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And you are listening to radio station WBAI in New York.
Somehow still broadcasting from the Empire State Building.
It's 8 o'clock on a Wednesday night.
And it's time once again for Off The Hook.
Here we go.
And a very good evening to everybody.
The program is Off The Hook.
Emanuel Goldstein back with you this week.
Joined tonight by Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
Who should I go to next?
Alex.
Good evening everyone.
Kyle.
Hi E.
And Jim over in the cheap seats there.
Yep.
And it's good to be back.
We've been away for a couple of weeks.
You guys have been holding down the fort.
Thank you very much for that.
Two weeks ago Kyle and I were in the Netherlands.
And we just got so incredibly tired we couldn't stay up.
That's a bad excuse.
But we had an early train and we knew we were in good hands.
And then last week we were in Iceland.
And we kind of had like a medical thing we had to deal with.
That last minute thing.
And learned a whole lot about Icelandic health care.
So that's kind of cool.
They have it.
And it works.
It's cheap.
Yeah.
So that's how the rest of the world tends to work, right?
And accessible.
Yeah, very accessible.
As long as you have a car, which luckily we did.
But anyway, so everyone's okay.
Everyone's fine.
And we had some interesting radio here.
And there was absolutely no shortage of technology and interesting things we'll mention, I'm sure, later along the way.
Well, I just want to say we have a lot to talk about tonight.
There's a headline screaming at me right now, which we will get into.
Tuesday's massive ransomware outbreak was, in fact, something much worse.
Yeah, that's pretty much going to be something we focus on later on in the show.
And also we'll be talking about Google's massive fine over in the EU.
But, yes, Kyle, we had some technological challenges and things that we noticed while traveling, as we always do.
And, of course, whenever you go to different countries, you notice security systems and weaknesses and paranoia and things like that.
I think for the most part, though, things worked out fairly well.
We didn't have our laptops seized or banned or anything like that on airplanes, although there's certainly the threat of that happening.
Yeah, and it felt like there was some confusion in some areas as far as where the borders are.
There's a lot of gray lines with the various talks about countries entering or leaving the EU or whatnot.
And different countries that are involved have, obviously, borders to maintain and kind of don't know what to do.
So, for example, Iceland, there is security wherever you go in the airport.
It seems like when you enter, you leave, everywhere you go, they want to give you a stamp for everything.
Well, Iceland is not really a member of the EU, per se, but they cooperate with the EU.
I believe that's the right way to say it.
But going into the UK from the Netherlands, we went by boat.
I have an EU passport and I had to answer questions, which you don't usually do when you go into an EU country.
Usually, you just show the passport and you're in.
But they were asking, so when are you leaving?
And I felt like saying, well, when are you leaving? You're the ones leaving the EU, so what's the deal here?
You're treating me like it's a foreign country, which I guess one day they will be doing.
Yeah, it's true.
And that's also leading to extra checks.
I got a random check of a computer that I had in a case, but they just were looking for residue, of course, for anything not so good.
The laptop ban is off the table for now, but the threat, of course, with this administration, it could come back at any time.
And you just have to wonder, if they really can't tell if your laptop is going to explode mid-flight, then how come it's okay to put it in checked baggage?
It doesn't really instill you with a lot of confidence.
I think they're more concerned with what you have on your laptop.
Or perhaps they're concerned that you're going to hack the airplane somehow, because everyone seems to think you can do that.
It's a whole bag of mysteries how they actually think. Alex?
I had an issue with the UK about 10 years ago, actually, when I was applying for a student visa to go over to the UK to study at Oxford.
And initially, my student visa was actually denied.
And it was based on a weird technicality on the paperwork that I had submitted that said I was studying at New College, Oxford University.
And the documentation I had was from New College.
But the person processing my application didn't know that New College was actually a college of Oxford University.
So they denied my application on that basis.
And I had to resubmit it immediately, because otherwise I wouldn't have been able to study in the UK.
And it was accepted, but it caused me, every single time I left the country and came back in,
it would take about a half an hour in order to get through border processing.
And they continually asked me questions.
Why was your visa denied?
What are you doing?
When are you leaving?
All of this.
And it was very embarrassing every single time I left.
So every time you go over a border, they know your visa was denied at some point.
Absolutely.
I would love to see their computer screen, see what it says about me, about all these people.
Oh, I'm sure it says very interesting things.
Oh, such a look on the face of the person whenever they look at it.
Yeah, it says something.
You know, the only person that was available during the summer holiday at New College at Oxford was the bursar.
And he was coincidentally also a lawyer.
And he had said something very funny to me about this denial.
You know, somebody who didn't know that New College was part of Oxford obviously did not have a proper upbringing in the UK.
That was his explanation for this, that they would need some sort of explanation about what federalism is.
Which is such an elitist put-down coming from Oxford.
It was pretty funny.
But it did really cause me a lot of embarrassment, a lot of trouble.
Any time I was traveling with a group of people, I would constantly be stopped and questioned as if I was up to no good.
Other things we noticed with traveling were some of the telephone plans you get.
Sometimes they don't always work as advertised in the system.
Oh, yes.
The system is there.
I would say I'm happy to report phones work internationally.
And as long as you're not getting checked, your phone isn't getting checked or anything.
Which, again, wasn't the back of our minds.
But it wasn't something we experienced.
It was just more anxiety because of all the stringent stuff that's going on there and paranoia.
But we had different plans, obviously, as you would.
And I opted for one.
You got the other.
And mine seemed to go right through data just because it hadn't had the right setting or something like that.
But suffice to say, I was able to use it mostly.
But there's intermittent stuff.
There was places way off in the country, in Iceland, where I got great signal that was not the case going through some of the parts of Italy or the U.K.
Places you'd expect service, but it just doesn't happen.
Or there's some processing difficulty.
You end up needing something crucially at one given moment.
And then, of course, it doesn't work.
And I'm not just talking about the Long Island Railroad app.
I'm talking about other things.
Oh, don't get me started on that.
