaces
and organizing together?
Yes.
But that'll change.
This will change it.
I think we have an opportunity to change that mindset,
because once there's a physical space within your community
where community members who aren't really part of the hacker community
can see that there's people in their neighborhood and their community
who are actually building really interesting things
that are all really positive,
I think this has the potential to change larger communities' views of hackers
and what they're really all about.
So that's one of the reasons I'm so excited about this.
I think this really has a lot of potential
to show the world what hackers are really all about,
not the stereotypes government and corporations try to paint us as.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, this is definitely something that I think we should throw our full support behind.
Hopefully we'll get as many of these groups together
at the upcoming HOPE Conference in New York City in July.
We can plan and scheme even further
and maybe get some more groups started as a result.
It seems like a really historic period in our history.
So speaking of HOPE,
Hackers on Planet Earth Conference taking place July 18, 19, and 20
in New York City at the Hotel Pennsylvania,
which, yes, we'll still be standing.
Call for Papers will be going out later this month in January.
So get yourself ready for that and start making plans.
And we'll be announcing all sorts of other fun projects
and things you can get involved in.
If you have ideas, get those ideas together,
and we'll be announcing all kinds of ways you can get them to us.
If you can't wait, you can always write to us here at the radio show,
othat2600.com.
Our phone number, 212-209-2900.
We'll be taking phone calls,
speaking with Mitch Altman, who's here in New York,
turning off television sets and doing various other bits of mischief.
In fact, after the show, there are some I want to show you
that really need to be turned off.
I'm glad to help.
Okay.
So Mitch is here to answer any questions.
Don't you have a TVP gun?
I do, yes, but it's no fun to just turn off TVs by yourself.
It's good to do it in a group.
And I have a TVP gun pro that can turn them off at 100 meters.
This is exactly what I want to see.
I'm not going to tell the people where we're going to go
because a crowd might develop or police might be informed.
Now, of course, we talked about this briefly a couple of weeks ago.
There was an incident in Berlin where someone actually did get arrested
for turning off a TV set in a big store.
It's the first time in history that someone has been arrested
for turning off a television.
All charges, of course, were dropped.
So it stands that turning off a TV on our planet is not illegal.
Well, not yet anyway, but they claimed it was, what,
a $60,000 TV set that they turned off.
Actually, 80,000 euros.
80,000 euros.
And they couldn't turn it back on, they claimed.
They claimed.
And then they claimed they couldn't turn it off.
And then they claimed they lost money because they had to keep
turning TVs back on.
And then they dropped all charges.
Unbelievable.
Fun for everybody, though.
It seems to be legal in Germany, but we don't know the law
in more repressive states like ours.
Well, we do know the law in ours.
It's not illegal to turn telescreens off or televisions.
The thing is, though, you're going to be met with somebody,
a security guard or a cop, that really doesn't know the law
all that well and is going to tell you something is illegal.
That's not necessarily illegal.
So based on that, people might get the impression that something
is illegal when, in fact, it might not be.
But the thing is, you're turning off TV sets all over the place
and this whole consumer electronics show in Vegas,
the publicity from that, you might see legislation introduced
by somebody saying that turning off a television set that does not
belong to you is, in fact, a violation of the Patriot Act.
There's commies under my bed, or terrorists.
What's the enemy nowadays?
I think we might be.
Let's find out for sure.
Let's take some phone calls.
092-900.
Let's go over here.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
That's too bad you didn't stick with it longer.
Let's go over here.
Good evening.
You're on off...
I sense a theme in our calls tonight.
Good evening.
You are on off the hook.
Hello.
Two comments.
Go ahead.
The first on the discussion about the aircraft systems,
the latest trend in new designs for airliners and military aircraft
is to concentrate the computing resource.
Instead of every single system having its own independent computer
and software, they are concentrating it in what you might think
used to be mainframes, or think of it as the city's electric network,
they share the CPUs, and they depend on the operating system
to be, quote, certified, unquote, to keep the different tasks
in the computers separate and not interfering.
So you think this means that the Internet might actually be using
some of the same resources as the navigational systems?
Well, it might be using similar technology.
Not just navigation, but flight control,
like controlling the aerodynamic surfaces on the wings and stuff,
and also the data flow into the computers.
If you can confuse the input data, you can confuse the output
from the computers that control the airplane.
Well, that's not exactly something that makes me feel good.
Did you have another point as well?
Yes.
The second was about the hurrah that was, remember,
about the cell phones in the New York City schools?
Mm-hmm.
This main article was to do with something else.
Back in December 7th, 07, in the New York Times,
in the business section, they dropped this,
if I might read the paragraph.
Very quickly.
The New York City Department of Education is considering a proposal
to give all students free cell phones,
which would use text messages produced by an advertising agency
to promote achievement.
The plan includes sponsorship opportunities for cell phone makers,
service providers, and other marketeers.
That's incredible, isn't it?
Commercialization is just going to get involved in every single aspect.
Thanks so much for those points.
Thank you very much for your wonderful show.
Thank you. Take care.
Channel 1 failed, so I assume that that would fail as well.
But it might take 10 years and corrupt a generation of students before it fails.
Did Channel 1 fail?
Channel 1 is failing.
Yeah, but it's still around.
I remember when that got introduced well over 10 years ago.
That's the channel that kids are forced to watch in their homeroom,
and it has commercials.
Ugh. All right.
Good evening. You're on off the hook.
Why do I keep hitting the wrong button?
Good evening. You're on off the hook.
