Brooklyn for Peace and World Can't Wait present Whistleblowers and Surveillance, a panel event
Monday, April 21st, 7 to 9 p.m. at The Commons, 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn.
Join panelists from World Can't Wait, Stop Mass Incarceration Network, and Arab American
Association of New York to explore questions of surveillance from Edward Snowden to our
own communities.
That's Monday, April 21st, 7 to 9 p.m. at The Commons, 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn.
For more information, check brooklynpeace.org.
And you're listening to radio station WBAI-New York.
The time is 7 o'clock.
Time once again 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.
Bundledly bound for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Bundledly bound.
And a very good evening to everybody.
The program is Off the Hook.
Emanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening, joined tonight by Kyle.
Hi, how's it going?
Bernie S.
Greetings from Pennsylvania.
And our good friend, Jason Scott.
Wonderful to be here.
You may know Jason from such organizations as Archive.org.
And, well, just somebody who has made a number of documentaries about the hacker world and
computers in the past, Get Lamp and the BBS documentary.
And you're always working on something.
I'm always working on something.
Because as we only get so much time on this earth, might as well fill it with fun.
Absolutely, absolutely.
And speaking of fun, I understand both you and Bernie participated in the same fun this
past weekend at the Vintage Computer Festival.
Is that correct?
Yep.
We went to the Vintage Computer Festival in, I guess you would call it, Wall Township,
New Jersey.
And it's a two-day, actually now a three-day event.
They have a day of workshops and then two days of exhibits and talks.
There's more vintage computers than ever now.
It is crazy how they go about it.
They really put their all into it.
There's also this Marconi Wireless Museum that has room upon room of some mainframes,
some minis, some micros, even electronic games.
Lots of people, dozens and dozens and dozens of people were there.
And I swum around mostly on Saturday and saw Bernie.
We bumped into each other, hung out in front of some great stuff.
And, you know, I can't really, I can't say enough good things about the retro-computing
people who really put their heart into it.
You got people coming from other countries or from across the country with stuff to show.
In fact, I should say that there's another one coming up.
If you live in the Georgia area, the Vintage Computer Southeast is going to be held on
March 4th and 5th, I believe, in Atlanta, Georgia.
So these things are put together by volunteers.
There's no umbrella organization.
They are just assembling some amazing exhibits and talks.
And it's well worth going to.
And there were some good talks at ECF 9.1 in New Jersey last weekend.
One of the more interesting speakers was Jason Scott.
I heard about this.
I heard that there was some issue with the wind or something.
Do you want to explain that to anybody who might have been there, Jason?
So they've had me speak in a couple of rooms, and I'm a loud person.
And the idea was they wanted to expand out their space.
So what they did was they rented a tent, and they put it out in the yard near the building.
And in theory, this should mean that you have much more control.
But it was a windy day, and so the tent was blowing flaps.
And so there was a revival sense about it.
It was a windy day, and I was loud as anything.
And I've listened to the recording of myself, and I sound absolutely high.
And I didn't mean to, but, man, I'm like, I love this stuff so much.
And I'm just very excited.
And they're clapping and cheering, and it was crazy.
This brings back memories of Oum Roop Radio in the Netherlands at Oum last year,
where we were doing radio.
In fact, we did an edition of Off the Hook that has not ever aired in this country,
but will air on our website in a few weeks.
More details on that later.
But we were inside a tent, too, and the wind started howling and blowing,
and the tents were flapping in just the exact same way.
We can certainly identify with that.
So they had that, and I was followed up by one of the guys behind the Franklin,
which was an Apple clone that got punched around by Apple,
got into a lawsuit over whether or not they could have the equipment be that way.
And he was a really nice guy as well.
And there's all sorts of people who were there,
and you might not even, like, co-designer or designer of the Commodore 128.
There's a whole range of people where, unless you're introduced and told who they are,
you have no idea some of the giants of this organization.
So, you know, it's weird because they're tech celebrities,
but they're still celebrities to me.
Absolutely.
Hey, James, do you have a minute to talk a little bit about what you talked about at BCF?
I'm happy to do that.
Am I clear? Is my microphone working? Is everything good?
I think we're clear, yes.
All right.
In summary, I work at the Internet Archive, which is at archive.org.
A lot of people know about it because it's got the Wayback Machine.
That's the place you go to when you discover your website is gone
or a website you cared about was gone.
And it's the dream of a guy named Brewster Kahle
who took the millions he made in the dot-com era
and set up a library for the people.
No banner ads, no interstitials, no special client to download.
You can go there and he's put up millions of books
and tens of thousands of movies.
And some time ago when he hired me, he said,
you know, we've done really good with our web crawling
and our books and our movies and stuff,
but we haven't done well with software.
Could you do something about it?
And that was three years ago.
And I have put up a lot of software,
thousands and thousands of CD-ROMs
and computer manuals and magazines and documentation.
And we wanted to take it further,
which is I think what you're referring to here.
And we've actually, two years of work,
have revealed something called the JS MESS emulator.
And if your audience is aware of the MAME emulator,
which is the arcade emulator,
they might not know that there's a second emulator
that goes with it called MESS
and it stands for Multi-Emulator Super System.
It can emulate, to varying degrees,
1,600 computer platforms.
Everything from a PDP-1 to an Atari 800
to all sorts of consoles.
Really powerful thing.