But those are – I don't know.
You have examples, E?
Well, I just know there was a good bit of confusion as to what we had access to.
I know you went through your data practically by the time we arrived.
They gave you – how much data did you get on your plan?
It was a couple hundred megabytes.
That's it.
Yeah.
And I wasn't trying to conserve it, really.
I just was like, oh, I want to see what this is like to just use it normally.
You watched a movie on your phone.
I watched a couple of videos, and yeah.
So I probably did it to myself.
So I'm not complaining too much.
I'm more complaining about reliability of service, things being intermittent, saying it's one type of connectivity.
And it may not be able to handle something.
Well, I had something interesting.
I have T-Mobile, and they have a plan where for a fee you can get free international roaming in various countries.
But a couple of weird things happened.
First of all, the roaming is only 2G, so it's deathly slow.
But if you can live with that, which I can because most of my life is text-based, it's not that bad a deal.
But throughout, I noticed that there were two clocks on my phone that popped up.
One said roaming time.
One said home time.
The home time, for some reason, was Central European time.
So when I went to England, it had a different time for England, and it had my home zone as being Europe.
I don't know why it did that.
I'm not exactly sure what it was trying to tell me.
I do know that I'm supposed to get free roaming for whatever country I'm in in Western Europe.
So it shouldn't have been an issue for that.
Your phone was so eager, so excited for you to be traveling.
It was.
It was uncanny how crazy.
It was like smart and almost a smart aleck about your traveling and so nosy.
It really was.
Next step, you're in an area, it knows you're going to go to a particular bar or any stop along the way.
It was really kind of creepy how much it knew.
I make a point of not telling Google everything, but I use a Gmail account to make reservations and things like that.
That's enough.
If you tie that Gmail account to your phone, it will assume all sorts of things.
And most of the things it assumes are correct.
It says, you know, it's time to return the rental car.
Wow, how invasive is that?
Or, you know, you have a hotel reservation coming up on these particular dates.
Just basically volunteering all this information.
And, of course, also whenever you look at your phone, it tells you, are you in this particular cafe now?
And, you know, I never asked for these features, but they're just all there.
Imagine if I willingly start telling it all this information and sharing more.
And I'm sure it's all saved forever.
It can be extremely invasive.
It can also be extremely convenient.
And that's what many people like.
We did read, however, that that practice in particular Google is going to apparently not go.
I don't know if you guys maybe heard this story.
They're not going to read with computers your every word and utterance back and forth.
Gmail is dropping the whole scanning your email thing, which is basically how they built Gmail.
I'm sure we'll hear more about that.
But it is really interesting how many people out there are using these things.
And that was something, those were the things we noticed about our phones and everybody else out there.
And other than that, it was really about supplementing what you could connect to with Wi-Fi and that kind of stuff.
I'm not positive whether the story said that Google is going to stop scanning your email at all
or whether it's going to just stop using that info for advertising customization.
Oh, that was the most fun.
You put in all kinds of bizarre things and you get advertisements for morticians
or whatever it is that you were talking about in your emails.
We're talking about presidential assassinations.
You get weapons advertised to you and fast cars and helicopters
and whatever else you might need to carry out your task.
It was very helpful, all these plans you might be making or just fake emails you might be sending.
Yeah, so they're not going to solicit now, I guess.
They'll use it to creep you out by saying you're going to be here next.
Are you getting a haircut at this barbershop or whatever?
But they won't sell you the three different barbers in the area
and then the barber-themed amusement park or whatever else.
Alex?
Perhaps they're going to stop the scanning or at least one function of the scanning, as Robin mentioned,
because they already have enough information about us that it becomes superfluous.
We've given away such a great extent of our personal information that they no longer need this
and there's so many other ways to track us based on our devices, based on our social media,
based on check-ins, all of this nonsense.
But to go back to the advertisements, a funny story is a couple of years ago
when I was using PGP encryption on a Gmail account,
obviously you can't scan that and get the content of your communications
because it just looks like text characters.
So I was curious whether the ads that popped up on the side coincidentally were for house cleaning services.
House cleaning?
Yeah, which would just make you think that Google is assuming that people who are using encryption
are generally messy slobs who probably need somebody to come in and clean their house or their room for them perhaps.
Now that's interesting.
I wonder if that's something that's replicated often.
It might be. I'd be curious about that.
It could just be that random string of your PGP-encoded message somehow communicated that you had a dirty house.
Perhaps, or maybe I just did have a dirty house.
Yeah, there was a bit of a gloomy thing a long time ago.
When the September 11th attacks happened, I remember if you used a Gmail account,
it would feed you advertisements based on what was in the emails.
But if you were typing in things like Giuliani, 9-11, things like that,
it would shut off the advertisements for that message, I think out of respectfulness.
And it got to a point where people were dropping those words into unrelated emails
just to tell, I guess, Google's system what they thought about it.
And I was just using a text-based email and missing all the fun. Imagine that.
What else did we notice?
I mean, we could go on and on.
There's interesting media, or lack thereof, and that's all I'm going to say about that.
Well, in Iceland, we noticed that there doesn't seem to be any AM radio.
They don't have AM radio in Iceland.
Well, at least not in our car. We couldn't figure out how to get to it.
But Iceland is connected.
Yes.
Do not be fooled. That island has connectivity.
Yes. Yes, they do.
And that's all I'm going to say about that.
Let me say one other thing, though. I have a very annoying cell phone.
It's a Samsung. I didn't choose it.
It was chosen by that horrible company that I pay every month to give me insurance
in case something happens to my phone and something did happen to my other phone.
And they sent me a replacement that I didn't ask for.
And it happens to be a phone that doesn't do all the things the last one did.
And one of the things, apparently, it doesn't do.
And this is super annoying and frustrating to try to describe to people.
And I'm sure I'm going to get super frustrated and annoyed trying to describe it here.
But sending a text message over Wi-Fi is something that is very, very useful,
especially if you don't have cell phone coverage,
which I am frequently in areas where there is no cell phone coverage.
