Non-financial servicers and providers of financial products, then what's the language we need
to fix that?
Because none of us want to do that.
The Consumer Federal Protection Bureau is one part of the bill that's still being negotiated.
Leanne Caldwell, FSRN, Washington, D.C.
And in a follow-up to our story this week on election results in Sudan, we also talked
to Human Rights Watch about allegations of voter intimidation and censorship that people
faced in the first multi-party voting in 24 years.
You can listen to this interview at fsrn.org.
And you're listening to 99.5 FM, WBAI New York.
It's 7 p.m.
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.
We couldn't get much worse, but if they could, they would.
Bum-diddly-bum for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Bum-diddly-bum!
And good evening, the program is Off the Hook, this is Redact in the studio.
I'm joined tonight by Mike, hi, Jim, hello, Rob T. Firefly, good evening, .Ret, hello,
and on the phone, I believe we have Emanuel.
Yes, it's Emanuel, and I'm standing here in Sarajevo, in Bosnia, along with Kyle.
And we were, yeah, we've had quite an adventure, but is Bernie with us, too?
Oh, I forgot to ask.
Bernie, are you there?
Yes, I'm here.
Hey, Emanuel, did you get your fair share of tear gas today in Sarajevo?
Was there tear gas in Sarajevo today?
Oh, yeah, a bunch of veterans, like military veterans, were protesting that they weren't
getting the benefits they needed, and they were throwing rocks and bottles and things
at some government building, and Sarajevo police were attacking them, like 40-some
people were injured, and it's all over the Internet, but I guess you weren't in that
part of town.
Well, I didn't hear about that.
I heard about something like that a few days ago.
I didn't hear about that today.
Today was a day of bus drivers protesting.
All these buses were driving down the road, honking horns, and they were upset that the
bus contract was going to only one company and not several.
Another phrase was competition, yes, monopoly, no.
But anyway, that's neither here nor there.
Right now, Kyle and I are standing at the very spot where World War I was started.
This is where the shot was fired that killed the Archduke of Austria, who was the heir
to the throne, and that led to Austria declaring war on Serbia, because it was a Serbian who
fired the shot, and all hell broke loose as a result of that.
Of course, World War I was so popular, it led to the sequel, World War II, and all kinds
of other things.
What we're going to be doing now, I'm on a Bosnian SIM, meaning I have a phone where
I bought a SIM card to make this phone call.
I'm actually calling you, but I'm going to run out of money pretty quickly, and hopefully
you guys are going to call me back, and that's free for me.
I can receive phone calls, and then, of course, you're going to have to pay for the phone
calls.
Why?
Because it's free for us.
We pay for our own phone calls.
You better say something interesting, so make it worth our money.
Yeah, I don't know how long this will last, but Kyle's here with me, as well.
I'm just going to share a couple of thoughts, but again, we could get disconnected at any
moment, so it's kind of a typical Sarajevo-type thing, but let's go to Kyle, just to give
his impressions of where we're standing right now, and then we'll march on to the next place.
Yeah, right now, we're adjacent from a museum that talks a lot about the history of this
very spot.
It's right along a river, and there's a bridge, one of several, that identifies this historical
location.
It's a little bit chilly.
Things have really quieted down here in Sarajevo.
We've been enjoying taking in a lot of the new sights and the culture, and it's just
a thrill.
We finally made it.
We went through a lot to just be able to make this call, and we're crossing right now.
But yeah, we've learned this interesting tram system here.
We've been battling the phone system.
We were trying to get a pay phone to accept incoming calls today, and found out it wouldn't
take coins.
And then we went to another pay phone that was in front of a central office for the telephone
company here in Bosnia, and we found four prepaid calling cards, which was great, because
we didn't have a SIM chip card.
We only had coins.
So we actually found one of these cards to have about 14 units left on it, and we used
that to test, to try to get the call back to a friend.
I just got a beep.
You guys are gone, right?
Oh, we're still here.
Oh, okay.
We heard a beep.
I don't know what the beep was.
Now we're not here.
That's what the beep was all about.
At least they warn you if only for 30 seconds.
That's kindly of them.
Anyway.
You guys can talk while I dial the phone.
It's so quiet.
Anyone have any stories you want to bring up?
Well, it's been kind of quiet out there.
It's kind of in obscure corners of the internet right now.
I don't know if you guys have heard about it, but apparently there was something involving
an iPhone being lost or something.
I think I vaguely heard about this.
Maybe.
Maybe.
What, pray tell, is an iPhone?
Apparently it's like a phone, but with an eye in front of it.
In any case, for the benefit of those of you who might not have heard about it, there was
a prototype iPhone lost by an Apple employee.
It was found by someone who was not an Apple employee, who then sold it to a journalist.
Apple was not happy about this whole thing, and they decided to press all sorts of charges.
The home of the journalist was just raided.
Bernie, I know you've been following this a little bit.
What do you think?
Well, I haven't actually seen any evidence that Apple itself pressed charges, but apparently
I'm sure that Steve Jobs would be very upset that this reporter from a blog called Gizmodo
took all kinds of pictures of this apparently fourth generation iPhone prototype and posted
it all over the internet and took it apart, dissected it, and probably gave up all kinds
of Apple trade secrets.
