by the state of the mainstream media in this country,
We need a media that strengthens democracy,
We need a media that enriches public discourse,
I'm Jane Fonda and this is WBAI listener supported non-commercial radio in New York.
And you're listening to radio station WBAI New York, the time is 7.01, 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 cough.
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!
Bum diddly bum, bum diddly bum, bum diddly bum.
Bum diddly bum, bum diddly bum, bum diddly bum.
Ah, from Philadelphia.
Florida is always at the head of this kind of progressive thinking.
And regressions and the various other things that we cover in this hour.
We'll be taking phone calls, things like that.
The Hope Conference is plowing along.
All kinds of new talks have been submitted.
Thanks listeners who have responded to our appeals over the last couple of weeks and submitted talk ideas.
We've got some really good ones.
We'll be releasing a whole bunch more in the next few days, couple of weeks.
A lot of cool things out there.
There's so many I can't even keep track of them, but that's a good problem to have.
I don't want to give away details because they haven't been finalized yet.
We have to verify things with the submitters.
But I will say that we're getting everything from people who work in secret government agencies,
to people who are at the top of various corporations,
to students, to lawyers, to activists of all sorts,
to anonymous hackers, both with capital A and lowercase a.
It's really cool.
It's going to be the most amazing gathering of minds and mischief that I think we've had yet.
This is our ninth conference, Hope No. 9, July 13, 14, and 15 at the Hotel Pennsylvania.
It's always fun.
We might as well also point out that if you'd like to sell things at the conference,
vendor table information is now on Hope No. 9 website.
What kinds of things do people sell?
Besides Club Mate, which we sell.
Books.
People sell books.
People sell hardware.
People sell kits.
People sell things that we have never seen before.
Yeah, they surprise us sometimes with some of the things that they come up with.
Or you could just distribute leaflets.
Some people do that as well.
Absolutely.
The email address, if you want to submit a talk idea, there's still plenty of time for that.
I wouldn't say plenty of time.
There's still time.
We're filling up the schedule.
We're going to have over 100 talks, but you'd be amazed how quickly that fills up.
The address, speakers at hope.net.
I don't think you can get any simpler than that.
If you have an idea for some kind of a project, projects at hope.net.
Some kind of a workshop or something like that that you'd like to try and have happen.
It's a hacker conference, so anything is possible.
So we're open to all kinds of ideas.
Alright.
Yeah, that's a really good thing to point out.
Hacker conferences especially are participatory things.
You don't just go around and watch.
There's lots of doing and everyone interacting.
And the projects and workshops are an amazing part of Hope.
And the people you meet in general at the conferences.
That's always one of the great things about going to these conferences.
It's not just about the talks, right?
You can watch videos of the talks any time, but it's also about the people.
And the people you interact with and the people you get to meet.
It's great just standing on 7th Avenue at 3 o'clock in the morning
with about 50 other people that are all part of the conference.
And everybody is just sort of hanging out, talking about various things,
watching the world go by.
That's what the whole weekend is like.
People just hanging out in various parts of the hotel.
And it's right across the street from Penn Station,
so it's a very busy area all the time.
And, yeah, the talks are great to experience live, to be there,
as are all the things going on in the second floor as well.
But, yeah, it's all about the interactions.
It's all about the people you meet because you do wind up staying in touch
with them for a very long time.
The address, if you want to register, www.hope.net.
Again, this month we have a special promotion where 10% of the ticket sales
go to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
So if you buy a ticket, 10% of that will be donated to the EFF.
And I think that's really a good way of saying that you support what they do.
We've had them on the show multiple times.
We'll have them again.
And they are going to have a bunch of talks at this conference as well.
They've been doing incredible work over the last, well, last decade,
a couple of decades, but I think it's stepped up a lot recently
because so many things are happening on so many levels.
There's this one case that I just read yesterday.
Federal appeals court rejected a dangerous interpretation of the federal
anti-hacking law dismissing charges that would have criminalized any employee's
use of a company's computers in violation of corporate policy.
Yeah, basically you could be locked up for that.
The EFF filed an amicus brief in that case, which is U.S. v. Nozal,
urging the court to come to this conclusion as part of its ongoing work
to ensure fair application of the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Bernie, have you been following that?
Yeah, yeah.
We've all been following this for years, this whole terms of service
violation thing, whether that would incur a potential criminal prosecution.
I'm glad to hear that, but it's just a circuit court,
and other circuit courts have ruled the other way,
so it looks like this might be going to the Supreme Court,
and we'll see where that goes.
Yeah, it's always fun.
If I use my employer's computer at work to surf Facebook or something,
clearly I can be fired for that if my employer doesn't want me to,
but you're telling me I can be thrown in jail as well?
You know what?
I thought you were talking about terms of service violations, but no.
You could be.
I mean, you could.
It depends on the terms of service.
There's criminal, there's also a decision this week,
and I was confusing the two decisions,
conflating them that the terms of service violation is not considered by this
one circuit, federal circuit, a potential criminal offense.
Are you talking about the thing where employers can't ask you for your Facebook?
No, that's something else.
That's a whole different case.
There's a lot of cases.
That's the thing.
There are so many cases.
I think that's a tactic.
There are so many cases that you can't keep track of them all,
and you wind up not paying attention to ones that really wind up,
you know, kicking you in the ass at some point.
And, yeah, this is a very important one to pay attention to,
because if you could basically be charged for a federal crime for violating your
employer's rules, whatever they might be,
they basically elevated corporate policy to the severity of federal law.
That would be horrible if that were to succeed.
You know, if you're a corporation or you're, you know,
a group of corporations like the MPA and the RIA, you know,
just they're throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks, right?
So, of course, there's a lot of cases.
This didn't work.
Maybe this other way will work.
Well, the gist of it is that without organizations like EFF around to pay attention
and to file amicus briefs when necessary and to fight in court whenever they can,
we'd be in much worse shape, and we still could be in much worse shape,
because this never goes away.
They will always come back and try and get in, get their foot in the door a different way.
So you always have to be alert, and it's really important to recognize this
and to support these organizations.
I mean, the other nice thing about the EFF is they understand the technical aspect of it, right?
So not only are they there to protect our rights and protect our privacy,
but also they have an understanding of what's going on, which often, you know, lawmakers don't.