And they do exist, these places. They really do.
If you're deep inside a mountain, for instance, or in a bunker,
I'm not saying those are the places I spend a lot of time.
But, you know, there are places where the signals just don't exist.
Now, what happens if you have a Wi-Fi network on most phones,
you can send messages and they go through, MMS messages, SMS messages.
And my last LG phone, I believe is what it was, it worked just great.
HTC.
Yeah, right, the HTC One, that's what it was.
And now, with the Samsung, it doesn't work, it doesn't go through.
And I've asked people, does this work for you?
And they say, yeah, of course, it works on Wi-Fi.
The thing is, it's very hard for most people to get to a point
where they have absolutely no cell phone signal.
So they think it's going out over Wi-Fi,
but actually it's using that little bit of cell phone signal
and sending the message out that way.
I learned this in Iceland because we were frequently, and Scotland as well,
we were frequently in places that had no coverage whatsoever
because we were deep inside stone buildings.
And when I got up the next day, all of a sudden I had 50 messages
as soon as I stepped out the door, and it was really frustrating.
A lot of people trying to reach me, wondering where I was,
where I disappeared to.
Meanwhile, I had Wi-Fi service the whole time
and not one message went in or out.
So I don't know why Samsung does this,
but apparently they block the ability to send and receive SMS over Wi-Fi.
It's extremely annoying.
The phone company isn't doing it.
It's the phone manufacturer for some unknown reason.
Perhaps it's all those stingrays that are popping up around you
to scarf out your communications.
I'm so glad you brought this up, E,
because this is part of what I was saying
in the realm of quality of service and reliability.
This handing off or whatever is going on
between dealing with a low quality of cellular reception
and making that work with the Wi-Fi or 2.4 or 5 GHz internet.
I mean, you can go so far as to create whatever you need,
log in, have access.
If you can set that up, that's great.
But if the phone is not actually managing and balancing that
in a functional way, not a clunky, really slow and unreliable way,
then you're all set.
But this inability or whatever they're doing insofar as updating it.
I know I have an update I could do, but it's dubious for other reasons.
Or that other people with the same model of my phone can do it,
but it's because of my carrier or whatnot not allowing it.
So these little things are thrown in there.
I don't know if it's for a form of revenue or something
in that kind of malicious way on behalf of the manufacturer or the provider,
but it's still an impediment to the quality and reliability.
And when you're overseas, it's magnified,
because that really is your computer.
I said so many people have phones,
whether it's the country you're visiting or other travelers.
And with more and more of these overbearing searches and so on,
people are probably going to be thinking twice
about bringing more than just a phone.
So we need that stuff to work seamlessly.
If you are told that you can do something over Wi-Fi,
like send an SMS message, something that's very well established and used,
over an Internet signal, that's fine.
Then you'll work on getting Wi-Fi wherever you go.
But if they're thwarting that, it's really defeating the whole premise of it.
Yes, absolutely.
I don't want to spend too much time on this.
There's just one more thing I wanted to bring up
as far as some of the things that I noticed.
And that's just poorly designed software.
And this happened with my local cable company.
Some of you following me on Twitter might have noticed
this little exchange I had with them,
where basically I was walking around the streets in some city.
I forget where I was exactly,
but it was right when the William Sessions testimony was beginning.
And I've got this great little app from my cable company
where I can load my DVR on my phone and look at the schedule
and hit record and record a TV program.
Imagine that.
How cool is that, that I can be walking around in the streets of Calcutta,
even though I was nowhere near there,
but I could actually go on to my cable company and start recording.
And when I get home, I can turn on the TV and that program will be there.
Perfectly normal.
It's great.
It's an amazing thing.
But you know what I discovered?
You know what I discovered when I was walking around?
It thought that it was the time.
It was basically, I think it was 4 o'clock.
No, it was 3 o'clock here.
It was only 10 o'clock.
It was 10 o'clock where I was, I believe.
Yeah, that's what it was.
It was 10 o'clock where I was.
And I'm trying to think how this – I'm messing up the time somehow.
You were trying to get something recorded in the afternoon
and the app was using your local time.
It was using my local time.
No, that's right.
I was ahead.
I'm sorry.
I've got it backwards.
It was something like 6 o'clock where I was standing.
Sure.
And it was noon here.
Yep.
But the schedule was showing 6 o'clock for the programming here.
And I couldn't get them to understand that I needed it to be 12 o'clock,
the actual time it was here,
so I could record the program that was on at 12 o'clock,
not the program that was going to be on in six hours at 6 o'clock.
And if you look at the back and forth I was having with the cable company,
they were saying things to me like,
well, sir, when you travel, you have to take the time difference into account.
Like I'm some kind of moron that doesn't know there's a time difference.
I know there's a time difference.
It's the DVR that doesn't know there's a time difference
and thinks I'm in the same time zone when I'm not.
And I'm trying to record something now that's actually six hours earlier or later.
I still can't get it right.
But the point is the time wasn't reflecting properly.
And it's bad programming.
There's nothing other than that.
Try it yourself.
Go overseas and try to program your DVR.
It doesn't work.
Not if you do it live.
If you're trying to record something at that moment,
you have to wait six hours.
Yeah, the one feature you would want when you're in another time zone
to use that specific thing with whatever your media provider.
Actually, I got it wrong again.
You can't wait six hours because it's six hours late.
So you've missed it by six hours.
Okay, that's too much time spent on that.
Let's go to the important news.
So what's going on in the world?
Well, apparently Google's in a lot of trouble in Europe.
And, Alex, I wanted to ask you about this.
They got fined a huge amount of money.
They got fined 2.4 billion euros for allegedly abusing –
actually, it's not alleged anymore, I guess, if they fine them –
abusing its market dominance by favoring its own comparison shopping service
in search results.
They say that Google has given preference to its own shopping services
search results over others by demoting rival comparison shopping services
in its shopping services search results.