And I had this idea for,
you should be able to run it
without going out and downloading the program
and finding ROMs and making things work.
So with the help of a set of really great volunteers,
we have ported it to JavaScript,
which sounds horrifying, but it actually works.
And so it is possible at the Internet Archive
to see a historical piece of software.
Let's say Azalkabath,
which was one of the first role-playing games
for microcomputers made by the creator of Ultima.
Click on a button and suddenly you're playing it
just in your browser at full speed.
And it's a full-working Apple II.
And so we've tried to do for software,
the experience of software,
what we've done with movies and music,
which is there's a button, you press it,
you're watching a movie or listening to music.
And we're just on the opening salvo of this.
You know, it's not perfect.
It's pretty interesting.
But I think over time,
that is how the vast majority of people
will experience software,
is as an embeddable object to say,
and here's this thing running.
And it's been quite an adventure.
So, you know, I'm still working
with a lot of different groups
to get off of aging and dying magnetic media
and make it available on the Internet Archive.
And again, this is,
people who've known me for the years,
I've done all sorts of things,
but this is my full-time job and it's a fantastic one.
I was going to mention, Jason,
over the years you have probably saved
so many relics of our history.
Geocities, for instance.
Just that alone is a monumental achievement.
But what are some of the other things
that you've stood up and said,
this cannot be allowed to die?
Because what really happened for me
was that at the time of the bulletin board system era,
so I was born in 1970,
so 81, 82, 83,
you know, I've tried to spend some time
trying to figure out what happened here
and I think it was that my parents got divorced
when I was still in single digits.
And so I had a real sense of
not everything's going to stick around.
Like a lot of people, they don't get that lesson
until their 20s, their 30s,
they lose something close to them.
I learned it very young.
And so when I started these bulletin board systems,
these dial-up bulletin board systems,
I saved copies of everything I found
because I knew it might not be there
and I was right.
And so when the web started,
I thought, people need to see this.
So I took all of this stuff
that I had saved in the 80s
and put it up in the 90s.
And whether I wanted it to or not,
that site, which is textfiles.com,
has gone on to be this institution.
I have people who go to college
who have always known
that there was this site they could go to
to get all these hundreds and hundreds of files.
And stuff you've done, right?
I mean, stuff you've done 30 years ago.
Although I don't know how you do it being 39.
But the site
is all of this
hacker and technical history
and I think it brought value
to something that was otherwise thought disposable.
And I've just,
once I got hired by Internet Archive,
I've just ramped that up by 1,000.
So grabbing old manuals
and grabbing old books
and grabbing old materials
that might be transient
or thought of as ephemera
or otherwise irrelevant,
get up there and become accessible
and people can make the choice
over whether or not it's useful.
I think it's very important
to bridge that air gap.
Once it's online, we can decide it's good
as opposed to deciding before we ever try.
What would you recommend?
We found a milk crate
filled with 5 1⁄4 floppy disks.
We don't know what's on it.
We don't even know how to read it
because computers these days
don't have floppy disks.
What would you recommend for somebody
who might find a pile of these someplace?
So let's go with just floppy disks, right?
With cassette tapes,
you can turn them into a WAV file.
You can digitize them right off with a microphone
and you'll probably get the data.
And I also apologize to some archivist out there
who just snapped their pencil in their hands
hearing me come up with a
easy-bake version of archiving.
It's a very big professional process.
But I can assure you
that there's a couple products out there,
FC5025,
the Disk Ferret,
there's a couple others
whose names are escaping me
this exact moment, I'm sorry.
And these products
basically allow you
to connect
an old floppy disk
to your modern machine
through USB and suck all
of the data off of it, like a magnetic
recording. And we can actually use those
in emulators or even to blow
out new copies to
new old stock floppy disks if you want to.
I'm actually surprised by the number
of vintage people who I talk to who their first
question is, can I write it back out again?
And I'm like, what?
We're saving it.
It's like having a building on fire and being told,
so when can I move back in?
It's like, wait, wait, dude, building's on fire.
But it's actually not that hard.
There's actually a couple products that if you
have the old system, will enable
you, there's a beautiful one for Apple II
it's called ADT, Apple
Disk Transfer, that
I swear to God, this is the most
hackery thing I've ever heard.
You hook it in through the audio in the
cassette in port of an Apple II,
you play this WAV file,
it reads it like a program,
it turns the Apple into a disk reading
client that then can push through
the serial port out the
data to a client on your machine.
You start with a WAV file
and you end up getting floppies off of your old
machine. So there's some amazing work
out there. People, I think, have come around
to recognizing this has value
but we're really on the cusp.
Well, it's also just history.
Whether it has value or not is something that should be preserved.
We save our written material over the
millennia. It's something
that pictures or audio or video
or just words
should at least make it a couple of decades.
Oh, I call it the sideways value proposition
which is, you know, if you take a Civil War
letter and it's a guy writing back to his
wife just saying, hey, how you doing? Hope the cows
are okay. That's fine. A person
might go, well, who cares? It was a guy and his cows.
But that paper that it was written on
may be from a company that claimed it never
gave paper
or supplies to that side in the war
or he might be writing it
using a pen that has ink that we might not even
recognize as being used at
that time. Or there could be a secret message in there.
Or a secret message or it could turn out that that
person was actually
somebody really huge writing under a pseudonym.
I mean, that's why
I'm such a big fan of you preserve it first
let the next generation
find if there's value and so
you know, we're not
Go ahead, Bernie.