Apple is notorious for holding its new products close to the vest before Steve Jobs personally
announced them.
But it raises all kinds of questions about what should journalists be allowed to do,
and should journalists have any immunity from prosecution for certain things.
I just thought this case was more interesting from that standpoint than just like there's
an iPhone on the street.
I don't know if I'm the only one wondering this, but if this was such a secretive thing
that Apple didn't want to get out, why were their employees carrying these things around
into restaurants or bars or wherever?
Field testing.
A lot of companies do that sort of thing.
Apart from all this, though, the big issue that's going on right now is the fact that
this journalist's home was raided, and Gizmodo had responded with citing a law that protected
journalists from such searches and seizures, although the question is now being raised
as to whether this law protects the journalist at all, since he allegedly received stolen
property in the pursuit of his duties.
Right.
So the charges being filed are that the property was stolen, and that the—or, I mean, it
was lost, but because the person who found it didn't make enough steps to try to return
it to Apple that it was thus stolen.
Right.
The person who found it apparently sold it for—I don't know if it was the same person
who found it.
I don't know if that's been announced yet, but basically $5,000 apparently changed hands
over getting this phone into the hands of the journalist.
And somewhere along the line, that seems to be selling stolen property, receiving stolen
property, all of which are nasty things to do and which I think very well might disqualify
the journalist from the protections of the law.
If I lose my phone in a bar and someone picks it up, I want the police to go raid that person's
house.
Like, I want to know how you get that level of service.
That's the real question to me.
Be a member of the committee of some task force that's charged with raiding people's
houses.
Or be Apple.
Yeah.
Basically.
Be a large corporation or a public figure.
There's a great picture that's been going around.
Jim brought me a copy clipped from the newspaper here of Steve Wozniak, Woz himself, looking
at an iPhone and wearing a t-shirt that says, I went drinking with Gray Powell, who's the
employee's name.
And all I got was a lousy iPhone prototype.
It's pretty good stuff.
But yeah, it's kind of an interesting case to follow, I think.
Not specifically for the iPhone angle, but because of the journalism angle and how this
whole thing will pan out for him.
Yeah.
Go ahead, Bernie.
I think it's been widely reported, too, that the person who originally sold this lost iPhone
prototype to Gizmodo.
Currently, the police visited their home as well, trying to get evidence.
It's important to note that no files have been charged.
Nobody's been charged with violating the laws yet.
It's going to be interesting to see what happens.
Is that you, or is that...
I think we have a manual back, because I'm hearing sounds in Sarajevo.
Yeah, I'm here.
I'm here.
I'm listening to you guys.
Yeah, finish your discussion on this, because we have much more to tell you about Sarajevo.
Well, then, real quick, nobody has been charged with a crime yet in this selling of a stolen
or found iPhone that was stolen property.
But my guess is this is all going to fall out where the guy who sold the phone for $5,000
is probably going to get charged with receiving or selling stolen property.
And the Gizmodo reporter probably won't be charged, because his company has lots of money.
And I don't think the state prosecutor in California wants to spend millions of dollars
fighting someone who has a lot of resources.
So that's my prediction.
All right.
So, Manuel, what's new?
Yes, actually, we are now at a different historic location.
You can throw a stone and hit a bunch of historical locations in Sarajevo.
Please.
But right now, for those of you who have followed more recent history here, there was a massacre
at a marketplace when mortars hit, fired by served tanks, I believe, the Markel Marketplace.
This is the spot where NATO was finally inspired to join the battle
and stop the massacre that took place here in Sarajevo.
Basically, the streets we're walking down now, 15 years ago,
we could have been kicked off very easily by snipers in the mountains that surround this city.
An incredible realization to feel that.
And to also be up in the mountains looking down and seeing people walking the streets
and knowing that only a few years ago people were up here firing at civilians.
And it's incredible to be in Europe and to realize that such history has happened such a recent time.
It's very sobering, but so extremely inspiring, because the people here are very positive,
very colorful, very mixed in their religion, their upbringing, their attitudes.
And it's an amazing place.
I was very surprised by it.
But also we were talking about just the challenge of getting on the air tonight,
because Kyle said we were trying to figure out how to get a phone call from you guys,
and getting to a pay phone was a challenge.
We were able to get a card and make a phone call to get the number of a pay phone
by calling someone's local phone, but then we couldn't call into the pay phone,
so we finally had to buy that SIM, which apparently ran out while we were talking.
So now they're calling us on our special call-free number.
But we've had other experiences, too, in other places since we talked last.
Do you remember where we were last week?
I hope you remember. You were in the former Yugoslavia, were you not?
Well, we're in the former Yugoslavia now. The whole thing is in the former Yugoslavia.
No, the name of the place is Zagreb.
Zagreb, yes.
I thought you were in Tbilisi.
We were never in Tbilisi, Bernie. That's in Georgia.
Oh my God, Americans, I've got to tell you.
Last week I thought you were in Tbilisi.
Georgia's a state.
I might have felt that way, but no, I actually wasn't.