So it's up to the EFF in a way to monitor what the lawmakers are doing
and make sure because the lawmakers have no idea what it is that they're actually doing, unfortunately.
And they're open to listening, too.
So if you know something that maybe they're not quite getting
or maybe they don't see the importance of it yet,
they'll listen if you contact them and say,
hey, this is something coming down the pike that could really be a bad law,
and we need to fight it or we need to be educated about it.
So, yeah, it's great to have this dialogue.
And, again, the conference is a great place to actually put faces to the names
and make contacts and stay in touch and build resistance to all this,
because we've been fighting these battles for so long,
and it's just it's always interesting, but a bit scary at the same time.
Don't you think, Bernie?
Very scary.
We'll be hearing lots about scary laws and ways to combat them.
Yes, definitely.
Lots of scary laws.
We have not just EFF lawyers, but people from different organizations as well
and a lot of people that are on the receiving end of some of these laws.
We even have some speakers who are not lawyers at all.
Yeah, we do.
Lots.
I'd say most probably aren't lawyers.
But there are people that become lawyers because they read the magazine
and they listen to the radio show and they realize, hey, lawyers are needed,
and people have actually turned into lawyers as a result of listening
and reading what we put out.
Yeah, but then they graduate law school with crippling debt
and they go work for corporations, and they know a lot about the issues,
and it doesn't help.
It doesn't always happen.
It doesn't always happen that way.
Sometimes it works out well.
Sometimes it works the other way, too.
I know a lawyer who stopped being a lawyer and went fully into hacker stuff
full-time after attending a few conferences.
Oh, wow.
How did that work out?
Apparently well.
I can't imagine that paying off, but okay, whatever you feel like, I guess.
Okay, we have some very interesting stories that are out there now.
You hear about this?
They apparently just came up with this method of dealing with stolen cell phones.
So many people have smartphones these days,
and a lot of these people are either losing their cell phones,
their smartphones, or having them stolen.
What has happened this week is that major wireless service companies
have agreed to disable cell phones after they are reported stolen
under a strategy intended to deter the theft and resale of wireless devices.
They'll begin blocking stolen devices within six months.
According to the FCC Commission Chairman Julian Genachowski,
who said this at a news conference yesterday,
along with NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly,
carriers with the push of a button,
I don't know why it takes them six months to push the button,
will be able to take highly prized stolen instruments
and turn them into worthless pieces of plastic.
What we're doing, some of us already think they are worthless pieces of plastic,
what we're doing is drawing up the market for stolen cell phones
and other types of devices.
It's like draining the swamp to fight malaria.
Yeah, we think this is going to have a significant impact.
You're kind of really putting yourself up on a pedestal there.
Okay, they're stolen cell phones.
Is this really anything new?
They always had this ability.
Is it that they're going to start doing this in six months,
or that after it's reported?
I think they're not going to start doing this for six months.
Because the thing is that with all cell phones,
when you lose your cell phone,
they have a record of the kind of identifier of the cell phone.
I assume what they're going to do is if a cell phone is reported stolen,
they're going to block any cell phones with identifier from using their network,
which, I mean, it's not a bad metaphor.
I can't believe they've, well, the malaria thing is a ridiculous metaphor,
but I can't believe it took them this long to come up with something like this
because do you remember the guy in England, the 7-7 bombings,
when they basically had a bunch of people that were blowing up buses and trains
and things like that?
One guy went to Italy, put a new SIM card in his phone,
turned it on, and was immediately caught because it wasn't the SIM card.
It was the ID of the phone that was able to be identified.
Now, if somebody steals your phone,
obviously the same capability exists where that ID can be identified and disabled.
So I had a phone once, and for whatever reason,
someone who wasn't me kept reporting it stolen,
and so I would have to call the carrier and be like,
yo, the phone's in my pocket where it's always been.
Wait, who did you steal it from?
From myself, apparently.
It was very strange, and I would have to go through this long argument
telling them that no, in fact, it was neither lost or stolen,
and I don't know who they talked to, but it wasn't me.
But if they had disabled my phone
and then I had to spend hundreds of dollars on a new phone,
I would have been even more upset.
Well, yeah, but the person who originally owned the phone
that you somehow obtained, they would be upset too, right?
Emmanuel.
Why are you saying you didn't steal it?
Let's just be clear here.
I did not steal the phone.
This is a day of justice, Mike,
where everything is coming out on the table now.
So you definitely did not, you're sure about this.
Remember, you are under oath.
Yeah, I bought it from the carrier, that phone.
All right, and they kept reporting it stolen.
Someone who wasn't me kept reporting it stolen.
All right, well, that's an interesting trick.
Go ahead, Bernie, and then Red Hat.
Cellular carriers used to do this.
They used to blacklist what was called the electronic serial number.
This was before GSM phones were in the U.S.
And if your phone was stolen, you could report it,
and it would be on a blacklist that was shared through all the carriers.
But sometime in the 90s, they stopped doing that.
Why? I don't know.
But I think that the carriers have a vested interest
in not creating a blacklist
because then all the stolen phones can generate revenue for them, too.
I mean, just the average cell phone, stolen or not,
generates many hundreds of dollars a year,
if not thousands, for the carrier.
Well, here's my question.
Okay, maybe it is a pain for them to do this.
Maybe it's not profitable for them to do this.
But by disabling the phone,
obviously the person can't make phone calls,
but all the personal information that people tend to store on these smartphones,
is that disabled, too?
Or do people still have access to all of that?
I think this is just to prevent the phone from working, frankly.
It's a little unclear from the article,
but to me, it does break a cell phone.
I know of no way you can...
There's forensic technologies that can still get the information out of the cell phone.
So this isn't protecting your information.
This is preventing your cell phone from being used by the thief
who bought a phone from a thief or from a fence or somebody like that.
Seems like that's a good way to catch the thief,
by having them use the phone.
I don't think...
I mean, if you shut it off, then you can't find them.
I don't think that the carriers necessarily have the capability
to remotely wipe a phone.
There are solutions out there that will do that,
but usually the user has to install it.
I think... I don't know if Apple ones have it built in.
But anyway, there are ways to remote wipe it,
but I don't think it would be within the carrier's capability to do it.
But also, a note to the carriers, if you're going to do this,
make sure that the person who's reporting it stolen originally
had the phone associated with their account,
or you're going to have problems like what Mike had.