I'm sorry to interrupt. I just want to say that all those
five and a quarter inch floppies you found there in the
2600 warehouse, they may be left over from your
old Heath Zenith
Z100 computer. Well, as long as you brought
that up, yes, the Zenith
Z100 computer that we've also been
trying to restore, you know,
that computer predated
a mouse, but
it turns out it was stored in a garage for
a few years at least.
There was a mouse actually living inside it
when we opened it up. Oh, yeah, excellent.
That came to it.
I don't know if we're going to get that computer running again.
It would be nice if we did. You think, Kyle, we can do that?
Yeah, we salvaged
it and I mean, it's in
good shape. I opened it up and looked at it
and we're probably going to try to get some gentle
compressed air to blow the mouse
habitat out
and then very carefully
power things, but it's in
pretty bad shape, but it's still around
and most of the components
look pretty good. They're just
covered in stuff. You think that's good, really?
Wow. They've been through
a lot. I'm sorry?
Worst case, you can emulate it through
the MESS that Jason was just
describing. You get the data off those
disks using one of those hacker
devices you can buy.
You can actually read that data
and run those programs virtually
online using
the MESS. But first, can I get into the 40MB hard
drive that's in there? And I think there might be a password
attached to that, but I'm sure we can get past that.
40MB is a Miley Cyrus single now.
I know.
Back then, the biggest hard drive
before that was 10MB for me.
And it was much bigger. And it's a funny thing,
that Z100 ran on two floppies
at first. We took out one of the floppies
and put a hard disk in. And then the
faceplate didn't have a hole where the
little red light was. We actually drilled a hole so we could
see the hard drive flashing because that's
half the fun of having a hard drive.
Exactly. To know when it's writing
and to be blown away by the space and everything else.
I mean,
this actually brings up something which is of relevance
to me, which is I'm a really
big fan of getting a tape recorder or
Audacity and recording the stories.
Because, you know, let's say
you have
an unfortunate episode in the next
week or something. If we were to pull that machine
out, we'd have the machine. But we wouldn't have
the story. We wouldn't have the story of
why you used that, drilling
holes in it, what it felt like
to get it. That's why I like to get down
the stories of the people. That's why I do the documentaries
is because, yeah,
great, you have a stick.
But you don't know
anything about the man who walked with that stick
through the woods and what he saw and what he believed
in. All you know is, yeah, he wore the stick down
a little bit. Looks like he was left-handed.
Looks he got a little paint
on it. And I'm
so huge on the human side,
the stories, more than the
artifacts. I mean, the artifacts are important.
Stories are huge. Absolutely.
One thing, pet peeve, actually, since we're on this
subject, but we won't stay on it for very much longer.
With those old computers
that had two floppy drives,
it was always A drive
and B drive. To this day,
PCs, that is,
have C drive as the default.
No floppy attached. A and B
are still reserved for a floppy. That will never exist.
Doesn't that bug you?
It doesn't bug me in the same
way that we still use the phrase
carriage return or return
for a key because
that tells you that
the paper is going to be
put up one line and that the
printer head is going to move to the left
again for you to start writing again.
And it is
just a part of our
world. And we're getting up on 40, 50
years now it's been around. It's
referring to a piece of equipment. I mean,
literally, it's like when, you know,
mind your P's and Q's,
just stuck around
and people don't even know it's about
fonts or typefaces
or anything. It's just a word.
And so, you know, it's buried down
there and we still use it. Return
to
move the cursor.
One of the very first
terminals I used was a deck writer.
An actual hard copy terminal.
And it would beep as you got to the end of the line
just like a typewriter will ring a bell to say
hit carriage return, stupid, because otherwise
you're going to type over your own letters.
And when they printed out
programs, they'd be beeping all the time because
they'd be getting to the end of the column
and returning on their own.
So that's a memory that I hadn't thought of
in quite a while. That's what I do.
I swim through a fog of nostalgia
and memories for people.
And it's a nice fog. It's very friendly.
You could have had your
hands on some deck writers at the Vintage
Computer Festival. There were some models of
deck writers I'd never even touched before
that were there and it was
really cool. So next year you've got to come.
Well, you're assuming I want deck writers.
I've had deck writers. I've been on deck writers
a lot and I'm past that
phase, I think. But I do want to preserve them.
I just don't want to be the one that has them
taking up all my space.
That's the point, Emmanuel. You walk in, you go
I used to have those. And then you get to
leave.
You get to walk away.
That's good. Hey, Mike joins us.
Welcome.
It's true. I can't listen
and talk at the same time today.
You seem to have headphones that are plugged in over here
but the microphone's all the way over there. How did you
work that out? I don't know. Can you plug
the headphones in over there, maybe?
I don't believe there's any jacks over here.
We really want to
thank the kind folks at WHCR
for this studio, which we
overstayed our welcome at already, but it's
a bit of an odd setup. I do
like it, though. It's very nice. How did you do it last
week? You weren't doing that. You weren't spread
across two tables like you are now. I was
using a different microphone.
Okay.
Anyway,
in addition to the things that we're talking to Jason
about, as far as archives and things like that,
there is some breaking
news that you probably might have heard about, and that is
this Heartbleed security
flaw. We've all gotten
memos about this. Apparently it's
a massive
security hole infecting open
source encryption technology.