Go ahead.
Hi. I just have two quick questions that I want to send off the air.
What do you think of the state program to monitor Americans for local law enforcement?
And two, did you catch the pirate? Thank you.
What was the first thing, the first program he said?
And what pirate?
I think he's referring to the Brooklyn Pirate that we were speaking about.
Oh, the pirate radio station.
You know, I did hear that.
I was driving around, and I did hear exactly what the caller last week described.
There was somebody on 99.3 broadcast.
Well, it's not that cool if they're interfering with us at 99.5.
And the thing is, if you put a pirate right next to a commercial radio station,
the FCC comes after them like gangbusters.
But you put them next to us, and they're a lot slower to react.
Not that I think they should react and, you know, take their equipment and things like that.
I just think people should have respect for us and not interfere with our signals.
So if you're out there and know the people at 99.3, tell them that that's not the best place to be.
And we might be visiting them to tell them that personally.
I don't know what program he was referring to at the beginning.
Do you?
Local authority monitoring citizens.
I'm not really sure.
Well, we're against it.
All right.
Good evening.
You know, the problem is the phone system.
It's not that people are hanging up.
It's that a light lights up, then it goes from 1 to 2 to 3.
It bounces all over the place, and we don't know where the actual line is when we press the button.
It's a bad system.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Hi there.
How are you doing?
I have a very simple question.
Okay.
I'm a recipient of one of these recycled laptops.
I got it from the cancer center.
Okay?
Okay.
It's a Toshiba.
And when the screen comes up the window, it asks for a password.
And I've taken it to the geeks at Best Buy, and they said the password is on the motherboard, and they can't take it off.
I have to send it to Toshiba or somebody else?
Well, this is definitely a question for the PC computer people that come on after us.
Does anybody here have any idea what he can do?
Well, I refurbish computers, and it's a really difficult problem to do on laptops.
On desktops, you just remove the CMOS battery.
But on laptops, it's pretty difficult.
If you can call Toshiba or the company and beg, sometimes you can get someone who can tell you what to do.
But otherwise, you might be out of luck.
I also suggest calling in the next hour and asking the personal computer people.
They might have a better answer as well.
All right?
I was wondering if I was given a lemon machine or something like this.
Well, I'd certainly talk to the people who gave it to you and ask them to maybe give you some more information that might help out,
because, yeah, you shouldn't have to deal with this.
Well, it was just a group of us in the hospital in the cancer center, and we all got these old machines.
They were just donated to the center.
I see.
And they just handed it out to us.
I'm 68.
I hear your show, and I don't know what the heck you guys are talking about, but it's fascinating.
Okay.
Well, that's the best endorsement we could ask for.
Best of luck to you.
Let's try another one.
I knew that was going to happen.
I'm setting a record today.
All right, good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Yeah, I got two quick questions.
Go ahead.
I moved to a different location, but I did not basically let people like banks, this, that,
and these corporate agencies that would send you mail.
But somehow they started sending me mail shortly after I moved.
Can you explain how they were able to get my address?
Well, you must have told somebody you were moving, right?
Did you have anything sent to your house?
Did you tell the Department of Motor Vehicles, the phone company, the cable company, all those people?
Yes, certain companies, yes.
Well, they can get access to information from that.
There's all sorts of ways they can find out not only that you live there but that you used to live someplace else.
Okay, no problem.
And the second thing I just wanted to ask you very quickly, I tuned in a little bit late,
but what are the positive virtues of hackers?
Because you made a comment that the corporation and government paint a negative image of them.
I would like to hear the positive.
Okay.
All right.
Fair enough.
Positive words about hackers, a positive perspective, I suppose.
I see it as a lot of people experimenting, asking a lot of questions, sharing information, getting together,
learning together, building things, being curious, not taking no for an answer,
not being abusive towards others and basically keeping them from knowing certain things
and holding all the technology to themselves, just being open, the personification of open source.
What do you think, Mitch?
Yeah, and also so many people are doing things because they really love it.
It's not because they're trying to make money.
It's nothing against making money, but they're doing it because they love it,
which means really cool things are happening.
So many of the innovations in technology throughout the last couple decades have been only because of hackers.
So much about the web and the Internet is only because of hackers.
And, you know, there's like maybe a half million hackers around the world,
and in any group that large there's going to be a few people who do things that are not really cool.
Unfortunately, with the media being the way it is, they pick up on that and vilify the whole half million.
Okay.
We're going to leave it at that.
So thanks, Mitch, for coming in.
We're going to go out and turn off some TV sets now.
We'll be back again next week for another edition of Off the Hook.
Until then, stay out of trouble and write to us, othat2600.com.
Good night.
Good night.
Good night.
Blame the voice of you for asking what is true.
Young man sitting on the witness stand.
The man with the book says, raise your hand.
Repeat after me, I solemnly swear.
The man looked down at his long hair.
And although the young man solemnly swore, nobody seemed to hear anymore.
And it didn't really matter if the truth was there.
It was the cut of his clothes and the length of his hair.
And the lonely voice of you cries, what is true?
What is true?
The young girl dancing to the latest beat has found new ways to move her feet.
The young man speaking in the city square is trying to tell somebody that he cares.
Yeah, the ones that you're calling wild are going to be the leaders in a little while.
This old world's waking to a newborn day.
And I solemnly swear that it'll be their way.
You better help that voice of you find what is true.
And the lonely voice of you cries, what is true?
All right, I love Johnny Cash, you see.
He's fantastic.