And I hope I don't have to say shopping services any more times.
Google must change the way it operates within 90 days
or face additional penalties and risk being liable for up to 5%
of its average daily worldwide revenue,
not only the European revenue, worldwide revenue.
They've already been fined the equivalent of $2.7 billion.
You know, most companies, that would take a sizable chunk
out of their earnings.
I guess Google, that's just the cost of doing business.
But do you know what it is they're being fined for doing specifically?
Well, you sort of talked about it,
but it's very difficult to really figure it out from all of these stories.
You sort of have to look at it visually.
But I think another thing to point out is $2.7 billion for Google.
In 2016, they had $90 billion in revenue.
Okay.
That's a lot of money.
But that's in a year.
Yeah, that's in a singular year.
This happened in one day.
Yes, that's exactly right.
This was sort of anticipated,
but the amount of the fine wasn't necessarily anticipated.
There's also a lot of other sort of anti-competitive investigations
of Google being undertaken by the European Commission as well.
So this is just one of a number of investigations of Google.
And, you know, really what they were doing is, right,
there's these shopping services,
and it almost seemed like it was a seamless type of service
or something that just Google had propped up.
It didn't necessarily even seem like a particularly Google service.
When you would search for something,
a little box would show up on the right-hand side.
Say you were searching for, you know, a new MacBook Pro
or something like that.
Okay, all right.
You would get sponsored ads, you know, that people pay.
Right, right.
Through Google's AdWords program to pop up first.
And then on the right-hand side,
there would be a list of comparison types of comparison, you know, sales.
But most of these were, you know, Google-type shops.
These were already clients of Google.
They would promote their own services through this particular shopping service
that would prop up on the right,
whereas competitors' sites would be pushed down the search results
to, like, the third or fourth page.
I mean, when was the last time you went to the third or fourth page
on a Google search?
Probably.
Well, actually, you probably go way deep into the pages.
No, I never go past the first page.
Is that right?
It does.
I don't know.
I don't know why they tell you how many pages there are.
I mean, you're not going to go to the 695th.
I usually start last and work backwards.
Well, that should yield some interesting results.
Which is why I'm very inefficient.
Well, okay, so clear up my naivete here.
You're using Google's site, all right?
You're searching on Google's site.
Why doesn't Google have the right to promote their own sponsored content
above anything else?
Well, it's like anything else.
You know, you have rights,
but those rights only exist insofar as you don't trample on other people's rights
or you don't cause harm, right?
Like we have the right to smoke cigarettes but not necessarily in the studio,
you know, aside from Rob.
You should probably put that out.
In any event, sure, you have rights,
but you can't exercise them in an anti-competitive method.
For instance, let's say, for instance, you owned Penn Station.
Oh, boy.
I know.
My professor used to say, you know, lead us not into Penn Station,
but deliver us from evil.
People outside New York have no idea what we're talking about,
but believe me, this is topic number one everywhere around here.
It really is.
Penn Station is the awful transit hub for the Long Island Railroad.
It's a place of ill repute.
It used to be great back in the day when it was...
Before they tore it down, yes.
It used to be great.
If you look at some of the old Hitchcock movies and you see it,
it's really beautiful.
But let's say you own that today.
Your name would be Amtrak.
Yes, that's right.
All right.
Yeah, your name would be Amtrak.
And within that space, within the Long Island Railroad Station at Penn Station,
you only decided to lease retail space to stores that you owned,
and you didn't let anybody else in.
And everybody who's coming in from Long Island or New Jersey on Amtrak
would only be able to shop at those stores that you owned.
Then that would necessarily be anti-competitive.
Yeah, but, Alex, I mean, that's the real world.
This is the virtual world, which is virtually unlimited.
And I could just, you know, one block down open my Alta Vista train station.
And are they still around?
Does anybody know?
Yahoo, whatever.
And, you know, have my own stores there.
I mean, Google is not really, you know, a common carrier.
They're a business.
And can't someone just use a different business if they don't like the way Google is treating them?
Well, this is a really good point too.
It's actually something that the Financial Times has capitalized on as well,
and they criticize this because, you know,
this is a new type of anti-competitive regulation in the sense of, you know,
companies with a dominant market share are now prohibited from favoring adjacent services online.
So you're right.
It's not brick-and-mortar type stuff.
This is a lot more amorphous.
And Google's sort of pointing the finger now at Amazon saying, well, if you think we're bad, you know,
look at Amazon.
Look at what they're doing horizontally.
Look at what they're promoting in terms of adjacent services.
So this could really have a major spillover effect,
and it's a real warning call to companies that are doing business in the EU that have
or that operate on the basis of some sort of conglomerate
where they may have services that are complementary to each other.
You know, this is going to affect.
Do people expect Amazon to offer things they don't sell on their website?
Obviously, the things that they offer are things they are selling
because that's what they're in the business of doing.
Well, that's true.
Maybe Google should just say, by the way,
these searches are searches that benefit us and might also benefit you,
and they could get out of a few billion dollars just by saying that.
That's true.
That's absolutely true.
But that being said, on the other hand, 90%, apparently,
90% of people in the EU are using Google as their search engine.
And Google is not so forthright with the fact that, you know,
they make their money from advertising.
If they came out and said, we're an advertising network.
This is how we make our money.
Search is just incidental to our main function,
which is selling ads and capitalizing on your personal information,
then perhaps it would be a different story.
Are there people who really don't know that Google makes its money from advertising?
I would presume a lot of people.
Wow.
I think this is the distinction that you need to think about
is that Amazon is not a search engine.
The shopping part of Google,
I mean, Google is super really dominant in that field.
And what this amounts to is it's a lot closer to the antitrust stuff with Microsoft,
which is probably going to be the genesis of what this turns out to be.
And I think, honestly, this got stalled out because of money in the American courts.
I think the EU sees a much fatter goose here in Google at the moment,
and this will end up being low-hanging fruit.
But this is about antitrust.
If you're the operating system and you want to get into the browser industry,
you're doing the same thing that Google is doing with the shopping thing.