I guess if you don't use encryption,
you don't have anything to worry about. If you do,
then this is something to be
a little worried about. Go ahead, Mike.
That's something I want to be careful about.
I think the takeaway here is not
don't use encryption. If you don't
use encryption, you're worse off.
This is an attack
on encryption. It degrades the value
of the encryption. People
might be able to get data out of servers you
use, but the solution is not
to transmit everything in the clear and just
give the NSA or whoever
else direct access.
Obviously. This
affects sites that
if you use HTTPS in the
URL bar
and you enter a password after that
point, then you might have something
to be concerned about. Is that
the takeaway here?
If you transmit any data
over HTTPS or
if you connect to a server over HTTPS
that has data.
This is a really
strange bug, but basically
it allows the person
who's trying to get data out of
the server to basically get a random
chunk of the server's
memory. It might be
the password of the last person to
connect. It might be the encryption key itself
so that you can get
all the data coming through the server.
It might be
it could be anything. That's what's
so strange about this, so frightening
about it. Anything that's gone through the web server
if you're connecting on the web
anything that's gone through the email server
if you're connecting over the email
it's really quite bad.
I think it's 64 kilobytes.
I mean
as a historian I'm kind of fascinated
on the way that we've
this is like finding out
that probably
all meat products
are infected with something
and people are just in this
weird fog here, these
48 hours
afterwards where people are like
yeah I heard it's bad
and people were up really
late last night working on stuff
and is everything okay and it's like
yeah there's not much you can do
as a lay person
you can't, this isn't like
you know, oh you know double check
your write protect tab or
be sure that your phone is covered or
try to turn off your phone when you're near a washing machine
I mean this is, it's a pretty
fundamental flaw and we have
people whose job all
day is to make sure that
if a problem arises like this
to fix it and it just
has to kind of filter through the
infrastructure and we're just
discovering how big the
infrastructure is
and it's just, but like I said
for a lot of people it's just they don't know what
it's like getting into a plane, I don't know how
this thing works, it's probably going to be fine
Well the thing is if you're a user
of a site there really isn't anything you
can do, if you run a site
if you run a server then you need to
upgrade to the patched version of OpenSSL
that's my understanding, if
you change your password on
a site that has not yet done that you're not really
accomplishing anything, so
I guess it's up to you to make sure that
whatever site you are using
has done this and of course they should be
notifying their users
But the problem is
now you get to see how nimble certain
organizations are with this, some of them are like
they're going to have to issue a statement
we're going to see a lot of really boring
look we love you, we want you
to know this is a problem but we're working
on it and it's going to be very
you know hand-holdy in some cases
and weird in others and I think
people are going to have fun with this for the next six months
but it's what happens
you have a homogenous system
I mean that's the thing, I mean if you
a lot of things are fundamental to
the internet and it's rare
to have something this bad
happen
and watching the internet deal with it
like an infection, it's lying in bed with
the thermometer going like
this one's a bad one
you know
It's been a bad year though
we would like to say it's really rare
for something this bad to happen
but there's been a lot of them this year
there was a flaw in GNU TLS
which is the one you use if you don't use OpenSSL
there's been a flaw in Apple
and this and that and the other
I can't even keep track of them all
I don't know what we can do about it
but to say this is exceptional
this is exceptionally bad
even amongst the other ones I mentioned
but to say that this is
somehow
the only one of its kind ever
is not true
I think what it is, if I had to define why it strikes me
it's like a fire truck on fire
you know
it's like
a compromised security protocol
it's like a flawed
you're using it because
you think this is the more protective one
but it's got a problem
that
welcome to the new reality
we depend on these networks
and we do our best to make them
as good as we can and we will continue to do that
and this
also gets kind of thrown in the mix
with a lot of the leaks and things we found out
about what the US government
is doing via the NSA
and stuff like that
there were rumors about some of these things
already being understood
or the NSA deliberately
weakening the protocols
as they're at inception
stuff like that
yeah no
people gotta spend the summer now
they gotta come up with better
overarching conspiracies
because we've already proven out a couple
now
we've got the national government
doing all these crazy things
and now we gotta come up with something even better
most people who see encryption as the enemy
who don't want people to be
protecting themselves
i.e. NSA and other government agencies
they must be kind of happy right now
because of all the confusion
and people maybe suspecting that
encryption really isn't all that
and maybe I just won't bother anymore
right
certainly you can start to come up with nightmare scenarios
like if someone's captured a bunch of your packets
and they run this
and by luck they happen to get private keys
maybe they can start to go through those old things
but that's kind of what
places like the NSA do anyway
which is they capture a bunch of traffic
and then over time they attack it
even if they have to go back a bunch of years
so I mean that isn't new to me
but just the idea that
it brings up to the
it's like when the power goes out
and we discover that oh they've been overloading
the circuits for three years and nobody's been discussing
it because it's not sexy
enough to get attention
well interesting as far as the time factor
they say researchers discovered it last
week and they published their findings
Monday but
the problem has been around for more than two years
right
it's been a good run for somebody
I mean every time one of these things
would get announced I just try to imagine some guy
in some grey office
you know in some
cubicle going
project bluebird
that was a good one
they know about it now
they say any communications that took place over SSL
in the past two years could have been subject to