In this country, Americans are looked upon as heroes,
because they're seen as the people who stepped up,
or the government that stepped up and ended this war before it continued,
and more people were massacred.
Today we went to the runway tunnel, the tunnel museum.
Basically, people escaped the city by running through a tunnel one meter wide
and I think 1.5 meters high that went under the airport runway,
which was a space carved out by the UN.
The UN didn't really do anything to prevent the massacres,
but they were able to keep that part of the city out of Serb hands,
and people were able to escape under the runway
and emerge on the other side in freedom and safety.
So that was simply incredible.
I want to come on again to talk about the hacker spaces we saw,
both in Zagreb and Ljubljana in Slovenia.
So let's hear from him, and then we have a bunch of other things to talk about as well.
Yeah, Manuel mentioned how hospitable people were,
and we've been catching up with leaders of the Hacker Quarterly
and listeners of the shows, and they've been really, really helpful.
It seems every place we've gone there's been someone there to sort of guide us
and show us around.
In Croatia, since we last spoke, we were able to visit Hack Lab Mama,
which was very interesting, and spend a little bit of time getting to know
a couple of people there.
And then, as Manuel mentioned, we were able to go to Ljubljana in Slovenia
and visit the Cyber Pipe Hacker Space,
and we were able to chat and visit their space, which was very, very nice as well.
Amazing buildings, amazing how they were able to wrangle funding
and kind of keep it going.
We shared a lot with them about different problems we've experienced
and different wins that they're having as well, and likewise with us.
So there was a lot of really good sharing and connecting going on there.
And it was very interesting to hear the differences and things like that.
For instance, in Ljubljana they tend to complain about how wonderful
their Internet connection is, which has a really counterintuitive side effect.
Everybody stays at home, and they don't really huddle around the real fast pipes,
which is hard to believe, but that sounds like a real problem for some of the things
we're really trying to see.
I believe it was 20 megabit down and 20 megabit up for €20,
and you'd get TV and telephone with that.
And 100 megabit in situations for €100.
So, yeah, that's really amazing to hear compared to some of the things
that we have and experience in the U.S.
Are there any questions or anything I've said so far you'd like to know more about?
On those Internet prices, is any part of that subsidized by the government there,
like the Post and Telegraph or whatever government agency there,
is it so affordable there because the government subsidizes part of the Internet
or is this all privately provided?
That's a great question, Bernie.
We don't know the answer about that as far as the Internet connection.
A lot of the spaces got government help, which we were really listening for
and kind of taking notes because we could use a little bit of that for our spaces as well.
But I don't have a good answer technically.
But here we are.
We've just now walked a little bit further down to the Eternal Flame,
representing World War II and remembering everyone who was lost in that war.
Anyway, is there any other questions?
Yeah, I had a quick question about the government thing you were talking about.
Did they tell you the reasoning?
Why was it that the governments of these countries are eager to sponsor the hackerspaces?
Why was the government so supportive of hackerspaces?
Right.
It wasn't explicitly said to us, but it seems like they were able to find educational grants.
I know the connections at some of the spaces were actually academic connections,
but that wasn't the 20 up, 20 down for 20 euro that I had originally said.
Those were personal connections that people had at home,
which was part of the problem they were having getting people to show up
and have such great connections at home.
But, yeah, some of the Internet connections at the spaces were subsidized by academic-type grants.
And then the actual spaces had other sorts of sometimes private philanthropists,
venture capital, that kind of thing.
And then especially in Ljubljana, they gave us an idea of how they spend their money and when.
Basically, they get a lump sum once a year, and then that covers their rent, I believe, for the year.
And it's uncertain.
They're trying to diversify some of their income,
and that was where some of the sharing came in as far as keeping nights going and that kind of thing,
because it wasn't reliable.
Money would run out during the year.
And so it was interesting in that sense.
But it was basically like them looking for money and finding places to get it from the institutions that are around them.
And it seemed to work really well.
I mean, one of the spaces, the one in Ljubljana, was in the bottom of a club, a former club.
So it was just beautiful.
Everything was, like, really cleanly installed, and it was just amazing.
They were having a conference there, and they had just really plush, plush arrangements.
So it was kind of a treat to visit them and hear about all this stuff.
Back to broadband feeds.
The largest reason for even moderately advanced countries having, like, much faster broadband feeds than the U.S.
is because the government mandates open the pipe to, like, third-party providers on this competition.
We don't have that in the U.S.
Yeah.
I was wondering about the hackerspaces themselves.
Since you've experienced these, how do they compare to hackerspaces elsewhere?
Okay.
Emanuel, I'm back on now.
You had to break up a little bit.
But how do they compare?
Well, they're remarkably similar, actually, insofar as the spirit, insofar as the way they look on the inside.
So, I mean, it's sort of a common denominator with hackerspaces anywhere.
What's different is just the support that they get from the surrounding community, from society in general,
and obviously from governments.
And we had interesting conversations with people because we were trying to find out what the catch was.
Basically, okay, so you guys, you get health care.
You don't have to pay anything when you get sick, except maybe, like, $10 or $20.
Your higher education is pretty much subsidized.
You pay maybe a couple hundred bucks, maybe $1,000 at the max to attend a top-notch university.