And I think the evidence that this is going to go that way, I think,
is just how crappy Google shopping is.
It stinks.
And that's why I say this is totally low-hanging fruit for the EU Commission.
That part of their site is so bad and so clearly biased to Google's paying customers
and no one else in the shopping realm.
If it worked well, you'd have eBay, you'd have Amazon inside that little thing,
and they'd say, look, you look at our little ecosystem, it's open and a free marketplace.
That's not the case, and the evidence is the Google shopping thing itself.
I've purchased a lot of things for organizations and stuff.
I don't know a lot of people who really use it and enjoy it and get anything out of it ever.
And clearly we don't use it.
No, it's not.
If we wanted to buy things online where we would go,
we might check it on the off chance that someday it gets useful enough to use,
but that day hasn't come yet, not for our organization.
Yeah, it's important to remember the Microsoft antitrust stuff as regarding this.
And for those unfamiliar, it was back in the 90s and they decided to get into the browser market
and they thought, well, let's not only put out a web browser,
let's tie it into our operating system and make it an integral thing
and push it when you install Windows that that's just the internet.
And they got in trouble for that, especially in the EU, I believe.
Yeah, that's right.
We criticize Google, and I think rightly so, because it is a pretty crappy service.
But all that being said, the basis of this $2.7 billion fine
was actually the revenue that was generated through this comparison shopping service.
So by any standard, I think a fine of that magnitude would indicate
that a lot of people are using it and possibly being deceived.
Yeah, and if I have this correctly, the antitrust, the anti-competitive thing comes into play
when you're using your dominance of one field to give yourself an unfair advantage in a completely different field.
That's right.
So it would be like Amazon.
If you go onto Amazon.com and search for your favorite brand of half gallon of milk, for instance,
because I'm sure that's where we all buy our milk.
But Amazon decided themselves to get a dairy farm,
and when you searched for your favorite brand of milk, instead they showed you Amazon milk.
Only Amazon milk.
You can't find any other milk.
I don't want to be on this side. I really don't.
But it just seems to me that if you're on the Amazon website,
you shouldn't expect really informative information about milk.
You should expect information about milk that benefits Amazon in some way.
And I just kind of feel like when you're on Google,
the first things you're going to see are things that benefit Google.
That's just my somewhat jaded view on how things work on the Internet.
Well, you're taking a very U.S. centrist approach to this.
Which leads to my next question.
How come we haven't seen anything like this in the U.S., this kind of a fine against Google?
Well, there's a small distinction here between the U.S. and the EU.
It's actually not so small in the sense of the anti-competition,
the anti-trust laws in the United States are generally designed to protect consumers.
In the EU, it's a little bit different,
because the EU's regulations are designed to protect not only consumers,
but also competition.
They see competition as something being very sacrosanct as well.
Now, taking a cue from you, and also Obama,
was very skeptical. He took very similar positions to you on a lot of things,
except whistleblowing, I think.
But in any event, both you and Obama will probably say,
this seems like the EU trying to level the playing field
and gain some sort of tactical commercial advantage for their local companies,
for EU-based companies to be able to sell or advertise products,
or compete with Google.
And in a sense, this is the EU trying to exert some form of dominion
over U.S. technology companies.
And I think there's some merit to that, because who is the EU,
but a bunch of Eurocrats,
and why should they dictate the way U.S. companies do business around the world?
Well, if they're doing business in their countries,
they can dictate how they do business there.
That makes sense to me.
I guess, to a certain extent.
The problem with this is then,
again, like everything else we were discussing a couple weeks ago,
businesses are generally going to conform to the lowest common denominator,
or the most restrictive regime.
Whereas in the EU, it requires certain regulations be complied with,
with respect to advertising, market dominance,
complementary shares of a market, things like that.
Then most companies are going to do that,
because most companies don't necessarily have the leverage
or the flexibility that Google does to design one system that works in the EU,
another that works in the Middle East, another that works in Africa,
another that works in New Jersey,
which we know is really a crazy jurisdiction to operate in.
They are a transnational entity, though.
Maybe their roots were in the U.S.,
but they do have interests globally.
These adorable companies change over time.
I would say that's a fair analysis of the distinctions between the markets.
We also have a different process here.
That actually had been tried, as you were asking.
It basically got stalled out in court.
They just kept them in court, and then the government just gave up.
Google outlasted the government in court. That's something.
Well, come on. They can just keep them in court all day long, and that's it.
It's supposed to work the other way around.
The government is supposed to keep you in court.
Yeah, and there's all kinds of interests that can compel things different ways
at different times, and other things become more important.
But the EU is a little bit more resolute in taking this on.
As I said, I think this is going to be a low-hanging fruit for them,
and they're going to succeed.
Well, let's see how resolute they are,
because my prediction on this, along with other legal analysts,
is that Google is going to appeal this ruling.
When they appeal it, it's going to go to the European General Court.
It'll be stalled there for a little while,
and then it can go to the European Court of Justice.
My guess is that Google is going to appeal this
all the way up to the European Court of Justice.
The problem is, once they appeal it,
there is a chance that they can actually have the fine reduced,
or it can actually be increased.
So they are taking a bit of a chance there.
But if I were Google, if I were their general counsel,
or their outside counsel, I would take the chance on the appeal.
The money that they could be fined,
in addition to what they've already been fined,
is probably de minimis for Google,
given their $90 billion a year revenue stream.
The most important thing for Google
is to gain some form of predictability,
to try to reduce or narrow the ruling
that came out from the European Commission.
If they get that kind of clarity,
if they reduce the restrictions in a certain way,
I think that they will have won.
One of the questions, which I don't think you know the answer to,
is where does this $2.4 billion fine go to, if they do pay it?
It goes to Berlusconi, directly to him.
I mean, that could build a whole high-speed rail network.
It could do all kinds of things.
It's a good question. I've been thinking about that.