Obviously, if the person was using it,
and it was registered with their account, and they reported stolen,
that's a pretty legitimate way to verify that that was their phone.
But, yeah.
Yeah, I'd definitely be more interested with some sort of solution
to bring in to wipe phones as opposed to simply turn them off,
because with these smartphones coming out,
you have all this private data.
However, I don't know if this will really drain the swamp, so to speak.
I have a sneaking suspicion this is really just going to stimulate
the market for people figuring out how to modify
the actual identifier for their phones.
I would love the opportunity to be able to just make a phone call
and shut off anyone's phone I wanted to and wipe it as well.
Who I'm going to feel bad for, though, are the people who, you know,
someone gets their phone stolen, they sell it immediately on Craigslist
or something to somebody else, and then a few days later
that person has a non-working cell phone and no recourse.
See, right away we come up with mischievous applications for this kind of thing.
It's not even a mischievous application.
It's just that if somebody buys a stolen cell phone unwittingly,
they're going to have problems, right?
And there probably won't be any way for them to appeal that.
No, that actually would be a really horrible thing for people
because then you could have someone buy a phone,
sell it for about the same amount of money, report it stolen,
and with their warranty for a lower price buy a new phone
and make a net profit.
All right, well, speaking of advances in the cell phone world,
apparently you can improve just about anything these days
by sticking the letters HD in front of it.
And that's what Sprint apparently is doing
as people increasingly abandon voice calling for texting and emailing.
Audio quality has been a bit neglected, to say the least.
But Sprint's debut of the HD voice-compatible 4G LTE signal
that carriers are starting to kick the quality up a notch.
Yeah, okay.
The jump from your current phone to HD voice
is like switching from dial-up to DSL.
But what is it exactly?
This article in Gizmodo asks,
normally calls are transmitted on a limited frequency of 300 Hz
to 3 to 4 kHz,
but HD voice is a wideband audio technology
expanding that range from 50 Hz to 7 kHz and up.
This larger frequency essentially means that more sound waves
and speech data can be squeezed into a single channel
with the excess information stripped out resulting in clearer calls.
You know, it's sort of what we've been talking about for years,
something that maybe people would pay a premium for
is actual phone calls that sound like phone calls used to sound like.
But I'm not sure.
Bernie, I know you're somebody who takes these things with a grain of salt.
Do you think this is actually a step forward?
Well, I think it's a step back to where it used to be,
where the phone call quality was very good with cellular phones.
But then the carriers got greedy
as they started overselling the capacity on their networks
and then squeezing existing customers into a smaller and smaller bandwidth channel.
So, I mean, I'm talking to you on a Sprint phone right now,
and my voice is going through a codec,
which is an algorithm that, you know,
squeezes my voice into a bit stream that's about 3 kilobits per second,
which is ridiculous.
I should be getting, you know, it used to be really high quality.
So they're just squeezing us and charging more for it.
And this is just...
I'm really curious as to whether they're going to start charging money for this feature.
If they do, it's a real ripoff.
Well, I'm sure I'm speaking for everyone here when I say that
we'll wait to see if it actually performs as they say it does.
But I just love how HD in front of everything just means that it's better now.
Yeah, I mean, one of the things that it at least sounds like from the article
is since they're using, you know, a wider band channel,
there are actually limits, you know, information theory limits
on how much data you can squeeze through certain channels.
So if they're giving it more bandwidth,
then it at least is going to be able to send more information.
And if they couple that with, you know, fairly good codecs,
then, you know, it may sound better.
Well, I mean, I actually suggested this a couple of years ago.
And I did suggest that people might be willing to pay more to have better sound quality.
Imagine talking on the phone and it sounds like FM radio,
like you're talking to somebody and you can both hear each other.
You're not talking and the other person is talking at the same time
and neither one of you is listening to the other person.
You would have that two-way function that we used to have on landline.
Well, we still do have on landlines except people don't tend to use them nearly as much.
I, for one, will be very happy if after 20 years of building infrastructure
and billions of dollars investing in this network,
we'll get to a point where phone calls sound like they did 30 years ago.
Well, the thing is people are so reluctant to even get on the phone.
I had a conversation on the air yesterday with Kyle about this.
We were talking about how people don't use phones anymore.
People are texting back and forth.
And all you have to do is pick up the phone and ask a simple question
and the time would be cut by a huge amount.
But also just the voice quality.
We were talking landline to landline.
And not only were we talking landline to landline,
both of us were on rotary phones, old rotary phones from the 1960s.
And we asked a question at that time and maybe you guys can help answer this.
How many people in the country at that moment do you think
were talking on landlines from one rotary phone to another?
We were wondering if we might be the only ones left.
Do you guys know anybody that still has a rotary phone that uses it?
No. Jim, you do?
Okay. Well, good. All right.
Bernie, how about you?
I have lots of rotary phones, but I don't have a phone line connected to them.
Yeah, you need that, Bernie. You definitely need that.
No question about that.
We concluded that maybe there are some stubborn people out there
that are still using their rotary phones.
But even if you do, the odds of calling somebody else that does that are rather slim.
I think you provided an existence proof for the stubborn people
with still using rotary phones.
What does that mean, existence proof?
I mean, you were the ones.
So you think we were the only ones?
I don't know about the only ones, but it's clear there are at least some
because you were doing it.
Okay. All right. Well, you know, it'd be interesting to find out.
If anyone out there has a rotary phone and uses it on a regular basis
and you call the people who also have rotary phones and use them,
pick up the phone and they're talking on a rotary, I would just like to know.
Why do I want to do that?
Well, I don't know. You don't even have a landline.
No, I don't.
I don't get the relevance of that.
I could maybe hook up a rotary phone to a Bluetooth and talk over it on my cell phone,
but why do I want a rotary phone?
It's just not the same.
What's the advantage?
Well, there's no advantage to it.
But the phone is probably better quality than anything more modern
and it probably will last longer.
I mean, I'm talking about telephones from the 1940s that still work perfectly today.
Well, the technology hasn't changed at all.
Yeah, except good luck using a phone that's only five years old today.
They tend to fall apart a lot quicker and the quality is not nearly as good.
No, I meant for the landline phones.
The technology hasn't really changed.
The switching technology has changed,
but the way that you actually connect to the phone network hasn't changed.
Well, it depends.
I mean, obviously you have to use some kind of a phone, not a VoIP phone company.