And your biggest problem is that your Internet is too fast.
And this literally is their biggest problem.
Their Internet is too fast.
As Kyle was saying, it keeps people inside.
People stay home because their connectivity is faster in their homes than at their offices.
And getting people to attend social functions is difficult because they don't want to play games inside.
These are the biggest problems.
What is the catch?
I don't really understand it.
Maybe they don't get to have wars a lot.
They don't get to waste a lot of money on things that are nonsense.
I don't want to get too political here, but there's a vast, vast difference in the way things are done.
We can go on for hours about this, talking about organic food, how that's the norm here,
about how alternative cultures are supported and encouraged.
And I think basically the best thing that any of us can do is to come over to places like this.
And you wouldn't expect places in the former Yugoslavia to be shining examples of this.
But if we come over to various parts of the world and look at how people are doing things
and realize that, hey, maybe we can learn something from this and do a better job ourselves,
it might be really inspirational.
And that's what I'm hoping to see.
I'm hoping to see people at hacker gatherings around the world, including our own in July,
but other ones throughout the planet, come together, share information,
and just learn from each other because, wow, we don't have to do it the way we're doing it.
There are other ways.
There are other examples of success.
And it's incredible.
It's really, really inspirational.
Anything else you want to tell us about the stuff you've seen there?
Well, right now we're standing in front of the World War II monument.
So in a few minutes we're able to go from the start of World War I to the height of the war in the 1990s
that started NATO's involvement.
And here we are at the World War II monument.
I mean, I don't really know.
We can sure go to a lot of other places, but I think we've shown that the city is simply full of history.
And actually there's two cops here right now, and we're just sort of standing next to them.
That's okay.
No problem.
We're not worried about anything here.
It's a very friendly place, very open.
And a lot of – everyone goes into a place like this with a lot of preconceptions.
There are mosques everywhere, dozens and dozens of them, call to prayer all the time.
But the people are very open and friendly.
It's just different.
It's not something Americans are used to, which is why I think Americans need to see things like this.
So basically what we're doing after this, I said last week I didn't know where I was going to be this week.
That was true.
I had no idea where I was going to be exactly because I think the best way to travel
is to not plan every single step to the day.
Basically things change all the time.
Volcanoes erupt, and sometimes you have to make site travel changes.
And we've been doing that constantly throughout.
Sometimes we found that we went up to Ljubljana.
We discovered that there wasn't a bus to Split and Croatia, which is on the west coast.
So we had to get a friend to give us a ride back to Zagreb,
and then we had to catch a train that went over there.
So that changed things around a bit.
What we're doing after this, we're taking the train that was reopened late last year,
December of last year, the train between Sarajevo and Belgrade was reopened.
And it's a very symbolic thing because that train had been out of service for 15 years.
It was devastated.
And it's going to be fascinating because there will be at least four engine changes,
two different passport checks if not three.
We'll be going through Srpska, which is actually an autonomous Serbian republic within Bosnia.
We'll be going into Croatia and then into Serbia itself.
So that's going to be a fascinating train ride.
All kinds of people will be getting on.
All kinds of train cars will be swapped in and out.
But then after that we're heading out to Montenegro,
and the idea is to cross from Montenegro into Albania.
Now, it turns out there are no direct bus or train routes to do that.
So what we're told is the best way to proceed is to simply hire somebody to drive us
from the capital of Montenegro to the Albanian border, walk across the border,
and then catch a bus into Toronto, the capital of Albania.
And what I'd like to ask our listeners, because they've been very helpful so far,
is that a good idea?
Is that the best thing that we should be doing?
Does anybody know any other ways of doing this?
And perhaps there are people in Montenegro or in Albania that listen to the show
and maybe would like to meet up.
It's been fascinating, guys.
I cannot tell you how amazing it is to meet people in places like this,
in Croatia, in Slovenia, in Bosnia.
People who listen to Off the Hook and Off the Wall
and are ready to show you their town and share their culture with you.
It makes me realize how important what you guys are doing back in New York,
what we do for many, many years, the Hope Conferences, the magazine.
It matters.
It really gets through to people, and we share something in hackerspaces,
in just our curiosity, in our willingness to exchange cultures and things like that.
It's something that I cannot stress enough that you need to get involved in
and just do this as much as possible.
It's awesome.
Very cool.
Of course, if any of our listeners can offer any advice or assistance
to Emmanuel and Kyle out there, let us know, othat2600.com.
Yes, please, don't let us walk across the audience without knowing what we're doing.
So, yeah, that's pretty much it as far as that goes.
We've been to amazing places.
We've seen amazing things.
We've played with technology in all kinds of different ways.
It's an amazing way you can find the Internet.
Actually, the other day, I let Kyle tell the story,
and then we'll have a special guest join us.
But we were in Split, and we had no idea where we were going to stay the next night
in Sarajevo in Bosnia.
Now, that kind of a prospect might terrify a lot of people,
but when you're an adventurer and traveling by the sea that you can,
it's the kind of thing that you live for.
So here we are in Split, Croatia, no idea where we're going to stay,
no Internet access, no way of getting access that we know of,
walking around the streets.
