Stay tuned for Off The Hook, coming up in the next hour, so please stay tuned.
And you are listening to Radio Station WBAI New York. It's 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.
They could be at my dress, but if they could, they would. A million miles for the best, expect the worst. I hope that's understood, one million miles.
I hope that's understood, one million miles.
And a very good evening to everybody. The program is Off The Hook. Emmanuel Goldstein here with you, joined tonight by Kyle.
Yes.
And over in Skype land we have Roxy Firefly.
Good evening.
We have Gila.
Hello.
And we have Alex.
Yes, you do. Good evening.
We have a special cast of characters.
Well, folks, tonight is going to be a rather somber night because we are paying tribute to two giants who have left us in the past week.
Referring to our friend, fellow hacker Dan Kaminsky, died way too young, the age of 42.
And, of course, WBAI's own Bob Fass, a legend here at the radio station.
So we're going to be paying tribute to both of them during this hour and sharing your memories if you'd like to share them with us during overtime.
And we can take calls later on tonight. That's at 8 o'clock on YouTube.
More details on that later, but first to Dan.
This is just unbelievable.
Nobody was expecting it.
Dan Kaminsky is a well-known security researcher.
So much more than that, though.
You might know him from his discovery of a fundamental flaw in the fabric of the Internet.
That's a pretty big one, right?
Passed away on Friday at his home in San Francisco, 42 years old.
His aunt said the cause was diabetes, ketoacidosis, which is a serious diabetic condition that led to his frequent hospitalization in recent years.
I had no idea. I had no idea.
This is the kind of thing that someone like Dan would just keep to himself.
In 2008, he was widely hailed as a digital Paul Revere after he found a serious flaw in the Internet's basic plumbing that could allow skilled coders to take over websites,
siphon off bank credentials, or even shut down the Internet.
Dan alerted the Department of Homeland Security, executives at Microsoft and Cisco, and other Internet security experts to the problem and helped spearhead a patch.
He was a respected practitioner of penetration testing.
That's the business of compromising the security of computer systems at the behest of owners who want to harden their systems from attack.
It was a profession his mother, Trudy Maurer, said he had first developed a knack for as a four-year-old.
Four-year-old, yeah.
That's after his father gave him a computer from Radio Shack.
Could it be any more perfect?
And by age five, Dan had taught himself to code.
His childhood was a parallel to the 1983 movie War Games, in which a teenager, played by Matthew Broderick, unwittingly accesses a U.S. military supercomputer.
When Dan Kaminsky was 11, his mother said she received an angry phone call from someone who identified himself as a network administrator for the Western United States.
The administrator said someone at her residence was monkeying around in territories where he shouldn't be monkeying around.
Without her knowledge, Dan had been examining military websites.
The administrator vowed to punish him by cutting off the family's Internet access.
His mom warned the administrator that if he made good on this threat, she would take out an advertisement in the San Francisco Chronicle denouncing the Pentagon's security.
I will take out an ad that says your security is so crappy, even an 11-year-old can break it.
They settled on a compromise, three days without Internet.
And then, nearly two decades after that happened, he wound up saving the Internet.
What Dan Kaminsky discovered in 2008 was a problem with the Internet's basic address system, known as the Domain Name System, or DNS.
A dynamic phone book that converts human-friendly web addresses, like nytimes.com, wbai.org, google.com, into their machine-friendly numeric counterparts.
He found the way that thieves or spies could covertly manipulate DNS traffic so that a person typing the website for a bank would instead be redirected to an imposter site that could steal the user's account number and password.
Dan's first call was to Paul Vixie, a longtime steward of the Internet's DNS system.
The usually unflappable Mr. Vixie recalled that his panic grew as he listened to Mr. Kaminsky's explanation.
I realized we were looking down the gun barrel of history. It meant everything in the digital universe was going to have to get patched.
Mr. Vixie asked Dan if he had a fix in mind.
He said, we are going to get all the makers of DNS software to coordinate a fix implemented at the same time and keep it a secret until I present my findings at the Black Hat conference.
And over several days, that's just what they did.
They cobbled together a solution in stealth, a fix that Mr. Vixie compared to dog excrement.
But given the threat of Internet apocalypse, he recalled it as being the best dog excrement we could ever come up with.