malicious eavesdropping
wow
well I wonder if we'll see any
fallout from that
in the years ahead
yeah
anything else
Jason how about some of the films you've been working on
so I finished a film last year
on the Defcon hacking conference
called Defcon the documentary
some of which we shot at Hope actually
ironically
and it was a
one year project where I had a crew
of six and we filmed everything
we could at the
20th Defcon hacking conference
they paid for it
and I
put it out and they immediately
put it up on a torrent for free so it's out there
if you look for Defcon the documentary
it's just an overview of
what that thing is like after 20 years
so it was a fun
side project to work on for a year
but now I'm back to my main three
which are
6502 documentary about
the chip
that's in progress
that is in progress
6502 arcade
and tape
I was going to talk about the ones you've done
but you're working on three separate
films right now
let's start with the ones you've done
you've done the BBS documentary
BBS the documentary came out in 2005
that's a 8 episode 5.5 hour series
on the dial up bulletin board system
and the reason I did it was because
in 2002 I realized
we hadn't gotten
any documentaries on bulletin boards
so I thought I should make the last one
and so I shot
this thing over four years
and put it out
for what it is
it's done very well people tend to like it
it's got a lot of interesting people in it
I finished that and I thought
well that was obscure but not obscure enough
what can I do so I made a movie about
text adventures
games that were really popular in the late 70s
and early 80s where you were given
a line of text and asked
what do you want to do next
and that was just such an eye opener
for people with computers back then
I didn't think a computer could take the story
and work with you
that's one of my first memories of a computer
playing adventure, going east, you're in a forest
various things like that
things that still to this day
captivate the imagination
and so I wanted to capture both
the interesting approach to writing
at that time but also how important they were
to the games industry
and the beginnings of what we think of as
computer games
so I worked on that for about
it came with a gold coin
for a few years
which I still get people who show me their
coins, they keep it in their wallets
and so that
went very well and then I finished that
and I thought okay, I like making these
but I don't want to be
in my 60s making films about things I did
when I was a teenager
I don't want to
so I did a kickstarter and said
hey, if you guys fund me
I will work on three
I put up the names of the three
got funded and I've been
shooting for the last few years
with this small break for Defcon
and it's been going well
You took a break to make another film?
I know, it sounds terrible
while also running all the stuff for the Internet Archive
while also doing a bunch of other things
How many of you are there really?
Well that's the thing
since I used to have a job in IT
and those wonderful people
my co-workers who had to deal with
disappearing for a week and a half
to go work on something
I left that
and went to work for the Internet Archive
and now every single
waking moment I'm doing something I want
to do and it's a wonderful life to have
and a lot of it is aimed at
history, getting these stories down
getting artifacts, being that
bridge where a person goes
wow, this history has value
I should bring these
magazines here, I should get
this old film and I get letters
every day from someone who's like
I got like 25 things I had when I worked
somewhere 30 years ago
do you want them? And I'm like yes
I always answer yes and as a result
I have a shipping container in my backyard
full of yes
and I've been sorting through them and scanning
them and just doing all the work you do
and it's been wonderful
and it's a wonderful life
and so sometimes people will
buttonhole me and talk to me for like
30 minutes about their Apple 2
but I love it because it means
that they feel that connection too
with this machinery
and the people they knew and the fact
that they found somebody who will understand
what they mean when they say oh and the quarter
track cracking was so intense
and I couldn't, I'm like yeah I'm glad to be
that person so it's a great
life, I'm a very happy person
So tell us about the films
So
let's start with
6502, so the 6502
chip is the one that was in
the Apple 2, it was in the Atari 800
and 400, a version of it
was in the 2600
there was
one of the Nintendos had it
cars had it
some pacemakers have it
it's a relatively simple
programmable chip
you program it in machine language
and it's been a ubiquitous part
of our culture and life
many of us don't even know it existed
and it included the skill of machine language programming
which is becoming a lost art
to some extent and I want to do a film
on the people who made it
a film on
you know
how it shows itself now
on what programming is
and everything else, you know the human side
of this chip and using the chip
as the
basis of it and believe it or not
I have gotten some static from people who are like
I'm trying out the Z80
and I'm like I don't know what to tell you
I'm sorry, I gotta choose
I went with the 6502 Z80
you gotta do the rebuttal
I was gonna ask about the 8088
exactly, there you go
everyone's got their favorite chip
so
but Jason, I just want to say
you bring up an interesting point
back in the late 70's
when a lot of us got involved
maybe early 80's
there were these different camps
who were all fans of this one
microprocessor whether it was the 6502
or the 6800
or the 8080 or the Z80
or the 8085
the 1802
it was a CMOS microprocessor by RCA
and we all had these
cultures around this one
chip. Some of us got tattoos too
I don't know
I didn't have a CMOS
I didn't have a Cosmac tattoo
it was an interesting time
and they were not compatible with each other
so it was
just an interesting era
with all these subcultures surrounded by
around a particular microprocessor
you had to pick one and that was a good one to pick
the 6502
so for me it was
the 6502 in many ways
was like the most
it just has the softest
edges because it got pulled into
so many consumer grade hardware
things that were also huge
promoters of the idea of computing
obviously Z80s did it as well
especially in Europe
everyone's got a piece of this history
so the movie is kind of about
that but it's also secretly about
the idea
of what these chips are and everything else
so that's the 6502
I'm doing a documentary on the medium
of tape that means audio video
and data tape
and everything from video stores
up through to mixed culture
and so on