I'll let Kyle pick it up from here.
All right.
It's really a quick story.
We needed this Internet connection, and we're looking for Internet cafe,
some sort of place where we could officially connect,
and ended up walking around with a computer to find the right one,
whether it was free or whether we had to pay a little bit of money here or there.
We were finding nothing in sort of the touristy boardwalk sections of Split,
and ended up sort of walking around.
I had done some exploring during the day, and this was a little bit later in the night.
So I was comfortable going up,
and we went up into some of the neighborhoods where the apartments and stuff were
and just looked for stuff that was strong signal, stuff that might work.
And we tried a couple of different locations
and then found one that was open and sort of nondescript and very anonymous,
meaning there was no brand or anything like that.
We just hopped on, and actually it was an amazing connection.
We were whizzing away with all kinds of correspondence
and research for finding out where to next, and that was amazing.
It took about 15 minutes, maybe a half hour of our time to walk around it.
But the climate there was so nice, we just sort of made a jaunt of it,
and there we were getting online, and it worked out in our favor
because we got the right information,
and here we are now looking at the next leg of our journey.
I'm sorry, Kyle, do you want a Bosnian coffee?
I'm going to hop into this cafe for a second.
Actually, that'd be delightful.
Okay, I'll be right back.
All right.
Hey, Kyle?
Yeah.
Hi, Kyle.
I just wanted to ask, did you folks happen to research
if there are any criminal penalties there on the unauthorized use of Internet connection?
I don't know.
We're not in Croatia anymore.
Yeah, that's a really fantastic question.
Once I get back, I'll look into it.
I don't know.
Yeah, I don't think so.
I just don't have that information.
You probably don't want to know anyway.
He's got a Bosnian coffee now.
It's very similar to Turkish coffee, a lot of sludge on the bottom,
but they're really good.
We're going to be up all night with this.
Well, one thing that's certainly illegal is taking the subway without paying,
and I believe we have a RenderMan on the phone who knows,
not that he's done it, but he knows something about it.
Hello, everyone.
Yeah, he's never taken the subway without paying.
I hope not.
Of course not.
Where are you now?
I'm currently in Alberta, Canada,
so I'm like a couple thousand miles in the other direction from New York that you are.
Okay, so we're all outside the jurisdiction of the United States at least.
Yes.
But we're not, so go easy on us.
So now, RenderMan, if I understand, there was a story in the Daily News,
last week, that caught your attention?
Actually, it was this past Monday.
To tell the story, I was sitting around on my couch reading various news articles
from around the world and found this interesting one from the New York Daily News
saying that for $27 you could get free access to the subway system.
And, of course, this intrigued me.
So I continued to read the article, and it was basically this revelation in their minds
that master keys for the emergency gates were being sold by transit employees
and were being sold in an underground fashion to people to bypass the MetroCard turnstiles
to basically get free access to the subway.
Apparently these keys also open up a whole bunch of other things around the subway stations as well.
But this reporter was talking to MTA employees and saying,
oh, this is a bad thing, we don't want to have unrestricted access to these things and everything.
And, okay, that's not a surprise, the keys would be copied and sold.
However, what I thought was really interesting was the photo that they had in the article.
The photo has the reporter standing there with an open emergency gate holding up the key.
And anybody who's into lock-picking knows that it's actually very easy to copy a key from a photograph.
Yeah, having a photo is basically equivalent to having the key.
Yeah, it gives you enough information to sit around with a file and make your own quite easily.
So any remaining security left in the system while they went around and audited who has keys and how many are lost,
and they presumably are going to go around and change locks,
any security left in that has been completely destroyed by this reporter holding up the key in this photograph
and giving it away to anybody and everybody.
And I'm sitting here 2,000 miles away and I now have a key that should, in theory,
because I can't test it because I'm 2,000 miles away,
that could, in theory, open up all these emergency gates.
Of course, this is not something we would recommend testing as doing so, I believe, would be a felony in this state.
Probably. I generally assume most things are a felony.
If I remember correctly, Bernie and Rob were actually wondering if the resolution of the photo was even good enough to make a working key.
Any of you guys have any questions about that?
Looking at the actual photo in the article, you can tell what the bidding is,
but it's not quite high enough a resolution to just feed it into a CNC machine and make one.
However, because you know things like the size of the end of the key and everything like that,
you can see relative depths.
Two adjacent cuts would look, one's higher than the other, one's lower than the other.
And because all of those depths are standard, and there's only nine different depths,
at the very worst, you could sit down and make a bunch of keys that you could try out at your best guess.
You could end up with like a dozen keys to try.
The one that opens it is obviously the one that you want to make more copies of.
Is it a standard kind of model of key that you can recognize from the photo?
The funny part was in a subsequent article, they showed a picture of the key in the lock.
And on that lock, you can quite easily see that it's a Yale lock,
which reduces down the number of possible keyways, the profile that the key goes into.
Basically, you get a good photo of that compared with resources for blank catalogs that locksmiths have access to.
And you can quickly and easily find out what make and model of key you need to file down.
In theory, you could just order from any locksmith saying,
I want cuts, one, two, three, four, five, and they'll give it to you, and you now have a master key.