You have to use something that uses the actual wires from the CO
and you can still have lousy voice quality on a landline.
You can still do it.
You do know that it's digital.
It's analog from you to the CO, but it's digital from the CO to CO.
I'm not anti-digital.
I'm not speaking against digital technology at all,
but I'm saying that we compromise too much on the actual quality.
If you listen to a cell phone call, obviously it's not nearly as good.
It's got nothing to do with it being digital.
It has to do with the bandwidth being so compressed
and so little being allocated to the voice path that it just sounds awful,
but people are used to it, so they tolerate it.
Speaking of phones that nobody uses anymore,
did you see the article I sent about the New York pay phones,
that they're going to replace them?
Well, you know, we talked about this a few weeks ago.
Oh, really?
Yes, we did.
Apparently, they're going to be replacing every single pay phone kiosk.
They actually said this, every pay phone, not kiosk,
just every pay phone will be replaced by some kind of a data terminal.
I kind of doubt it.
I doubt they're actually going to go through and do it to every single pay phone,
but it will be interesting.
I just want to say that I totally love this idea for how horrible it sounds.
I mean, have you ever seen pay phones,
what they look like after they've been on the streets for just five months?
They get beaten, bashed.
You can have touchscreen devices.
No way.
Yes.
Look at our phones.
Our phones are lighting up like crazy.
We didn't even give out the phone number.
Sometimes we give out the phone number and we don't get this many calls.
So, obviously, we're touching upon some sore points here.
People want to talk about phones.
Maybe they're calling us from rotary phones.
That's possible too.
Yes, it's really pretty amazing.
I'd like to read some listener letters
because we have gotten a few.
But, you know, first I want to tell a story
because this is something that happened to me only a few days ago.
If you follow my Twitter account,
you might have seen me going through this living hell.
I was basically just trying to download some music legally.
I do this.
What I do is I buy albums and download them and listen to them.
Does anybody else do that?
Of course.
Yes, I do that.
You pay for them.
Basically, it works.
It can work until it doesn't.
And this is what happened to me.
I was going to Amazon, which is one of the places I go to,
and the album that I wanted to download,
and you know what?
I'm actually going to play some of this right now.
This is the music I was trying to download.
Not exactly top 40,
but this is the music I could not get on Amazon.
For some reason, this album was not there.
Very popular.
It's a Bob Dylan album from the 1970s, I believe,
and I just wanted this album.
No other reason.
It was on the Amazon.co.uk site, though.
You could get it in England.
You couldn't get it in the United States.
It was released in the United States, obviously,
but you couldn't.
I'd have to buy the CD and wait for it to show up
before I could actually listen to the music,
and I wanted something a little faster than that.
Amazon.co.uk would not sell it to me
because I was not in the UK.
I was not allowed to download music from the UK
even if I was willing to pay for it,
and it just struck me as ridiculous.
I said, okay, you know what?
I'm going to play by the rules here.
I could pirate this thing in five seconds
and pay nothing for it,
but I want to pay for it.
I want to download it.
I want to do the right thing.
I started looking all over the place,
and I went to iTunes.
I went to the iTunes store,
and boy, that was a lot of fun
because you can't just buy music on the iTunes store.
You have to log in,
and I logged in with the information that I had,
and apparently I didn't have the right Apple ID,
whatever the Apple ID is,
so I asked, okay, here's my email address.
Well, you can't use that
because that's associated with an Apple ID.
Okay, then what's my Apple ID?
They sent me email after about 30 minutes
saying, here's how to change your password.
Okay, I'll change the password,
but I still need to know the Apple ID
because you won't let me go into the store
to buy the music until I give you that.
I could not get that information out of them.
All they would tell me is I don't have an Apple ID,
and I can't get one because that email address
is already associated with an Apple ID,
so I realized after doing that for about 45 minutes
that this was a complete waste of time,
and I wasn't even assured that the music I got from iTunes
would be DRM-free.
It might only be able to be played on a certain machine,
and then I'd have to access all kinds of other things
to get it to play on a second machine.
All I wanted was the MP3.
It was insane.
It took over an hour just to get this music downloaded,
but eventually, I went to a site called mp3million.com,
and there I found it.
Instead of for $9.99, I found it for $1.07,
and I quickly downloaded it.
I had an account there already.
I hadn't used it in years, and I downloaded it,
and inside of a few minutes, I was listening to it.
And then since I did that, people said,
oh, you know what?
That was a pirate site.
You basically were supporting pirates by doing that,
but how do you know that?
This site has been around for many years,
and just because they're cheaper,
does that mean that they're illegal?
And if they were illegal,
how could they still be up after so many years?
And do we really have to check every single website
that we do business with to see that they are in fact legitimate
and that the money is going to the right places?
Because I bet if we check other sites,
the artists are not getting the money,
and it's not going to the places that we approve of.
So I say if you can find it, then it's legitimate.
And if the place is still around,
it's not up to you to decide this is something
that the record companies endorse or not.
Yeah, I mean, with regards to you not being able to buy it
on the U.S. version of the site,
it's probably because the U.S. version and the U.K. version
are dealing with different record labels or recording groups
that have different deals in terms of what music
you can get in a digital format.
It's the dumbest thing in the world.
I agree.
Why would they restrict people from downloading an album
that's out in this country or any country?
It's ridiculous rules, and it drives people to piracy, for sure.
I don't think that the organization that is granting the license
to Amazon.co.uk is necessarily the same as the one in the U.S.
So the U.S. label, whatever it might be,
has decided, oh, we don't want to allow people to download that.
But then the recording group that represents it in the U.K.
said that it's okay.
It just doesn't make any sense because they lost a customer.
They could have made money.
They probably lost many customers,
and I'm just going somewhere else to get it.
I assume I'm getting it legitimately.
I'm trying to get it legitimately.
It was the only place I could get it
that was not making me jump through hoops.
But this is one reason why people opt for what is simplest
and obviously free sometimes.
Well, these license issues are definitely insane
and have gone on for quite some time, as I'm sure we all know,
whether it's movies or whatnot.
But what I probably would have been very tempted to do
would have been to legally pay while still breaking the license.
Probably would have just thought of using a U.K.-based proxy
and then pay for it.
Yeah, I could have done that, too.
That's a lot more hoops to jump through as well.
It probably would slow things down.
You could have bought the CD
and then pirated it for the instant enjoyment.