That's a gigantic sum of money,
and if it went directly over to the European Commission,
they're probably already planning their next parties,
or offsides, or something like that.
But in all likelihood, it probably goes into some sort of fund.
I'm not entirely sure where it goes.
All the reporting I've seen on this never really discussed it.
So we'd love to hear from you about this,
if you know, and we can address this next week.
Now, it's been a busy week on other fronts as well.
Websites all over the place are being hacked by ISIS for some reason.
The town of Brookhaven, on June 25th,
seems to have been accessed by a pro-ISIS group,
who basically were issuing threats to President Trump,
as well as websites in Ohio,
the Ohio governor's website, in addition,
was hacked with pro-ISIS messages.
You will be held accountable, Trump,
you and all of your people,
for every drop of blood flowing in Muslim countries.
Actually, that doesn't sound at all unreasonable.
I mean, if it stopped there, I would be fine with it.
But it goes on to say a lot of other things as well.
But yeah, websites being defaced by ISIS,
it makes you wonder.
And I don't know if it even is ISIS.
It could just be somebody that knows how to paste the ISIS flag
and say that they're ISIS fanboys.
But it's one way to throw your local government into a tizzy.
I mean, I found it so bizarre that the town of Brookhaven on Long Island
was targeted in this respect.
I never really thought that that would be an outlet that ISIS would target.
But, you know, given some of their policies,
I guess it does make sense.
Absolutely.
And all kinds of other hysterical stories, as usual, come out.
I want to read a headline here.
Nothing is safe from a hacker, even a toy, smart TV, or fitness tracker.
Yes, with fitness trackers, smart TVs, and even children's toys
among the most vulnerable items,
people are unaware they're at serious risk of hacking.
New research from SWNS Digital has revealed the full extent
to which dishonest individuals can invade people's privacy
by way of a few clicks of the mouse.
The survey conducted by consumer security specialist, BullGuard,
included responses from 2,000 UK smart device owners.
And aside from smartphones, tablets, and PCs,
respondents own three Internet-connected devices on average,
including locks, pet trackers, and webcams.
A third admitted that they have no idea if their smart tech is safe and secure.
A quarter of respondents said their devices have no security at all.
Half are unsure if the protection they have is stringent enough.
32% are oblivious to the possible security risks facing their gadgets,
including cybercriminals hacking into baby monitors, door locks,
and even refrigerators.
You know, it's my lifelong ambition to hack into a refrigerator
to see the kind of damage I can do.
Many smart connected devices have little or no security protection,
said Paul Lipman, CEO of BullGuard.
We've already seen how one attack that used thousands of hacked smart devices
took down leading Internet services in the U.S.,
including Netflix and Twitter.
Hacks on the smart home could have much more damaging consequences.
More than a fifth of people said they were unsure about buying additional smart devices
since they have doubts about the security.
Six in ten said they'd be encouraged to buy more smart devices
if manufacturers did more to put consumers' minds at ease
in regard to security protection.
Yeah, so this is something that people are getting more and more hysterical about,
the baby monitors being hacked, refrigerators, ovens, thermostats.
Yeah, there's a lot of damage you can do, a lot of havoc that can be wreaked from all of this.
But knowing how your technology works, knowing how to keep it basically secure
is, I think, the first step.
And keep in mind, these are growing pains.
And if there is going to be some kind of security breach,
something that we have to learn from.
The real point is not to put everything on the line here
and be so dependent on a piece of technology that if it does get compromised,
your house is destroyed or something like that.
If that is the risk that you're facing, it's not a good idea to do in the first place.
Rob?
I love this sort of thing because the Internet of Things, still all the rage.
The kids love it.
But there's really no such thing as the Internet of Things.
It's another term for other people's computers in your house.
And it comes down to how much do you trust the people in control of those computers
to be on the lookout for your best interests.
I mean, so many things are connected through all this stuff now.
Could you have pictured maybe 10 years ago,
not being able to watch television because the Internet was down?
Right, right.
And not being able to change the temperature in your house.
I don't know if you heard about this, but on Monday,
a huge chunk of Queens lost its spectrum service, including where I live.
And the funny thing about this was looking at the online backlash surrounding it
and people complaining and people in a panic posting things like,
I need to turn the thermostat down for my dog and I'm not home
and there's no way to change the temperature in my apartment now.
Okay.
A few things here.
Hold on.
First of all, what in God's name is Spectrum?
Spectrum is the former Time Warner cable.
Oh, they're the cable company.
They changed their name.
How was Spectrum available?
They just happened to grab that name.
Okay.
Yeah, that's right.
Time Warner cable turned out to not have any relationship with Time Warner.
So they said, hey, it's a good idea.
We should change our name.
That's when I think AT&T was merging or something.
Okay, whatever.
Yeah.
So this person is concerned that their dog is getting overheated in their home
because they don't have access to their smart home through Time Warner
to turn down the thermostat.
How in God's name did they survive before the Internet of Things?
Clearly there was a way of doing this.
They put extra water out.
You need to have that way still work.
And this is what people seem to be forgetting.
These are the stories of this point in time that we really should remember is still ongoing.
This is a transformative point in the evolution of technology,
the industrial revolution.
These things are still being hashed out,
and there are little things we have to learn along the way.
Your dog may suffer from heat exhaustion if your Wi-Fi goes down if you set it up that way.
Yeah.
The screensaver just went on in the computer in front of me,
so I no longer can look at the script for the show.
People might not know this, but the show is very heavily scripted,
and we're constantly reading.
I've gone off script.
I'm ad-libbing right now.
You can't tell because I'm a professional,
and I'm trained for this kind of an emergency.
I don't know the password for the screensaver.
I can't read the script of the show anymore.
I can't keep up with what you guys are saying,
but you have to make do.
You have to have a backup plan for when things fall apart.
Look at a piece of technology in your house or wherever you happen to be.
Maybe you're driving in a car, and God forbid you have Waze running.
Boy, the wild goose chase Waze sent us on today on the way over here.