just trying to capture this medium
because the medium is
if not on it's way out it's becoming heavily specialized
it's becoming
certain groups use it
but it's almost nowhere
in terms of where it used to be
in terms of ubiquity
so I wanted to capture that especially because
in some ways it's a lossy format
and older magnetic tape
and I wanted to capture that
so the tape documentary is ongoing
and the other big one is arcades
and that's a weird one
because people go you know Jason
there's been arcade documentaries
why are you doing it
and I'm like well we've done it on arcade games
we've done players
but we've very rarely done it on the space
of the arcade
the idea of here's this black box
we put machines in
and people pay money to have fun with them
and we go all the way back to the Mechanical Turk
and I go all the way up to people
who have built arcades in their homes
and why do you think this is a place you need
in your home and what does that mean
and so that one's almost
filming itself it turns out arcade culture
is pretty easy to track down and I've been in some
pretty crazy arcades
and talked to some really amazing
people so
you're going to ask about a release date I know you are
I don't know I really want
the first of them to come out next year
I want a lot of things in life
do you find you're filming all three at the same time
talking to people about these three different subjects
yeah they lend themselves
to certain kinds of people
it's rare that I get overlap but sometimes I'll get
an arcade and a tape person
I had a guy who did a 6502
emulator in
I think it was 2k
2000 bytes
and he
also had worked with tape
professionally
so if I can sure but
the overlap isn't really as much as I would
like maybe you spend time in an arcade too
you could ask well like you guys mentioned
you're working on I like where you're going because
with documentaries some people think
of documentaries as like oh they film 10 or 15
interviews they make a movie and you guys
say like oh we're just starting out we're at 30 hours
and I'm somewhere like that
I'm like at 60 hours for the arcade
one and like 30 hours for the
6502 one and you know just
building up these large
groups of
shots and
presentation and people talking and questions
and from that you make a real
film that covers
things comprehensively instead of
something that you can
literally scrub through
with your movie player and still
get the gist because there's so little going on
you know it's just between making a really good
film and making one that's just a
disposable product you know
I think a lot of I mean
aside from the fact we're going to have to go through it all
a lot of it is because it's tapeless now
and hard drives are really
inexpensive and space is cheap
I think it's a gift I think it's a gift to be able
to do that I think
you know I've interviewed of the
BBS documentary
8 of those people are dead
who I've interviewed I put up their full interviews
because this may be the most
anyone has any recording of them talking
you know
I mean and it's not just oh they're
an old guy I mean some of them were in their
late 20s they came down with something
they're gone and so
this is the record of them so maybe
it's not so bad that I took an hour and a half
to talk to them instead of pulling out
you know 12 minutes of 16
millimeter film and
walking away after I get my one question
answered you know. We're speaking with Jason Scott
archive.org
archivist, filmmaker
Jason what is it do you think that
got you started with your passion
for archiving things for saving things
well like I said I think my parents
divorce actually helped me they gave me a real
a real sense of
transient life is and how things go
away and so I would save
things but I think what pushed me
over from
just ending up like another person
with a pile of stuff and turning into a
person who wanted others to see it
was I've always taken a joy
in instructing people
and drawing conclusions and speaking
I've always enjoyed public speaking I've always
enjoyed entering into conversations
and you know being able to
say you know here's
here's something I found but let me
tell you the story of why I found
it and why I kept it and
so when websites
came out I looked at those as
oh my god I get full color
you know I get a full color
presentation that anyone in the world
can look at I want a piece
of that I've you know so I've had websites
since 93 and
you know I think that
as each new medium comes up
people reward me
by saying I wanted to know
about this thanks for doing it
and the more work I've done the
more people ever it's been rewarding all
the way down there's never really been a downside
to it so
documentary films or
public speaking or websites
or collections it's always been a case of
wow this really changes
people for the better they get
a better understanding they share
their stories they feel they're part of the
greater whole they're sometimes
inspired to save things we might have
lost because they see the template
of somebody presenting it so
I mean it's been
rewarding all the way down I don't
see it ever stopping for me
when you travel a lot
next to Mitch Altman I think you travel more
than almost anybody I know almost as much
well now when you're
going overseas or throughout
the country to do interviews do you have
a crew are you doing it all yourself?
I do them all myself
the Defcon documentary had an actual crew
but that was because we only had
four days of filming
to capture we ended up capturing like
230 hours in four
days because
once an event happened it was gone
but on the whole I tend to do
single person
cruise because
that gives me an enormous amount of flexibility
I mean I was out in California
for work and I was able to go
over 100 miles in one direction
and interview a family business that
makes cabinets for arcade games
and I was able to then zoom back
I didn't have to call up Steve
and say Steve I need you to meet me over down
at the train station we're going to go I could
just do it the only downside to that
is I have to be super triple
extra careful on every single thing
it's an enormous amount of responsibility as well
as flexibility you have to be the sound guy
you have to be the light guy you have to be the camera guy
and the interviewer how do you do all that?
and the answer is that I have
among the 370
interviews I've done over the years
one or two lost ones and you don't
forget those you don't forget
those and you remember that lesson
and you cry a little bit and you move on
in one case I went back
and I said I need
I'm so sorry I'm so sorry
I have to interview you again and he was like oh thank god
and I was like what do you mean?