And by the time Dan Kaminsky took the stage at the Black Hat conference that August, the web had been spared.
Mr. Kaminsky, who typically donned the t-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops, appeared on stage in a suit that his mother had bought for him.
She had also requested that he wear closed-toed shoes.
He sort of complied, twirling onto the stage in roller skates.
And when his talk was complete, Dan was approached by a stranger in the crowd.
It was the administrator who had kicked him off the Internet years earlier.
And now he wanted to thank Mr. Kaminsky and ask for an introduction to the meanest mother he ever met.
And you know, when a reporter asked why he didn't exploit that DNS flaw to become immensely wealthy, which he certainly could have,
he said that doing so would have been morally wrong.
And I didn't want his mother to have to visit him in prison.
Dan Kaminsky was an incredible person. We all knew that.
You know, I've only met him a few times, but in each of those times, he was just bubbling over with life, positivity, support.
It's all the best things you could possibly ask for.
We had him keynote at The Next Hope in 2010.
I'd like to play an excerpt from that.
This is Dan Kaminsky at Hope.
This gentleman has wanted to attend a Hope conference for many years.
He and Emanuel have tried to work it out. He's very excited to be here.
He's well-respected in the computer security world.
Dan Kaminsky.
Holy crap, I finally made a Hope.
Took me long enough.
So, hi, I'm Dan.
I've got a company, whatever.
I want to start this talk by telling a story.
Who here is familiar with the TLS renegotiation bug found by Marsh Ray last year?
Was that not, like, the most beautiful bug that had come out in years?
Like, this was a core crypto design flaw.
It had been there since the beginning of SSL.
It was one of those situations where two pieces of the protocol thought the same message meant two different things entirely.
Beautiful.
So, Marsh finds this bug, pulls together a whole bunch of people, just like I did for DNS,
and you know what the best part of, like, they did like months and months of secret work.
You know what the best part of it was?
I had nothing to do with it.
No idea what was going on.
I went to sleep every night blissfully unaware.
So, this was a very big effort.
They spent thousands of hours coming up with a very deep fix.
The fix was almost perfect.
Almost.
The fix that I ended up coming up with ended up not working on about .01, .03% of servers.
But, you know, that's pretty good, right?
99.7% compliance.
I mean, that's totally good enough for deployment, right?
Yeah, so it's off by default everywhere in the known universe.
Crap.
So, this is interesting to me.
A huge amount of effort was spent.
A huge amount of code was written.
A lot of political capital was exerted.
No benefit to my mom.
That's not cool.
I got some bad news and I got some good news.
The bad news is, as hackers, we sometimes give really bad advice.
Sometimes we'll tell people, this is what you're going to do and it will be secure,
and that's all that matters in the world.
We, in more technical terms, only consider our own engineering requirements,
which is that it can't get compromised.
We assume that the environment is static.
We assume that the tools are static, that things are going to be as they are.
And, you know, the only thing we care about when we give our advice is, well, at least it's safe.
And in the case of the TLS bug, well, at least I can turn it on for myself.
So that's the bad news.
The good news is, if things are ever actually to get better,
if we're ever actually to see people having more secure systems,
I'm going to tell you something.
It ain't happening without hackers.
People who don't know how to break into things really don't know how to fix them.
At the end of the day, the analogy I've been using is,
it's kind of like turning off your cell phone when you get onto the airplane.
Whatever it has to do with, it's got nothing to do with safety.
I got a secret.
No one turns off their phones.
So let's start by talking about something that is really, really broken,
which I hope through some work eventually we can finally see get fixed.
What we have here are two SSH sessions to two completely different servers.
I've logged into two boxes.
Okay.
When I log into two SSH servers,
do I need to worry about one of those servers hacking the other?
No.
When I log into two different websites,
do I need to worry about one of those websites logging into the other?
Yes.
Why is this?
Because session management on the web is totally broken,
and session management in SSH works pretty well.
The web was never designed to host authenticated resources.
Authentication was basically bolted on.
I mean, if you go to the beginning,
once upon a time the web was just like flat files in a directory.
And then people started saying,
hey, wait a second, we can make money if we be a little dynamic here.
And that's when it all started going downhill.
Now, the real world normal mechanism by which credentials tend to be managed are cookies.