I don't want to get into that, but let's just say it fails.
It turns off.
It doesn't exist anymore.
Let's say you're in your house, and your cable goes out.
Can you survive?
Can you function?
You're in a store, and the electronic cash register stops working.
Can you still take money?
Can you count?
Can you make change?
No.
You need to train yourself so you can.
I've seen people completely shut down when technology fails,
and technology is going to fail at some point.
At one point or another, it's great to use it to have all the benefits,
but if you don't have a plan for when it occasionally fails,
then you become a victim of technology instead of technology becoming a tool for you.
Rob?
Yeah, that was happening in my neighborhood.
When the cable was out, I went into town to do some shopping
because, you know, no entertainment to be had in my apartment,
and the entertainment was outside
because half the shops couldn't take credit cards anymore
because that went through the same Internet connection.
Wow.
So people are having to figure out cash again,
and not only the people paying, but the people running the registers
have to figure out how to make change and things like that.
But they should be able to take credit cards as well.
There should be a way that they can get the information
and either transmit it later or have a different way of getting information
to the credit card companies.
These things do exist.
Does anyone still have those carbon paper things with the little slips
and it would scrape across the credit card?
Yeah, the imprint machines.
The companies are as guilty here as well.
I mean, I've called my cable company, which seems to keep coming up in conversation,
to report a cable outage,
to be met with a message saying to report this on their website.
Now think about that for a second.
How in God's name can I report it on the website if the cable is out
and I use them as an Internet service provider?
You can't do it.
They don't think these things through,
and they assume that everybody is connected when they are not connected.
So we need to prepare to not be connected occasionally.
And that's why I get frustrated when I'm using a phone that doesn't have service
and it can't do certain things that it's designed to do
because somebody decided, hey, I'm going to disable this
so that the most revenue is made and it only works under these conditions.
So that's when it becomes a disservice.
Okay, we can complain about this for the remainder of the time,
but I don't want to miss the other story,
of course, that being the Petya ransomware attack.
Now it turns out, we've been reading up about this all throughout the day,
there's a growing theory that this was not a ransomware attack at all.
There's a story actually out on Ars Technica,
which I think is really, really interesting, written by Dan Gooden.
Tuesday's massive outbreak of malware that shut down computers around the world
has been almost universally blamed on ransomware,
which by definition seeks to make money by unlocking data held hostage
only if victims pay a hefty fee.
Now some researchers are drawing an even bleaker assessment
that the malware was a wiper, yes, a wiper,
with the objective of permanently destroying data.
Now at first, researchers said the malware was a new version
of the Petya ransomware that first struck in early 2016,
and later researchers said it was a new, never-before-seen ransomware package
that mimics some of Petya's behaviors.
And now with more time to analyze the malware,
researchers today are highlighting some curious behavior
for a piece of malware that was nearly perfect in almost all other respects.
Its code is so aggressive that it's impossible for victims to recover their data.
So in other words, the payload delivered in yesterday's outbreak
wasn't ransomware at all.
Instead, its true objective was to permanently wipe
as many hard drives as possible on infected networks,
much the same way the Shamoon disk wiper
left the wake of destruction in Saudi Arabia.
And some researchers have said Shamoon is likely the result
of developers sponsored by an as-of-yet unidentified country.
And that's something that I think we see more and more with stories like this.
The screaming headlines always blame it on hackers,
but they shouldn't be blaming it on hackers.
It's governments. Governments are doing these destructive things.
We're talking about the election being hacked.
By hackers? No, by governments.
Governments are the ones with agendas,
and they are the ones that have something to gain from all of this.
And there is talk that this is something that the NSA created,
that the NSA might actually know how to disable this,
but in so doing, they might compromise some of their intelligence.
But when you see all these computers being affected,
and it's happening, it started in the Ukraine,
it's spreading all throughout the world,
and people are losing data left and right,
you have to wonder at what point do you swallow your losses
and help out the people that you are responsible for victimizing?
Go ahead.
Well, you bring up some very interesting points here, Emmanuel,
and I think this was an incredibly sophisticated attack
relative to what we saw with WannaCrypt a couple of weeks ago.
We've got two exploits being capitalized upon
that were supposedly developed by the NSA,
and those focused on the SMB protocol,
the Server Message Block Protocol, which is a file-sharing protocol.
Within Windows, it was used in particular.
That's where these exploits existed.
And then this particular malware, this worm,
combined custom code that would look in memory
to determine whether or not credentials were present,
and it would use other methodologies to identify credentials,
then make lateral moves around the network,
and thereby, if it could find credentials
for, let's say, a domain administrator,
it could then infect many, many other machines,
machines that were properly patched and updated.
Just because they're on the same network.
Just because they're on the same network.
That's absolutely right.
And it may have started with a strange accounting software,
I think called Medok or something like that, in Ukraine.
In Ukraine, right.
If you use Ukrainian accounting software,
you might want to double-check your updates.
That's what the email was sent, I guess, from that,
or related to that software?
Yeah.
It seemed to have...
Well, the attackers seemed to have compromised, possibly,
the actual developers of this particular software,
such that when they pushed out an update,
it contained this code, this patched code,
this updated patched code,
which is a really pernicious way to do it.
That means that somebody had to compromise the developers
and do it in such a way that the cryptographic signature
was not changed or modified or noticed that it was changed,
because software updates should be cryptographically signed.
Or it raises the question of,
could this possibly have been the product
of one of the internal developers
at the accounting software itself?
That would seem reasonable to me.
Maybe one of those developers was compromised
by a foreign nation and encouraged to do something like this
or blackmailed.
We really don't know, but it was very sophisticated,
and there were a lot of indicia that indicate
that this wasn't a money-making endeavor.
There was one Bitcoin address
to which everyone was supposed to provide payment.
There was a singular email address
that contained a ridiculously long string of digits
and numbers that was hard to type in.
And, of course, that email address
is going to be disabled almost immediately.
Right, right.
So the purpose of this didn't seem like
it was going to be to make money.