Yeah, I could have driven to a store
and gotten it quicker than what I had to go through there.
Yeah, and the thing the record labels
and all these old-school organizations and institutions
that have all these labyrinthine contracts
where you can sell it in the U.K. and not the U.S. or whatever,
none of these entities have really realized
the technological reality of the situation,
which is in this day and age,
the only way to have any control over your content
is to be the best provider of it.
If people want your content and they can't get it from you,
they'll get it elsewhere,
and then you've lost whatever control you had.
See, that speaks to what we've been doing at the magazine
where we just did the whole volume one thing.
We know people can scan things and pass them around,
but we think we do a better job
where we actually make it look good
and we explain what's going on and we make it DRM-free.
And yeah, people want that.
If you do a good job, people will come to you.
And you basically have to make it appealing,
otherwise you're going to lose people.
I'm curious about this distinction you draw
between sites that you don't know where they got the data
and you pay them a dollar
and sites that you don't know where they got the data
and you don't pay them a dollar.
I'm not clear why you think the first is really
in any way superior to the second.
Well, let me ask you.
The sites where I pay $10
and I don't know where they got the content,
how is that any better?
It's not up to me to make that decision.
I think it's up to the consumer to know
where the goods he or she purchases come from.
Okay, how do I find that out?
How do I go to Amazon and say,
where did you get this MP3?
How did they give me that information?
They show you right there
what record label they do business with.
How hard is it to just say what record label it is?
I mean, the other thing is,
Amazon's a huge company subject to US law
and they would get sued
if they were violating the law too much.
As would this other company,
which has been around for years.
I don't see why it's up to me
to prove that they're legitimate.
I don't think it's up to you,
but I don't understand why you think this is
in any way better than just downloading it
for free from somewhere.
Because I'm paying for it
and hopefully the money is going to the right people.
It's not up to me to determine that it is.
What's that, Bernie?
I said, aha.
How much do you...
I mean, I would be willing to bet
that none of the money you paid for that
went to the artist.
Well, how about if I buy it from Amazon?
What would you bet then?
Probably almost as little.
Okay, so what's a consumer to do then?
I mean, it's not up to consumers
to figure out where the money is going.
It's up to the record companies
and the artists to work all that out.
And if somebody is doing something
that is not kosher online,
I assume that the authorities will come after them.
The authorities have not come after MP3 million,
so they must be legitimate.
That's the only assumption that I can make.
And authorities aside,
what your purchase did
when you paid money for that MP3,
is it rewarded the agency or the entity
who was able to provide to you what you wanted?
Exactly.
And they deserve that
because they provided a service
where everybody else was refusing to.
And that's my point.
And maybe, you know,
maybe in this particular case,
they've eliminated middleman
and all that money goes to the artist.
I know that's very unlikely,
but maybe there's more of a chance of that.
Maybe the same amount is going to the artist
because they eliminated the middleman.
Who knows?
Do you believe that?
I don't know.
I don't know.
No, no, no.
But what do you think?
It's not up to me, Mike.
It's not my...
I'm not a lawyer.
I'm not a consumer.
I just want to buy the product, all right?
And if somebody sells it to me
and someone else refuses to sell it to me,
I'm not going to buy it
from the people who refuse to sell it to me, obviously.
But you're an unusually educated consumer.
You must have a guess.
Oh, I wouldn't say that.
So look,
if you go on Craigslist
and someone's selling a bicycle on Craigslist
and it's a fancy bicycle and it costs 50...
Never buy a bicycle on Craigslist.
Because you assume it's stolen.
No.
Because it's 50...
Because I want to ride it first.
Okay, it's a bad example.
If someone's selling a fancy bicycle on Craigslist for $50,
you assume it's stolen
and if you're an ethical person,
you don't buy that bicycle.
Well, first of all,
I'm amazed by how much bicycles sell for these days.
People pay over $1,000 for a bicycle.
I would sooner guess that they're worth about $50,
to be honest.
But I don't know that much
about how much bikes are worth these days.
The point is,
I don't know how much an album
that's 40 years old
is supposed to cost in the first place.
A $1.07 sounds about right, to be honest.
But we've basically programmed ourselves
to believe that $9.99 is fair.
You know what?
$9.99, I can get the CD too.
So how is that fair?
But we accept it.
Maybe someone else has found a solution
where they can sell it for what it's actually worth
and the money actually goes to the right place.
I don't know.
Like I said, it's not up to me.
What if I offer to sell it to you for 10 cents?
Sell what?
Would you suspect that I'm giving those 10 cents
to the artist or not?
Well, I don't know.
Are you offering?
Is that what you're offering me right now?
I already have it, so I don't need it.
Some other album that you want.
I don't know what kind of deal you worked out
with the record companies.
It's not up...
Like I keep saying,
it's not up to me to make that determination.
I'm the consumer, all right?
And if somebody is offering a product
and they've been offering it for years
at a certain price that's much lower
than what everybody else is offering it,
they must have figured something out.
Either that or they're the mastermind of criminals
and nobody can touch them.
But in this day and age
where the U.S. is able to go into any country
and shut down any website,
it seems hard to believe
that these guys are just doing this with impunity.
All right.
Well, you know what?
I'm going to be a little radical here
and say if you're worried
that where your money might be going to
might be stealing from the artist,
how about just not giving money
to these so-called pirates
or including record labels
and go to places where you'll find indie artists
selling their music directly?
Support that
and maybe you'd see the labels wither away
as they realize that their old model
doesn't work anymore
and then you would know
where all your money is actually going.
You know, I would have called Bob Dylan on the phone
and given him the $1.07 directly.
How do I know he's not the one
behind all this in the first place?
I don't know how it works.
I just wanted to listen to the music.
In fact, I'm going to listen to the music again
because, yeah,
now you're all part of the conspiracy
because this might be something completely pirated
that was downloaded illegally,
but we may never know.
How do you determine something like that?
It sounds just like the other one, doesn't it?
Yeah.
Of course, I wasn't able to get the other one,
but I imagine it sounds like this.
Wait to see if the record label contacts you.
They'd have to be able to even prove
that anything was amiss.
But, I don't know, Bernie,
what do you think about all this?
Do you listen to music?
I do.
It's getting very complicated.
It is.
It is definitely much harder to buy music legally
than to just find it for free.