and he was like oh now I can do the answers right
my answers were terrible I hated them
I could do so much better
so to them it was like a second bite at the apple
but I take that very seriously
you know I make sure the sounds
running and I tell people I'm not going to
look at you I'm going to be answering
you know you're going to be asking questions
I'm going to be answering
I'm going to be asking you the questions
but while you're answering it I'm checking the sound levels
the focus and everything else
so don't take offense I'm not ignoring you
yeah I'm not autistic I'm not
weird I'm just literally keeping track
of 12 things and it's worked
out you know I've changed equipment
over the years I now shoot DSLR
I shoot with a
H4n zoom recorder
these things work dependably
they work well they run
off batteries so I'm not
I don't have cables everywhere I'll have one
cable for the light sometimes I don't even shoot
with a light I use natural light
so it's been very nice
to have the compactness the ability to
dump things down into these massive
hard drives and be able to work with them
so I mean
we're seeing a renaissance for the films because
now you don't have to go
begging to the local
you know public good
fund hoping that they'll give you
$12,000 so you can film
for two hours and get the story
you can go out and shoot it I mean
will it result in some terrible documentaries
probably but I'd much rather
have you know 100 documentaries
and have 80 of them be terrible than
have 12 documentaries and have
4 of them be good and we don't hear
all these other news and stories
and lives so it's been
I'm going to the Tribeca Film Festival
next week
and there's all sorts of
documentaries there that you're like yeah
if it wasn't for this we'd never see this story
we would never see this story
well hopefully a lot of young filmmakers
out there and old filmmakers out there are being inspired
by what you've accomplished
what you continue to accomplish
and I never thought I'd see the day where you could
basically do what you do and
without a crew without having to
do all this set up in advance
I look at the nightmare
of what it must have been for Freedom Downtime
for you putting that all together
nightmare is kind of a strong word but it was a lot of work
horrifying nightmare how about horrifying nightmare
we still managed to get everybody into a single little car
and travel around the country
but wow it's really incredible
sound must be a nightmare
do you use a boom mic?
I use a boom mic
so you hold a boom mic
I absolutely have a little crane
that holds it over the person
and you get a nice microphone
you aim it right at their mouth
and you get a pretty good recording
and the human ear is very forgiving
if they understand
what the person is saying
you can have some background noise
or you can have some buzzing or whatever
and there's also so
this is the thing this has changed
just in the last two years
two and a half years
there are programs now that will present
the sound
not as a single wave
but as a spectrum
and in the spectrum you can make out
cell phone rings
or dropped pens
or other clicking and you can
make it out
dogs barking
you can actually paint it out now
like it was just a blemish
like a photoshop
you can literally remove a cell phone
from behind a person's voice
it's really amazing how much has changed
you can do color correction
on the fly automatically
you can
choose something in the image
and say wipe this out and have it disappear
even though the camera is moving
you can edit the camera
you can really really
to me the important thing is the story
and the important thing is
someone will go to me and go well I'm not so good
I'm like people will watch
I mean if you look at a couple of the memes
that have spread in the past week
even I won't go into which ones they are
but you know there have been some untoured things
well I noticed
that they were shot off of security cameras
off of monitors
so we are looking at
a cell phone recording
of a monitor
of a low bit
security camera and people
are like I can't believe that's happening
that's what they care about
they're not like what's up with this low quality
lo-fi I can't understand it
it's not in stereo
if the story is good
if the person you're talking to is compelling
you can record it with a
you know with a 35mm
camera from 1985
and people with a tape recording
people will listen so that's the number one
thing don't get hung up on the cameras
don't be all
oh well what about the bandwidth
or how about the wide angle lens
do that first
get the story
a long time ago
I learned this lesson there was somebody who did a documentary
on the four men who did
almost all the beats that we know of
like the beats
that were part of the 60s and the 70s
and they were sampled and turned into the
rap well
there were four of them and
in the beginning of the film they show the three men
holding a picture of the fourth
and it said you know
the fourth man died while I was trying to get
funding and I was
so wrecked
I was like just record him
just tape record him
how hard would that have been and now
he's gone and that taught me
get the story get out
don't be don't make it precious
and we're gifted with this ability
to make things look better but don't get
hung up on it. Hey let's open up our phone
line speaking with Jason Scott here from archive.org
and documentarian
archivist our phone number
212-209-2900
if people have
any comments questions things like that
Jason I imagine you also do all your editing too
I do and that is
unbelievably hard
I think it was nine months of editing for
I don't even know how long it was
for BBS. What do you use?
I use
something called
Vegas video which was unfortunately
bought by Sony is now called Sony Vegas
it's a relatively easy
video editing
program that
it almost treats video
it was basically a music program
called Acid that was
basically turned into a music
program for video so you mix the
video like
they are tracks of music and somehow
that really works well with my
personality because I'll pull
up something someone said and I'll place it over
another person and I'll say okay
well let's mix it if anyone's seen my
films they are these
weird
almost mosaics
of people discussing things I don't
use a narrator so a person will start
a sentence and another person will continue it
and the third person will finish it
I really like that powerful
sense of voices raised
together to make a thing
the program works that way and as
you might imagine that means I have to watch
everything at least once
I have to classify everything
and then I have to start pushing them together slowly
but I think the result is very
nice it's very polished and it's very
enjoyable for me to see what comes out
the other end so the work is worth it.
The whole process is inspirational
definitely to me to many people out there I'm sure
let's talk to some of those people
212-209-2900
and good evening you're on Off The Hook
Hello. Hi what's on your mind?