So, Mr. Ernst, with a combination of social engineering
and just some knowledge about particular brands of locks and what particular institutions are using,
you can, with a fairly decent photograph of the key, duplicate that key?
Yeah, essentially. But even with a relatively poor photograph, you can make a very educated guess.
Eliminate 90% of the possible combinations.
Now, I'm sorry, I'm having trouble hearing Terry because the signal is bad,
but have you contacted either the Daily News or the MTA to tell them about this major potential security hole?
Yes, I have. I've sent email to the MTA and to the reporter.
The reporter was first, just in case he wanted to head things off and find some way to cover his butt.
And also sent to the MTA and not heard back from either of them.
And so, okay.
Well, you might get back to them now, after talking about this on air.
And just to give a bit of background, a similar story happened with,
listeners might remember this, a couple of years ago with the Diebold touchscreen voting machines,
where some people with authorized access to a voting machine managed to make themselves a key based on an image on,
I think it was Diebold's own website.
It was on their online store.
Yeah. And so this security hole should not be new to anyone in the know.
But organizations like Diebold and now the MTA posing for this photo with the key
are basically leaving themselves wide open to such an attack.
And also the MTA.
Can I ask a question now?
Is the plan to try and make a key to see if this is actually possible to show the MTA how stupid it is
to actually have a key to a reporter to take a picture of to put in the Daily News?
Or are we just going to kind of say that, well, this looks like it's possible?
I mean, I know it's a public felony to even talk about it,
but I kind of like to demonstrate things, you know what I mean?
It wouldn't be extraordinarily difficult.
Just need a nice photograph of the key way to figure out what kind of key blank to get.
But even then, it's amazing what one can do with sturdy cardboard and other such materials.
The only problem is I'm 2,000 miles away and not going to be in New York until the summer, for hope.
So, yeah, kind of hard to test that from here.
Is there anything our listeners can do to help?
Photographs of the key ways would be useful to get some more information.
And also, if anybody's got any knowledge of what the schedule is to replace the locks,
I get the feeling that's going to be very quickly set up.
Basically what you're asking our listeners to do is take pictures of the locks that the keys go in.
Yes.
And, of course, you realize that people are getting harassed if they're taking pictures in the subway system to start with.
But you'd like us to take that a step further and take pictures of locks in the subway system.
So I want to make sure that's what you want.
We'll do it. Our listeners will do this.
They're very committed.
Potentially, yes.
Wow. Okay.
Are we going to share the results, I hope, or at a future prison exchange or something?
We'll find a way to get the information out there.
Hey, Renderman?
Yes.
Renderman, I had a question for you.
Well, more of a comment, actually.
I think there's a lot of irony in the story, and that is the New York Daily News,
which published on their website a picture of this master key they apparently bought on the Internet for $27.
And they were saying, you know, sort of an exposition or a story showing that this is the vulnerability.
They were telling you about this vulnerability.
The irony is the New York Daily News increased that vulnerability by an order of magnitude
by putting a photograph of the key on the Internet.
And even though if it wasn't a really sharp photograph,
a sharp locksmith could probably make a working key from that photo if they gave it a few tries.
But on the other hand, maybe the New York Daily News reporter was clever, like a hacker,
and actually trying to close this loophole by showing this key to the world
so the MTA would really have to do something about it.
That seems to be something like someone with a hacker mindset would do.
That's really good of them to do.
Well, someone with a hacker mindset might have a little more chaotic intentions in their doing it.
But he actually bought the key from somebody in Brooklyn.
It wasn't over the Internet.
The funny part is that because he now posted it on the Internet,
instead of the vulnerability being just anybody you can get to, you know, some guy in Brooklyn,
it's now everybody on the planet is now potentially able to pull this off.
That is a scary thought.
It's kind of an inspiring thought.
And I'm just wondering how many other pictures are out there,
things that perhaps you could make copies of and simply have access to all sorts of things.
I imagine to hackers such as yourself, this is something that is common knowledge.
But to the average citizen, I'm not sure it's that apparent
that simply taking a picture of a key is enough to give you access to a door.
This is why I'm a big advocate that anybody that has anything to do with security
needs to pay attention to what the hacker community is working on
because we tend to be a couple of years ahead of things.
What's new and interesting for us, the rest of the public hasn't heard yet.
But by the time we're bored with it, now it's starting to make news
and be interesting to the general public.
So stay ahead of the curve.
There's like 2,600 evil hacker blogs that are out there.
We're not evil, we're regular people.
We like sharing information.
I think some of our older listeners may be familiar with the old TV show Mission Impossible,
the original series back in the 60s.
And this is very much like somebody would just get a key in their hands for just a moment
and put it into a piece of clay or something and make an impression of it
and then give the key back.
And that technique is very similar to what we're talking about here.
So it would be interesting to see if somebody takes this picture from the New York Daily News
and makes a working master key.
And I'm really interested in seeing if you get a reply.
So would you let us know, RenderMan, if you get a reply from the MTA or from the Daily News about this story?
Definitely will.
Great.
Or if you get picked up by them, please give us a call.
That's an awfully long trip out here, so I might not be in their budget to come out here and hassle me.