The idea is that you have some form,
you type in a password because password is all we can finally make work after all these years,
and you don't want to have to type in a password for every single web page you go to.
So what we end up seeing is the first time you enter a password,
you get a cookie back,
a tiny little opaque blob that you now attach to every single request to a site.
And now you don't have to keep putting in your password over and over and over again.
That seems pretty reasonable.
The thing is, cookies are attached to every single request to a site,
even if that request came from some foreign domain.
So you're logged into your bank,
and you're also browsing some random bad website,
that random bad website can mix his URL request with your credentials.
At the end of the day,
this is why cross-site scripting and cross-site request forgery is a big deal.
It's because the actual credentials that we use to log into websites are really, really leaky.
Now, what we tend to say as hackers, as pen testers is,
well, when you log into a website,
you should have a little extra blob attached to every single URL.
You might see this little blob of noise called token equals and some noise
whenever you're browsing the authenticated portions of a site.
This works.
So that's right. That's cool. It works. We got a solution. We're done.
Amazingly enough, devs kind of hate this,
because cookies are automatic.
You flip a switch, they work, the browser takes care of it, you're done.
With this stuff, you have to touch every single URL in a web application.
So you know what happens?
People don't do it.
And so we go ahead, we advise people,
oh yeah, go throw this token on.
And then they try,
and they realize it's going to be more work to add this little token
than it was for them to write the web application in the first place.
And so they go tell you to pound sand.
And then you come back six months later and you have the same finding,
and you keep doing this until the pen test budget is exhausted.
So, couldn't the tools be a little better?
Every time I look at the web scene,
I see people arguing about whether SVG files should be able to animate.
That's nice. That's cool.
Could we maybe have the ability to log into a website securely?
Maybe that's a little more important.
So I tried to build this.
I went ahead, and I built four different systems
that tried to go ahead and make it so you knew
when you were browsing a website
that any request actually came from the site at play.
In other words, I want to be able to differentiate
when the site I'm logged into sends me somewhere
versus when some other site does this.
This shouldn't be a complicated thing.
It's really hard.
So I came up with four different mechanisms.
We don't need to go into the details.
I just want to say they all got owned thoroughly.
Thank you, Seastone, Kooza55, Amit Klein, Dave Ross, and SirDarkat.
This is awesome.
We have a bit of a problem in our scene.
One of those problems is we're really slow
to get around to actually breaking stuff.
I don't know if you've noticed.
We don't break things when they're originally being developed.
We don't break them when they're released.
We don't even break them when early adopters are using them.
What happens is something gets to a certain popularity level,
and then all of a sudden we're like,
oh, wow, lots of people are using this thing.
Let's find out if it's crap.
Little late.
We need to close this feedback loop.
We need to get to the point where when major new technologies
are looking like they're going to get adopted,
we have a reason to believe that they have been thoroughly
and publicly and brutally audited.
So here's the deal.
Whatever is going on with everyone else's defenses,
I want mine to get destroyed.
No question, no delay,
because life is too short to back broken code.
What could possibly be worse than spending years of your life on a defense
and then one day finding out, oh, yeah, that doesn't work at all?
Session management is going to require some pretty deep changes to the browser.
And if you're interested in it, come up, walk up to me,
and we can talk about some of the details.
There is something else that might not require nearly the sort of deep changes.
There's a really interesting guy I've known for about 10 years, Jeremiah Grossman.
He runs a company called White Hat Security.
White Hat does tremendous amounts of website auditing.
And he has something that a lot of us really should be looking at more,
which is data.
We tend to run a lot on anecdotes, you know, oh, I heard.
There is power in actual concrete information about how things fail.
One of the things that Jeremiah found, and I'm just going to quote him in entirety,
the bottom line is there just is not a measurable difference in the security postures
from language to language or framework to framework,
specifically Microsoft ASP Classic, .NET, Java, ColdFusion, PHP, and Perl.
Sure, in theory, one might be significantly more secure than the others,
but when deployed on the web, it's just not the case.
I'm not going to ask you to raise your hands, but I bet a lot of you in this room
absolutely assumed that mattered what language you use and what framework you use.
But when you have a guy who's actually going out there breaking websites by the thousands,
eh, 10% difference here, 20% difference there.
It's not a big difference what's going on.