I bought music, paid for it,
and other times when I've been frustrated,
I'll just download it from some site
that has it for free.
Oh, you see, I'd never do that.
I would never do that, Bernie.
That's quite an admission there.
Because I know if I'm downloading for free,
nobody's getting paid anything.
But they're not anyway.
We don't know that.
Unless you can show me books,
how can you prove that no one's getting paid anything?
Well, like Rob said,
the people who provide content period
better than anyone else is where everyone goes.
If you make it easy,
people who are willing to pay will pay.
But if you make it really hard
and have this crazy labyrinth
that one must travel through
in order to get the content,
they'll go elsewhere.
Mike, let me ask you this.
If MP3 Million had charged me $9.99,
would you think that it was legitimate then?
No.
Why?
You just don't like that site?
I've never heard of it before.
I have no way to know if it's legitimate or not.
So because they haven't advertised
and you haven't heard of them,
you assume they're illegitimate.
So what I could do is I could Google them.
I could find out a little bit of information about them.
I don't think that,
and you normally don't think,
that staying ignorant is a great thing to do.
How is it staying ignorant
to simply buy something on the net
without doing all this research
into every single company you do business with?
I mean, that seems like a big waste of time.
We just spent 10 minutes talking about it.
You could have spent one minute Googling them.
You profess to be a journalist.
But I did Google them.
That's how I found them in the first place.
And I find people using them.
And I have not found anybody saying
that they're doing anything illegal in the first place.
So I don't know why we assume
that just because they're not part
of the major record industry
that they're doing something illegal.
They might be the legitimate ones.
The record companies and the big companies
might be the illegitimate ones.
That's my point.
They may also be only legally allowed
to provide the service
to a certain region of the world
to which that license applies.
And you, as someone outside of that region,
much like Amazon wouldn't sell you the track
from the UK,
you may be not actually entitled
to use their license in terms of getting music.
But I did.
And maybe they're down the block from me.
I don't know where they are.
They could be anywhere.
Their business is registered in Cyprus
and the license is from the Ukraine.
Really?
Yes.
You just found this out now on your smartphone?
It's on their website.
Okay.
Well, you know, like I said,
I'm not going to do all this research
every time I buy a damn MP3.
It's a little insane.
And you have to assume,
we've been talking about this for weeks,
how every time the United States
is offended by some website someplace,
they take it down.
Or they have the people sent here to face charges.
This site has been around for years,
so I don't think they're doing anything illegitimate.
Prove me wrong.
But no one has done that yet.
That's my point.
I don't want to spend the whole show on this.
I do want to read some listener letters
and then take some phone calls.
212-209-2900.
I really thought this would only take a minute
to tell the story,
but apparently it's a hot issue.
Okay.
Big fan of the show.
Your discussion about how technology
is sometimes at odds with human interaction
struck a nerve with me.
I'm a dispenser of adult beverages,
in parentheses, bartender,
at a large convention hotel.
Why is everybody in this room on their smartphone?
What are you guys doing?
What's going on here?
We're probably all...
Are you chatting amongst yourselves?
What's going on?
We're probably all doing research
in this MP3 million.
You know what?
That topic's over.
We're moved on to something else.
It's no longer even relevant.
All right.
I continue with this letter here.
I so long for the days
when the bar was a place for people to meet and talk.
It really ties into here, too.
Radio shows used to be like that as well.
It is not uncommon for me
to have every seat filled
with nothing but the house music
to break the silence.
Everybody's busy on their PC or smartphone
giving off an air of do not disturb.
I have seen couples out on a date
ignore each other in favor of these devices.
I would be eternally grateful
if your TV-begone friend,
i.e., Mitch Altman,
would come up with a PC,
tablet, smartphone version.
You know,
the end of humanity is near
when people stop interacting in bars.
Thank you, Tom,
for that amazing letter,
and yes, it's so true.
I should point out
that Mitch's TV-begone
does work on certain MacBooks.
You know,
I kind of feel
that would be presumptuous
turning off people's phones and computers,
but, boy,
it does get annoying
lots of times
when everybody is just lost in that world,
and that's what I was speaking out against last week
with the Google Glass idea
where people would have
this altered reality.
What's the actual phrase?
Augmented.
Augmented reality
where, basically,
you have icons in your field of vision,
and you're communicating with people
that aren't actually in front of you all the time.
It could be in contact lenses.
It could be in Glass.
It doesn't exist yet,
but people seem eager
to jump into that world,
and, you know,
I'll play with it, too,
but I think it's really
a dark place to go
and live your life.
Oh, well,
anyone could build
an electronic begun
if they really wanted to,
but it wouldn't be very nice
because the electronics
basically would never turn back on again.
Okay, another letter.
I love your show.
I'm working on a project
that might interest you.
I'm trying to fix the problem
of e-book licenses
that prohibit legal sharing.
I have found a solution
that aims to satisfy readers
and copyright holders.
I plan to do this in two phases.
In the first phase,
I will create an e-book lending
social network
for public domain works.
Once I have done this,
I will convince authors
and publishers
to adopt a new e-book license
that will allow sharing
of copyrighted e-books
through the site.
My goal is to make
sharing e-books
more like sharing print books.
You can find more details
about how sharing
copyrighted e-books
will work on my
Indiegogo campaign page,
which I don't believe
you gave us the URL to.
If you like the idea,
I hope you'll share the link,
and if you give us the link,
we'll share it.
Thanks to Greg
for sending that out.
His Twitter ID,
maybe you can figure it out
from that,
is our e-book shelf,
and yeah,
this is something
that we've been pushing
as publishers.
We want to see this.
We want to see
people being able
to borrow e-books
just like they can
borrow real books
and basically share information.
Aren't there some schemes
in place already
for libraries to do this?
I don't know the specifics.
There are,
but there's all kinds
of restrictions,
and they have to pay
a lot of money for them,
and they expire,
things that don't happen
with real books.
I wonder if it's cheaper,
though,
than having books
that nobody checks out
for a couple of years.
I don't know.
Again, I'm not a librarian,
so I don't know this kind of thing.
Well, it probably would make sense
to have some sort of expiration date,
just like when you check out
a book from a library,
it's only supposed to be out
for a certain period of time
when you're supposed
to bring it back.
Instead of electronics,
they could easily enforce it.
Can you imagine having
to pay a late fee
on an e-book
that you didn't return on time?