It also affected...
From what I've read on this,
and I didn't perform any analysis on it myself,
is that it started to encrypt files immediately,
but upon rebooting would attack the master boot record,
which is what the computer reads
when it's booting up the operating system.
And that's a particularly sensitive part of the hard drive
because if you foul up the MBR, the master boot record,
you pretty much are very likely to brick your machine.
And that's what it targeted,
so it did seem like the destruction
was part of the reason to do this.
Now, I think we should give Voltaire some credit,
even though he's not here, but, you know, on our list,
you know, he had mentioned,
well, why would a country like Russia
want to burn a complicated exploit like this?
And to be fair, sure, you know,
there's a lot of development that went into this.
If Russia was really behind this,
would they want to operate in this manner
and do this publicly?
Why are we assuming Russia's...
Or any other country.
Or any other country.
Let's say Belarus,
just because we won't get any complaints from Belarus.
Yeah, that's absolutely true.
So let's say it's Belarus, right?
They're putting a lot out there.
They put a lot of effort in there
just to cause chaos and sow destruction,
but perhaps that really was the point.
That could be the point of a foreign adversary,
on the other hand,
because there's a small window of time
in which you can sow this chaos
because after WannaCrypt,
people are still patching their machines.
They're updating these machines,
and there's a small window of time
within which you can sow this chaos.
What this also indicates is that people,
despite the WannaCrypt disaster,
have not been properly patching
and updated their outdated operating systems.
That's pretty scary.
Yeah, these are mostly legacy systems
that are being affected.
There could be an entity
that uses this accounting software
and that that was part of the reason
for this native updating process being exploited.
And you're correct.
It was not a phishing email.
It was this native updating that was compromised.
And perhaps a Ukrainian company or firm
or larger global firms
that use this accounting software
would have been basically immediately infected
because they used this software
and it was exploited in this way
and so vigorous.
Yeah, I'm just fascinated by all the trouble
that they apparently went to
to make this look like the ransomware
because ransomware over the past few years
has become this known thing.
People kind of know the drill now
when ransomware pops up,
at least people in charge of, say, networks
and things like that.
But now because of this,
sort of the radar has been jammed.
We don't know for certain what's going to happen
when we see a ransomware notice now.
And I'm wondering who it is
that wants to watch the world burn like this.
Well, I can guarantee
it's not hackers sitting around
deciding that this is what they want to do.
These are people with agendas.
And like I said, governments,
evil leaders of various companies or countries
rubbing their hands together
and cackling in glee.
That's where you got to look.
Just the fact that it's like an exploit
that got out of control of a security entity,
arm of a government
that uses these private markets
or whatever for exploits and so on,
it kind of shows a proof of concept
of how these things getting out of control
can become something entirely different
than they were ever intended to be.
And hackers are the people
who will figure out how to fix this.
They're the ones we should be listening to.
Now, as far as ways you can protect yourself,
best way I can think of,
tape backups on a regular basis.
If you have a tape backup of your network,
of your various systems,
then every day, every week,
yeah, you'll lose something if this happens to you.
You will lose something,
but you won't lose everything.
You won't lose a significant amount.
Yes, you have to invest in hardware
and make sure you keep the tape
in a different location
in case your office burns down or something.
You don't want to have it sitting
on top of the computer, obviously.
This will serve you in a number of scenarios,
and so many people, so many companies
don't do this.
So backups are your friend.
That's the biggest lesson we can learn from this.
And with respect to backups,
if you're backing up not to a tape drive,
let's say to an external drive,
the most important thing you can do
is to disconnect that external drive,
put it in a drawer somewhere,
lock it away,
because if it remains connected to your computer,
it can be discovered very, very easily.
And ransomware can often seek it out.
Yeah, use all those devices,
all those tactics,
and do it often.
And yeah, space is cheap.
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who pledged in the last Fund Drive,
we are in the process of collecting
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so we can send you your premiums.
If you have not paid,
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oth2600.com
If you have any questions, comments for the show,
we'll see you next week.
Good night.
Hello, and welcome to Alask4Who?
For you folks at home,
the object of the game
is to visually identify a person
by some part of his or her skeletal system.
Who belongs to this alien?
Oh, that's easy, Mike.
Alask4Alaska Senator Ted Stevens.
Oh, wait, no, I'm sorry.
Alask4RolandGif.
Yeah, yeah, I'm going to go with
Alask4RolandGif.
Ooh, no, I'm sorry.
Alaska4AlaskaSenator Schad Stephens.
Oh, darn.
Close enough.
The internet is not,
the internet is not a big truck.
The internet is not something
that you just dump something out of.
The internet is not,
the internet is not a big truck.
The internet is a series of tubes.
The internet is not,
the internet is not a big truck.
The internet is not something
that you just dump something out of.
The internet is not a big truck.
Streaming stuff under the internet.
Why?
Tubes.
The internet is tubes.
Connections.
Consumers.
Massive commercial purposes.
Big truck.
Long distance.
It's tubes.
Hangover tubes.
An enormous series of tubes.
Your own personal internet.
The World Wide Web.
The internet is tubes.
Tubes.
Tubes can be filled.
And if they're filled, the internet is going to be delayed.
A series of tubes.
The internet is not a big truck.
The internet is not something that you just dump something on.
I want to make sure people understand my position.
This system.
These people are asking for regulation.
Okay?
I just the other day got internet.
It was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday.
I got it yesterday.
Mr. Chairman.
Yes, sir.
I'm sorry.
I thought you were finished.
No, I'm not finished.
These people are massively invading this world of the internet.
Why?
Tubes.
The internet is tubes.
Providers.
Consumers.
Movies delivered to your house.
Big truck.
Small business.
It's tubes.
Hangover tubes.
An enormous series of tubes.
Your own personal internet.
The World Wide Web.
The internet is tubes.
Tubes.
Tubes can be filled.
And if they're filled, the internet is going to be delayed.
A series of tubes.
The internet is providers.