All right, well, RenderMan, you're going to be at Hope.
Yeah, I just realized that.
That could make my life very interesting for Hope.
RenderMan, you're going to be at Hope along with hundreds if not thousands of other skilled hackers
who can do all kinds of things and strike the fear of the Lord into the powers that be.
Is there anything you can say to encourage people not to be afraid to come to the conference and meet people like you?
You know, we don't bite.
It's probably one of the places I feel the safest, and there's this wonderful sense of community that nobody's –
I mean, they might have ill intentions in some respects, but when we're all together,
it's just this really wonderful feeling of community that you can wish the rest of the world was like.
Really, it's just a lot of fun.
You learn so much, things you never even thought of.
You didn't even know existed, stuff out of Star Trek and stuff like that.
You're seeing beginnings of some of those technologies right in front of you,
and it's guys working out of their basements coming up with this stuff.
It's really cool.
Great.
Thanks, RenderMan.
No problem.
Would you like to stick around, RenderMan, and maybe we'll take some phone calls on this and other topics?
I'm sure.
Okay, great.
Yeah, maybe the Daily News reporter will call, in fact.
Maybe someone from the MTA will call.
A caveat, though, that we now have three people on the phone,
and I'm not sure if we answer the phone if we'll lose one of you, but we'll try it.
I'll just try to call back anybody that you might disconnect.
It's interesting.
As I mentioned, Kyle Meier and Sarita right now.
Right now we're standing at the site of one of the many, many places where a grenade or mortar hit.
There's craters everywhere, holes in buildings.
And what has been done is red paint has been painted onto the holes as kind of a memorial to all the victims.
And you see that everywhere in the city.
It's simply an incredible thing.
Yeah.
A lot of people don't want to forget what happened, and they want to make sure that people are reminded of it.
Not in a morbid way, but just in a way that we learn not to ever go down this road again.
The nationalism, the ultranationalism, and the suspicion of people who are different,
that's something that poisons any society, and to see how quickly it fell apart here,
and also how quickly it's being put back together, that's something that I think we can all learn from.
And there are bits of this everywhere.
There's a cafe called the To Be or Not to Be Cafe, and there's a line through the words not to be.
And that was done during the war because that was determined not to be an option, not to be.
People had to survive here, and the people in the city have been so strong and just able to get through.
That kind of hell we can't even imagine back home.
I mean, we've participated in many wars.
We've never actually been invaded.
We've never actually had our streets explode in front of us and had snipers fire,
except from our own people, of course, but having a sustained war on our city,
that's something we can't even imagine.
Even the buildings here, the buildings are built in such a way that they remain standing after something like this.
They're built out of stone.
While they may be destroyed on the inside, the actual structures are still there,
and that's something that in the United States we've been asked several times,
how come your houses are built out of paper?
They're so flimsy.
I guess it's because we don't worry as much about the things that might happen,
and here people are very keenly aware of that kind of thing.
So, yeah, people do want to remember.
They do want to learn.
They do want to move forward.
So it's a fascinating place and a fascinating lesson to learn.
All right.
Should we take some calls then?
Yeah, we got a whole—
Why not?
Yeah, we got some calls calling, and if you want to join them, the number is 212-209-2900.
Let's try number seven.
Oh, it won't let me.
I made it turn yellow.
I'm not sure that we can take all these phone calls, but let's try one more time.
Again, yellow.
I might be hanging up on people.
We might have to lose someone in order to take calls.
Do we have a volunteer?
Well, you know, I can sacrifice myself because I could be up tomorrow morning anyway.
It's 2 in the morning here.
So I can say goodnight from Sarajevo, and Kyle can as well.
All right.
Then we'll speak to you next week from some other mysterious land, maybe,
if I can—are you there?
I think everybody who's been so hospitable out here in Europe,
the countries and the people of those countries, you've been very, very welcome.
And if anybody out there in Albania or Montenegro has more information for us,
won't you please write to us, OTH at 2600.com, so we don't go down the wrong roads.
Thank you.
All right.
We'll speak to you next week, and we'll speak to you right now.
What's on your mind?
Oh, dial tone.
Very interesting.
How about you?
What's on your mind?
Hi.
How are you?
Let me just turn down the thing.
Great.
Please do.
Thanks.
Okay.
I really enjoyed your show this evening.
Thank you.
Are you guys familiar with the Bill of Rights Security Edition?
Why don't you tell us briefly about it?
It has the Bill of Rights on a metal plate, ink on a metal plate.
This way you can carry it on your person as you're going through airport security.
It has Amendment 4 in red, so you can carry it and set off the alarm and start a dialogue about it.
Have you tried it?
What happens if you do?
Well, I tried it, and it set off the alarm.
But the comments I made were so oblique that nobody really picked up on it.
I wasn't, at that point, energetic enough to be really pointed about it.
It wasn't fair.
I don't think it's quite fair to expect TSA employees in the course of their duties to pick up on things.
One of them, when I mentioned it, he said,
You didn't think that through, did you?
And I said, Oh, yes, I did.
And I left it at that.
Where can people get a copy of the Bill of Rights on a small metal plate?