Wow.
That could add up.
All right.
Our phone number is
212-209-2900,
and we'd like to hear
who's out there
and what's on your mind.
Let's take our first phone call.
Good evening.
You're on Off The Hook.
Speak up, please.
Hi.
Okay.
I read a while ago
about during the Vietnam War
that they used water pumps
to get water.
And the ones that had been made
in recent years
right around the war
tended to break down frequently,
and the ones you could
really rely upon
were the ones from the French
colonial years
in the 40s and 50s.
Really hope you're getting
to a point soon.
Well, the point is that...
Thank you.
Earlier, you were talking about
reliability of older equipment.
Ah, okay.
Old equipment.
That's how it ties in.
Yeah.
Well, I wouldn't be that surprised.
Well, look.
Something that was made
50 years ago
and is really flaky
and doesn't last 50 years,
you're not still using.
So sort of by definition,
anything old that you're still using
is pretty long-lived.
Yeah.
Anyway, peace out to everybody there.
Bye-bye.
All right.
Thanks for that.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
This is the engineer.
I wanted to talk about the cell phone.
That's your name, the engineer?
That's my name.
Okay, go ahead.
I want to talk about
the cell phone thing.
A few things.
I don't believe that the bandwidth
of the cell phone
was ever 300 to 4,000.
That's the bandwidth
of a real phone.
The other thing that cell phones
have done to us is,
or I should say
that cell phone companies
have done to us
is they've thrown away
years of ergonomics.
The original telephone
was designed
so a human hand
would work it properly,
and the damn cell phones,
more than I would otherwise accept,
are forcing us
to serve the phone
rather than the other way around.
But I hear babies
are being born
with different shaped heads now
to more suit cell phones.
What, they have a flat spot?
It's getting to that stage.
It's going to happen
in 1,000 years.
Just look at what humans look like
and you'll be amazed.
The other guy that's on the line,
where does he have his info
about the old cell phones
having higher bandwidth?
I know that because
I work in the industry.
I'm talking about
the analog cellular phones,
the old AMS,
the Advanced Mobile Phone System.
Oh, okay.
The fidelity of them
was even better
than the landline instruments.
It was superb.
Better than 400 to 4,000
or whatever,
200 to 4,000?
Actually, the radio channel
they operated on
were 30 kilohertz wide,
FM, wideband FM.
Okay, Bernie, calm down there.
The two might not be related,
but yeah, okay,
I'll accept that,
and then I have
zero knowledge about that.
But in terms of the cell phone itself,
the digital cell phones
that we're now using,
the parameters they've chosen
on the codec
are deliberately horrible
because, as you guys said...
They started out,
but when they started
with digital cell phones,
the codecs gave you
much more bandwidth,
and then they started
squeezing that
to be lesser and lesser.
Did they really?
Yes, they did.
See, if I can open this up
to something else,
I hear the same arguments
with regards to music
where basically
people decry CDs
thinking that they don't
have the same amount
of audio response as vinyl
where, basically,
digital can encompass
all of this,
but it's just not given
that amount
of frequency response.
Am I correct?
It depends on how they cheat.
If you look at
digital television,
leaving aside the problems
that were identified,
and I think it was
Electronics Magazine
about the relative unreliability
of their transmission scheme,
they have the opportunity
to have an HD channel
or multiple channels of lo-fi,
so they go with
multiple channels of lo-fi
or advertising.
Right.
More advertising.
Yeah.
Wrong guys own all the factories,
okay, guys?
It should be us,
and then this wouldn't be
a problem.
But anyway,
and talking about
old equipment,
the other fellow
talked about old equipment,
there seems to be
a U-shaped curve
in the design
of any,
quote,
technology.
I hate that word.
In the beginning,
you're trying to get it
under control.
Then you've got it working,
and you've really
made it high quality.
Look at vinyl records.
Then you start
looking at it
from a profit point of view,
and you say,
how can we shave this off?
How can we cut corners
and make more profit?
So the original records
were shellac.
They had problems.
78.
A lot of noise.
Blah, blah, blah.
Then they got into micro groove.
I have some micro grooves
here to date
from the early 1950s.
Spectacular frequency response
and all of that stuff.
They were actually made well.
Then they started degrading,
degrading.
Then they introduced
the floppy vinyl.
The floppy vinyl
is actually cheaper
to introduce,
so it was higher quality.
And you actually
make higher quality sound.
Then they started
cutting back,
cutting back,
and then it was
decreasing in quality.
They did the same thing
with CDs.
Original CDs
had problems
with lousy 80D converters,
blah, blah, blah.
They may have sounded harsh.
I only hypothesized this
from other people's writings.
I didn't check it myself.
But then you get
to the middle ground,
the middle period.
The CDs are going to be
higher quality because,
I mean, look,
the engineer is working.
They want to make good quality.
They have the best 80Ds,
blah, blah, blah.
And what's going to happen next
is they're going to start
cutting back
or have already.
MP3s, terrible,
in a related way,
are cutting back.
By the way, gentlemen,
I need people
to do this experiment.
I haven't had time
to do it myself.
I will.
I've been experimenting
with the Lame Freeware MP3 encoder,
and I've been making MP3s
of the indie band
that I work for
because we put them
on the website.
Somebody has to do it.
It's me.
Lame allows you
to check for clipping
in the waveform.
The algorithm apparently
goes into clipping,
especially when you reduce
the bitrate of the MP3.
In experiments I did so far,
with a waveform
that was not loud enough
in the original waveform,
it was an old school
CD transcription
of an old hippie rock band,
and so they didn't record
their songs
with a lot of compression.
It wasn't high level
in the master tape.
And so I had no clipping detected.
And then I took the MP3,
decoded it again,
and compared it
to the original file
looking to see
how much distortion was there.
While the distortion
was 40 dB down,
it wasn't that bad.
And it isn't bad enough,
my hypothesis,
to explain what I hear
when I listen to a commercial MP3,
and I go,
gee, that sounds really harsh
around the edges.
So I'm thinking
it might be clipping,
because nobody I know,
including all the guys
in the studios
that I go to work in,
when they make an MP3
off their thing,
they never once
go through the iterations
to find what Lame does
that the algorithm is clipping.
So we have to check this out.
It may very well be
that the reason commercial MP3s
sound as bad as they do
is because the original material
goes through
a hard knee limiter, right?