This is a Mr. Johnson
I'm listening to the WBAI
Alright Mr. Johnson you are on the radio
right now. Okay then I am
happy to talk with you
I have been listening to you for years
I'm 84 within a
week from now
the man that you're talking to
has got me spellbound this is
the world that I was in
in the movie industry
and I was designing and building
lighting equipment and audio
gear for special projects
and here I am
at 84 reliving
my life through this chap
who sounds like me when I was
in my 50s and 40s
I would love to end up
making connection with him
I've got loads of gear I would
give him only because
I just believe in what he's doing
a man is doing what's important
Well that's very kind
of you sir
I'm sure we can figure out some way
to do the connection
if people want to email me
I'm easily reachable at
jason at textfiles.com
t-e-x-t-f-i-l-e-s
dot com
or jscott
j-s-c-o-t-t
at archive.org
let me ask our caller
do you have an email connection
you could email him?
no I don't
but if he will please
take the phone number I've got
and make the time
to call me
he's got control
if he's calling me to shut me down
but he's got
the only thing he's got
is his phone number
and he's got
the only solar energy house
in all of New York
1979
I put the shelves up
at WBAI way back in the
50's or 60's
I was on
WBAI different times
I'm a solar expert
you are a living museum
sir I would love to meet you
I've got a library
that's 120 feet
of nothing but solar energy
and I'm going to be dying
I'm 84
and I can't influence anybody
well I think you've interested me
yes
we're going to put you on hold sir
put him on hold and we'll get your info sir
can you hold on for maybe 8 or 9 minutes
and then we can take your phone number
after we're off the air
yes if the phone don't go dead
with the battery
well you know what we'll try and figure something out
we're going to start by putting you on hold
somewhere between all of us in this room
we can figure out how to get your phone number
making my heart feel so good
I found somebody that might appreciate
me
as a legend
you bet
actually you know what I'm going to give the
controls over to Jason, Kyle and Mike
you can yammer on about something
what I'll do is I'll pick up the phone and I'll write down
your phone number as soon as I find a pen
and we'll do it that way how's that
that's excellent
I met you guys over at
the
not was it Chase
we used to have the meetings
was it every first
Monday of the month
yeah you're talking about
the 2600 meetings we actually just
had one last Friday
and they take place all around
the world on the first
Friday of every month
and it's the Citigroup building
when you were actively involved
you got put away by the feds
for a while
I'm all part of that memory
we need to hear your story
it's so good to be called in
I'm going to put you on hold right now
Emmanuel's going to take your thing and I'm going to say something about you sir
and you'll like it
if god forbid we get disconnected please call right back
but I think this hold button will work
of course
I'm happy to talk about it
this is something I run into a lot
where a gentleman comes up to me and says
what's your story
now the thing is that we all have interesting stories
and there are people out there right now
who have amazing stories
and they don't have any outlet for them
or they don't think anyone's actually interested
and the minute you talk to them you realize
oh my goodness this may be the only person who knows this
this may be the only person who has this
the only person who even remembers this ever happened
and it's maybe
too easy for us to go
well that's just someone telling stories
before they realize that once they're gone
you can't just go with them
so I mean I'll be meeting this guy
if I can as soon as I can
because you gotta move fast with history
you have to
and that's the difference I think between success and failure
you end up with
people who say well I'll get to it next week
or I'll give that guy a call next month
when I free up some time
I'm like if you don't go out
and get the stories of people
people fade, they fade faster
than the stories
we'll see what happens with it
I'm sure I'll give Emanuel an update as to what happened
after I met this gentleman
but the more people
the more people around you
that get their stories down one way or another
the better we are
so Emanuel has now gotten the critical information
I have successfully gotten phone number
and all kinds of other
excellent, wonderful
let's take another phone call
were you in the middle of something?
no no no
this is just great stuff
I really admire the work this guy is doing
and I want to relate
Peter Beauchene gets on
I'm not going to turn this into a show about Peter Beauchene
he's great, but he gets on
and years ago
I only had a couple of tape
cassette tape techs
and two reel to reel
so I hacked the cords back and forth
from the front to the back
to the turntable and the radio
I made a tape for like
it took me 18 hours
people don't understand
I had to do more work than Peter does
because he can flick a button and fade things
but along the lines
of what this guy is saying
and along the lines of what you guys are doing
and along the lines
you got old equipment or something
I thought of old equipment
I called one of you guys up
you came and you picked it up and it's great
I don't care what happened to it
I care that you did something with it
and you know what
your work is great, it's current
you fight legal battles
like other B.A.I. entities
all the way to George Carlin
and on and on
and I too have been listening
for years
I'm just a little younger than the other guy
but
I'm going to look at this guy's documentary
and other stuff and I'm going to
try, I'm under the impression
he said Jason at right
it's Jason
Jason at J-A-S-O-N
at textfiles.com
and yeah, the more people
all that matters to me is if one person
gets inspired to save something or reach out
then the work has been worth it
well I think more than that have been inspired
but if you want more information
or just want to talk to us, O-T-H
at 2600.com
is our email address, thanks so much Jason
for everything you've done, thanks for being here tonight
we look forward to seeing you at the HOPE conference
in July in New York City, I know you'll be giving a presentation
I'll be happy, I'll be the guy in the hat
yeah, the big hat
thanks again and thanks
to all our listeners, stay tuned for the Personal Computer Show coming up next
have a good night
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