Well, I will give you the email, www.securityedition.com.
You'll probably be able to find out from that who actually makes them.
But I don't want to put it out over the air because the airport in their area might not be too happy with them.
Fair enough.
All right, well, thanks for the tip.
It's another sad thing that President Obama seems to not care about Amendment 5,
deciding he can decide who's to be killed without any trial or anything.
All right, well, maybe we'll get that printed in red as well.
Let's take some more phone calls.
212-209-2900.
And you are on the air.
Hello?
Yeah, hi.
What's on your mind?
I was curious as to whether Bernie had previous experience with files.
Could you turn down your radio, please?
I'll do that.
Yeah.
Well, with files like the one he's trying to file the key with.
I'm just teasing good old Bernie.
Oh, yeah, I've done some filing in my time.
Hey, Bernie, you got that Wally equipment for me.
How are you?
Very good.
Listen, I was at a seminar today with the New York State Board of Elections,
and they have a new electronic machine.
The curtains and all the old machines are actually gone.
But I asked, is it a Diebold, and it's not.
It's something like Susquehanna or Sequoia.
Sequoia, yeah.
Which bought Diebold's election division when their name got tarnished.
So in spirit, it is a Diebold.
Yeah.
It's a funny thing because they give you this big piece of paper.
It looks like a huge check that you see on when somebody wins something on TV,
they give them a big check.
And that's your ballot.
And you fill it out like the SAT forms.
And then the voter will put it, insert it into the machine.
So I think they're kind of thinking that there probably won't be any problems
with the machines.
Maybe they're not thinking that in all fairness.
But let's see how something takes, you know, like machines that take a bill.
But this doesn't have to scan it like a bill.
This just has to eat the ballot and hold it inside.
All right.
It reads what was voted, and it gives you a printout of not,
I don't believe it gives the voter.
It gives a readout of what was voted,
and they can press if that's okay or not.
And then at the end of the night, it gives you a full tally of all votes made.
Also, it can take up to infinity voters.
They used to have a limit to 999 voters for the old machines,
and they would give you a second machine if you had over 750 just to play it safe.
But we're here.
We have the electronic machine now.
And I trust there's someone out there or more than one individual in the universe
that can hack these things.
I wonder what the key looks like.
One story actually that just came out this morning,
our friend Rob from Holland has been in India.
He gets around.
And he and some other people have discovered that the Indian voting machines,
the electronic voting machines that they use in India,
are, as they say, vulnerable to fraud.
They inserted a device into the machine which allowed them to add votes remotely,
which is scary.
And you can read more about that at IndiaEVM.org.
Can you just repeat that quickly?
I can.
It's IndiaEVM.org.
EVM stands for electronic voting machine.
But I wanted to give you a heads up.
They're not even sure.
The BOE is not even sure exactly all that's going on with this.
But they're still getting information, going to Albany for seminars and training,
and they're going to be training us inspectors,
giving us training seminars on how to run the machine and deal with the situation.
I worry when these people have absolute certainty in their systems.
But thanks for the call.
Yeah.
Thanks, Wally.
It's really easy to double-check the security on those things.
Just next time you're at one of those meetings,
ask if you can bring one down to the HOPE conference
and let us have it for the weekend.
We'll find something interesting to do with it.
You know, we make that offer and they never take us up on it.
Thank you, Brian.
We've got just a few seconds left.
Let's take this person's call, but very briefly.
Hello?
Hello.
Hi.
What's something brief that's on your mind?
Well, maybe it's not.
Okay, I'll ask briefly if you can reference a good website
that I can look into the pitfalls of Google.
Considering an investment into this new Droid, incredible phone,
and I've heard many leery things about Google
and its, you know, big brother proclivities.
So if you have any input, I'd appreciate that.
Thanks.
Anyone have an input?
I don't have that information immediately available,
but I think I could probably Google for it if I had the opportunity.
Googlemonitor.com and Googleopoly.net
are two that I've come across recently.
How do you spell Googleopoly?
Googleopoly.net.
Thank you, RenderMan.
All right.
Thanks, RenderMan and Adrenius on the phone.
I think that's it for today, and we'll be back same time, same place next week.
Emmanuel will be in some new location, so we'll find out what then.
And get in touch with us, oth2600.com.
All right.
See you next week.
♪
It was automation, I know
That was what was making the factory go
It was IBM, it was UNIVAC
It was all those gears going clickety-clack, dear
I thought automation was keen
Till you were replaced by a ten-ton machine
It was that computer that tore us apart, dear
Automation broke my heart
There's an RCA 503
Standing next to me, dear, where you used to be
Doesn't have your smile, doesn't have your shape
Just a bunch of punch cards and light bulbs and tape, dear
You're a girl who's soft, warm, and sweet
But you're only human, and that's obsolete
Though I'm very fond of that new 503
Dear, automation's not for me
It was automation, I'm told
That's why I got fired, and I'm out in the cold
How could I have known
When the 503 started in to blink
It was winking at me, dear
I thought it was just some mishap
When it sidled over and sat on my lap
But when it said, I love you, and gave me a hug
Dear, that's when I pulled out
Its plug!
We celebrate our culture and all things dance.