You always try to
make your master tape sound loud,
so you push it up to the edge,
and you can see it
in a way that you see
has a solid block of color
in most commercial recordings.
That will cause
the MP3 algorithm to clip,
even in the very best,
but certainly in the lower grades
that they sell you.
And so what you really
may be objecting to
is not the actual distortion
of the algorithm
or the compression algorithm,
much as I hate it,
you may be objecting to
the clipping introduced
by a lousy production
of the MP3.
Interesting.
Well, listen, we do want
to look into that,
and that's something fascinating.
You raise a number
of very good points.
But we do have to move on.
But thanks for that call,
and please stay in touch
and let us know
what you find out.
I really have to question
this claim that the Amps cell phones
were somehow awesome audio quality.
Anyone who ever used one
can tell you how staticky
they were in all but
the best circumstances.
They were incredibly expensive
to use and run
because the capacity
of the network
was not very high.
Expensiveness doesn't enter
into the voice quality,
though, does it?
Maybe they were more expensive, yes.
But the quality of an Amps cell phone
was not very good,
like in all but
the best circumstances.
If you take away the static...
Which you can't do!
Well, if you have a good connection,
I imagine you don't have static, correct?
When you actually are
talking to somebody
and hearing their voice...
I don't know,
I never had an Amps phone.
Bernie, you had an Amps phone, correct?
I had many of them,
and when you had
decent signal quality,
it was far and above
better than what we have today.
Also, we have no time
to go into it,
but when you get into
the subject of professional
album mastering today
versus years ago,
look up The Loudness War
on a web search or Wikipedia.
It's a huge subject
and various reasons...
By the way, just to further
touch upon the whole
MP3 controversy thing
that we're talking about tonight.
You know,
I've heard it said many times.
My ears are not that sensitive,
but I do notice a difference
that MP3s are maybe
a tenth the quality
of what you would get on a CD.
Yet, somehow,
we pay the same for MP3s
as we do for buying a CD.
So, when I find a site
that's a tenth the price,
maybe I'm paying the right amount.
I don't know.
Well, yeah,
I just want to jump in
a little pet peeve of mine,
this whole HD thing.
With audio,
it's called Hi-Fi,
not HD.
That's all.
All right.
Let's take one more phone call.
Good evening.
You're on Off The Hook.
Hi.
Radio off.
Hello.
Yes, go ahead.
Yeah, I wanted to open up
a new wound.
I was hoping we were going to hear
a little more about
Richard and Julia O'Dwyer.
I was hoping to call that at night
and ask,
why would Britain send
a whole flotilla of ships?
They lost the Antelope,
the Sheffield,
the Sir Galahad,
all to protect 50 citizens
and 2,000 citizens
on South Georgia Island.
What?
What are we talking about here?
We're making a direct comparison
of the O'Dwyers
to what has happened in 1982.
It started in April,
and it was a very gigantic
and bloody war.
It was called
the Falkland Islands.
Yeah, no, I'm familiar with it.
Okay, well,
I don't know if we have time
to draw these parallels.
Do you want to tackle this one?
Mike, you look very perplexed.
I'm having trouble figuring out
the parallels
between the Falkland-Smolvina situation
and the O'Dwyer case,
but I can tell you that
when there is news in that case,
we will be happy to provide it.
Yes, and there is no new news
as far as we know,
but we will check into that.
And you can always listen
to our interview
with Julia O'Dwyer,
who's battling having her son
extradited to the United States
for crimes that aren't even crimes
where he lives.
But regardless,
we are out of time now.
Please write to us,
othat2600.com.
We'll be back again next week
with all kinds of other fun,
exciting conversation.
And this outro, by the way, Mike,
was downloaded from a big company,
so you should be happy.
There was sad killing time
in June as we pleased
Then a computer virus came along
Blew in like a breeze
But for too long
We had a sad old tale of news
Our computer was corrupted
By the hard drive crash blues
So we wrung our heads
Cried a lot
We cried a lot
We cried a lot
So we wrung our heads
Cried a lot
We cursed and we screamed
Until we realized
I dismayed
This wasn't a dream
Me oh my
This was sure
Our turn to lose
Our computer was corrupted
By the hard drive crash blues
So we called them up
The company said
We weren't the style
They said you're really dumb
So never like
To back up your files
Ooh so smooth
They never gave us
A choice to choose
We get to live
With our computer
With the hard drive crash blues
So we wrung our heads
Cried a lot
We cried a lot
We cried a lot
So we wrung our heads
Cried a lot
We cried a lot
We cried a lot
So we wrung our heads
Cried a lot
We cursed and we screamed
Until we realized
I dismayed
This wasn't a dream
Me oh my
This was sure
Our time to lose
Our computer was corrupted
By the hard drive crash blues
Oh me oh my
A sad old tale of news
Lord have mercy
Lord have mercy
It was just our time to lose
Our computer was busted
With the hard drive crash blues
In the preceding program
Off the Hook was brought to you live
With portions on recording
We were just discussing off the air
What would happen if they could
Extradite any number of us
To countries where certain things are illegal
But quite legal where we happen to live
Boy, would things get interesting
Okay, let's have an I.D.
And then the personal computer show
Got questions about your computer?
Uh-huh
Well, I'm interested in drugs
Yeah
Well, how about that?
Yeah
Yep, yes indeed
WBAI's little computer does it again
Let's try this one
No, not that one either
Doesn't that work?
Hey, you guys are computer geniuses
What the hell is wrong with our stuff over here?
Yeah, other than it's poorly maintained
About 15 years old
And never has been cleaned out
Other than those facts
Those don't count
No, no
Cindy, Cindy
You know how we can fix that problem?
How?
Let's have a fundraiser
Yeah, we're going to have one
In about a half an hour, I'm given to understand
Wait a minute, wait a minute
It's now 8 o'clock
No, I don't think
No, it's not
It's 42, 43, 44
Yeah, we've got a few more seconds to waste
Before we can
Well, we can waste them
No
We don't have more than one fundraiser an hour
That's true, that's true
In fact, back in the bullpen
Some of the engineers were sitting around
Biting our nails and whatever we do
And, ah, two seconds
Anyway, we just discovered
There's going to be a fundraiser
Before we know it
You're tuned to WPAI in New York
And we're here next to a personal computer show
Which is on right now
There you go, see?