Now, I don't think even Jeremiah realized how significant this finding is,
because, you know, we've got some languages in here that are type safe,
and we've got languages in here that are, most assuredly, not type safe.
We're spending a lot of money on this safety.
Where's the safety?
This is a huge and massive and order of magnitude expenditure we're making.
Why aren't we getting the safety we're paying for?
Well, one thing to be clear about,
we're not really actually using type safe languages, even when we think we are.
The reality of web development is programming language.
You've got HTML, you've got JavaScript, you've got CSS, a little bit of XML,
let's bust in some SQL, how about some PHP?
Okay, now we'll do some C-sharp.
Every time you move, it's a new language.
All of these languages need to communicate with one another,
and they all have their own type systems, they all have their own internal things.
But when you need to have cross-language communication,
from PHP to SQL, from C-sharp to HTML,
how does it end up working?
It works through strings, just raw text.
There's no type safety involved, there's no context involved,
it's just, bleh, here's some programming.
So, this time last year I would have told you type safety was useless.
Turns out I was wrong.
Happens quite a bit, actually.
Never, by the way, be afraid of being wrong.
Being wrong just means the world is more interesting than you thought it was.
What great words to attend on.
The late Dan Kaminsky giving a keynote address
at the Next Hope 2010 Hotel, Pennsylvania, here in New York City.
And, you know, the obituary I was reading portions of from the New York Times
has a sub-headline, which is priceless.
If you are reading this obituary online, you owe your digital safety to him.
Daniel Kaminsky.
Folks, did you have occasion to talk with Dan over the years?
Rob?
Yeah, I mean, he was a guest on this program a couple of times in 2010
and again in 2011, and he was always a joy to be around,
a joy to speak with, you know, brilliant on the air, of course.
And this has been borne out not just by my experience,
but by so many experiences that the hacker community has been sharing
on social media and such since the announcement went out.
He was just a really great, amiable, kind, jolly dude.
He was, I remember, my biggest memory of him,
my biggest personal memory of him and this image of him
that I'll be hanging on to is just we had gone out to dinner
after he was a guest on Off the Hook.
We were at a restaurant somewhere.
I don't remember the restaurant.
I don't remember what the occasion was or the conversation was that sparked this,
but I just remember laughing with him.
He was laughing.
I was laughing.
You guys were laughing.
The other folks who were involved in the program back then and were with us
were laughing, and just this whole table full of us
were just having that kind of deep, all-consuming laughter
that was like echoing throughout the restaurant,
and I just remember that so well and so clearly
and the feeling of that and the joy of that,
and that's my picture of Dan Kaminsky that I'll be hanging on to.
He brought that positivity to so many people,
and I never heard him say, I've never heard of him saying
a bad, negative, or judgmental word about anybody.
He knew his stuff.
Not only was he a positive, as you call him, jolly person,
but he really, really was an expert who knew of what he spoke,
but it didn't go to his head.
You saw at the beginning of that talk, yeah, I own a company, whatever.
He wasn't about self-promotion.
He was about sharing his story,
and he could just talk in front of a crowd
without any kind of a script or anything like that
and just share information.
It was such an inspiration to so many people.
I can only imagine how many people are in the field of computer security
or just hacking in general after listening to what he said
and how he presented himself.
Yeah, I really aspire and was so drawn to that charisma
and presence and light and ability to take a joke.
First of all, I can't recall how many different times
I might have bumped into him.
Like the memory Rob is having,
I have an amalgamation of impressions of him
and that smile and joy in being able to share
and do that kind of storytelling, but relate it.
Relate it to whatever it is you hear in this talk,
to technology and so forth.
It really just struck me that he had that hubris
or just the ability to take a joke as well.
I have this memory.
I don't know what event it was,
but I think he was walking by or leaving a talk.
This is the kind of thing.
When we used to have events,
the type of thing you often hear is said about them
is that you have these interactions in the hallway.
You have conversations.
You can share with people what you're into.
You never know who you might be around at any given moment,
especially camps and so forth.
People are volunteering.
You could be working side by side with somebody
who's presenting and so forth.
I know he's walking to or from somewhere,
as everyone does, and getting crap about,
at least the next talk is not about DNS with Dan Kaminsky.
Kind of trying to catch him so that he hears it
as he's walking by.
Just little things like that would bring out that same laughter.
I wish I had more details about it,
but that is something that sticks with me.
Alex?
Sure.
I didn't know Dan very well.
I crossed past him, I think, a few times.
Perhaps a while ago over at DEF CON,
and I think at Hope many years ago, too.
But I didn't know him personally well.
But what I know of him is exactly like what you said, Emanuel,
on all the 2600 groups where people are sharing anecdotes.
What really struck me is not only the humility of this man,
who was a font of knowledge, never let it get to his head,
but also there were just so many stories about him.
It seems like almost everyone has a personal anecdote
about how Dan Kaminsky helped them out in one way or another.
Whether it was, I'm in a pinch on this project,
or I need to move boxes, whatever it is.
I mean, the guy seemed to be everywhere, all at once,
and willing to help anyone that needed help.
And yet at the same time was just sharing knowledge.
Really typified and exemplified, I think,
the very best of the hacker spirit.
And it's incredibly sad and incredibly, I just think, tragic, really,
that we lost him at the age of 42.
Way, way, way too young.
It feels as if this was a major, major loss for the community,
but also for the world.
I mean, this guy, 42 years old, look what he did in those 42 years.
You mentioned his childhood years, Emanuel,
imagine if he had another 40.
Imagine if he had another 50.
Maybe even 60.
The impact on the world that is lost is just another tragedy, I think,
that we don't even know how to quantify at the moment.
Yeah, well said.
Thanks for chiming in on that.
Yeah.
Delia, any thoughts from you?
I never met Dan Kaminsky.
I am now a little bit embarrassed to admit I had really not heard of him
until Rob mentioned to me a few days ago that this piece of news had broken.
And just listening to the excerpt of his talk, the humor, the vitality,
the passion, it was keeping my interest audio only.
I was not in the room.
I could not see whatever he was presenting, but I was fascinated
and I wanted to hear more, completely out of context.
And I can see how his energy must have been such an amazing piece
of the community in so many ways,
just echoing everything that you guys are saying.
I am deeply sorry I never got a chance to hear him or meet him.
Well, it just brings home the point that we have to cherish what we have
when it's around, whether that be places, people, events,
because they're so valuable and so able to disappear and be gone.
So we have Dan in our memories, and hopefully he's influenced us
to be better people.
He's certainly influenced us to be more secure.
Now we have a musical piece.
Rob, do you want to intro this?
Yeah, there is a bit of a hit song called Barbra Streisand
by an outfit called Duck Sauce, which is some music and then a sampled voice
saying Barbra Streisand every so often.
And it became kind of a running joke among DJs and that whole scene
to substitute in whatever name you wanted in place of Barbra Streisand.
There was a version that some DJ somewhere put together
changing the name to Dan Kaminsky, and this version was played
at hacker conferences, at DJ performances, hacker conference-adjacent parties,
dance parties, things like that.
There's even a clip out there somewhere of Dan himself dancing to this song,
which we'll try to find and retweet later.
But it's just an example of how people knew who he was,
and he was just in everyone's minds.
And he appreciated being a little bit of a meme himself too,
despite how humble he was about his actual accomplishments.
So it's a bit of fun, and it's a salute to him.
Dan Kaminsky.
Dan Kaminsky.
Dan Kaminsky.
Dan Kaminsky.
Dan Kaminsky.
Dan Kaminsky.
Dan Kaminsky.
Dan Kaminsky.
Dan Kaminsky.
Dan Kaminsky.
Dan Kaminsky.
Dan Kaminsky.
Dan Kaminsky.
Dan Kaminsky.
Dan Kaminsky.
Dan Kaminsky.
Dan Kaminsky.
Dan Kaminsky.
Dan Kaminsky.
Dan Kaminsky.
Dan Kaminsky.
And if you have stories that you'd like to share later on of Dan Kaminsky,
over time we'll be talking more, and we'll be taking your phone calls.
Phone number 802-321-4225.
That can be found on YouTube.
Go to the 2600.com homepage and look at the link on top to get in line for overtime.
Yes, Rob, go ahead.
I just want to really quickly thank the Duke Zip for finding that copy for us
so we could play it today.
Yes, absolutely.
Hard to believe, but we have a second New York Times obituary to quote from.
And this is for someone much closer to home, someone whose voice graced the airwaves of WBAI,
this very radio station, for many years, Bob Fass,
who for more than 50 years hosted an anarchic and influential radio show,
to put it mildly, on WBAI, mixed political conversation, avant-garde music,
serendipitous encounters, outright agitation.
He passed away Saturday in North Carolina at the age of 87.
He called his radio show Radio Unnameable because its freewheeling format didn't fit into conventional categories
like top 40, oral talk, things like that.
He had this unique voice that the Times describes quite accurately, I think,
as both soothingly intimate and insistently urgent.
And sometimes reflected the mellowing impact of the pot he smoked on the air.
He might start out with a critique of segregation or the Vietnam War
and then introduce a Greenwich Village friend named Abby Hoffman
to muse about a demonstration by the radical and theatrical yippies
that had showered traders in the New York Stock Exchange with dollar bills.
Or he might bring on an ambitious Minnesotan named Bob Dylan,
pretending to be an entrepreneur who manufactured clothing for folk singers.
Yeah, in various appearances Mr. Dylan did comic monologues featuring characters
with names like Elvis Bickle, Rumpel Billy Burp and Frog Rugster
and asked cabbies to bring food to the station.
In one appearance he tried out an unfinished composition called Blown in the Wind.
I'd put anyone on because the idea was if you didn't like what I was doing,
three minutes later I'd be doing something else, Bob Fass said in an interview.
He was not the first freestyle disc jockey in the country,
but he became the most prominent.
He helped forge the identity of WBAI,
paved the way for other popular WBAI hosts like Larry Josephson and Steve Post.
And at times Bob Fass who helped found the yippies, something I didn't know,
served as the instigator of what today might be called crowdsourcing.
In February of 1967 he urged listeners to flood the International Arrivals Building
at JFK Airport for a fly-in to greet incoming travelers after midnight.
About 3,000 people, many of them intoxicated both by marijuana
and by the excitement of taking part in a seemingly pointless communal escapade, showed up.
In 1971, one of the most dramatic episodes of his career,
a caller told Mr. Fass that he was so despondent about having made a mess of his life
that he had swallowed an overdose of pills.
With thousands of listeners, riveted by the live drama,
Mr. Fass kept the caller talking while dispatching associates to contact the police.
The telephone number was traced, the caller was found, unconscious but alive,
in an Upper East Side apartment.
His personality sometimes got him into trouble though.
In 1977 he was a leader of a unionizing effort at WBAI,
exploiting his microphone to garner support against his employers, the Pacifica Foundation,
and changes it had instituted in management and format.
He even barricaded himself in the studio, which at the time was in a church at East 62nd Street,
and continued broadcasting until executives called in the police.
He was banned from the station for five years.
In 2018, Bob Fass suffered a fiasco not unlike those he used to hear about
from distressed late-night callers.
While he was moving his belongings from his home in Staten Island to a house in Danbury, Connecticut,
he flicked on a malfunctioning gas fireplace and set off a two-alarm blaze.
He was using a wheelchair, he had to be carried out by the movers,
but he inhaled a good deal of smoke and scores of tapes of his shows that he had held onto were damaged.
Happily, though, there was a massive effort on the part of Columbia University,
who purchased 10,000 hours of deteriorating tape recordings of his program and began digitizing them.
And those recordings include his running account of the 1968 occupation of Columbia University by students
protesting the construction of a university gymnasium.
We've taken on a major audio archive of an outsider figure
who was positioned uniquely at a critical moment in American history.
At the end of the day, this is a huge corpus of data that will be used by historians.
Well, let's go back in history to 1967.
I believe this is April 4th, 1967.
Right here on these airwaves, WBAI 99.5 FM,
where Bob Fass had a special guest on, someone named Tiny Tim.
You know Tiny Tim, right? Tiptoe through the tulips?
This was before anyone knew who he was, 1967.
I think it was before he appeared on Laugh-In.
Let's listen.
That's not Tiny Tim, that's a record.
I'd sure like to hear you learn that song, Tiny.
Thanks, Bob. I think I will, because I have to get a hold of that music,
because it's a great number. Thanks for the suggestion.
I also want to thank Mr. Lyle for the guitar there.
People have been calling up and asking where they can buy this record of yours that hasn't come out yet.
I guess the answer is nowhere, yet.
That's right, but it will be sold at the scene at 301 West 46th Street.
The Steve Paul scene, and so if they'd like to know, they can call Judson 2.
Tiny, will you come up during our marathon?
We may very well be having another marathon soon.
I'd love to.
Very good.
Gee, if you let me know, I'd love to, Bob.
Afterwards, you tell me how to get in touch with you, OK?
Great, thanks, Bob, and thanks for everything.
OK, that's wonderful of you to come up tonight, Tiny.
Oh, thanks, Bob.
And I hope perhaps you'll make it to the sweep-in.
I'll certainly try.
And maybe you can help me to sign off in just a minute or two with some sign-off music.
I have a theme.
Oh, OK, but first I want to talk about the coronation.
On April 11th, WBAI is going to crown probably the last emperor of the Byzantine...
Emperor of all the Byzantines, the Byzantine Empire.
Prince Robert, who is, I'm sure, a follower of you, Tiny Tim.
Prince Robert Rohan de Courtenay, who is the heir presumptive to the throne of the Byzantines,
a throne which has not been occupied for 900 years.
And Prince Robert is going to be crowned by Andy Warhol at the Cheetah on April 11th.
And it's going to be... the admission is going to be $5 a person or $8 a couple,
and the benefit will be for WBAI's building fund.
So that's what's happening.
And there'll be all kinds of other festivities that will be taking place that day at the Cheetah.
And there'll be live lions and live boa constrictors and live belly dancers.
It's going to be a marvelous affair.
Joselle is the live belly dancer.
The live boa constrictor's name is Sammy.
And Andy Warhol will be impersonated by Andy Warhol.
It's going to be an event.
He's a nice man.
I almost didn't mention Lord Harry Rosti, who's the grand maître de la corps of Prince Robert.
He's of Italian lineage.
Mr. Warhol's a nice gentleman.
He came to the scene and he had his lovely velvet underground there
with Miss Ingrid Superstar and Miss Suzanne Bottomley and Miss Nico.
And he was so nice.
And it's such a thrill knowing a gentleman like him.
I also knew him in California when I was out there with Hugh Romney.
He was so nice, too.
How is Hugh Romney? Have you heard from him?
Not in months.
We worked together in the little theater last March of 66.
And then I made a little movie with Peter Yarrow, Peter, Paul, and Mary.
Yeah, I saw him on the street the other day.
You said he's into something new. He wants to come up and talk about it.
Oh, I don't know about that.
Maybe even do it.
Oh, he's a wonderful person.
He's a wonderful man.
And my manager, Mr. Ronnie Lyons, is a wonderful man, too.
They're all nice.
But everyone is so wonderful.
How about Al Shackler?
Oh, who's that?
Another manager.
Al Shackler, he's a wonderful man, too.
Oh, of course.
Oh, wonderful, Mr. Coleman.
Mr. Coleman is wonderful.
Okay, Tiny, thank you very much for coming here tonight.
And I hope that your record gets what it deserves.
And I expect to hear you on Murray the K.
Oh, he's wonderful, too.
He's wonderful, God bless him.
Oh, yes.
Okay, Tiny, thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
And the name of the record is Tiny Tim.
And the photograph of Tiny Tim on the cover is worth whatever the price of the record is alone.
It's gorgeous.
It's really gorgeous.
Thank you, Tiny.
And let's see, I've spoken about the Cheetah.
I haven't spoken about subscriptions, really, with any kind of vehemence for a long time.
But we did pretty well last month.
I think we came within 99 and 99 one-hundredths of our goal or something like that.
Somebody said it was 99.5 percent of our goal, which is, like, too beautiful to believe,
because we're at 99.5 on the FM dial.
So I can't really believe it worked out that well.
But this month we have a goal of 350 new subscriptions, 710 renewals,
and a total of $15,000, which shouldn't be too hard this month,
because already we have, let's see, 1,823, which is up almost $1,000 over yesterday.
So that's beautiful.
If you'd like to join the ever-growing number of people who subscribe to WBAI,
something close to 12,000 now, we're moving up.
Call Oxford 7-2288 and say,
I would like to join the ever-growing list of people who subscribe to WBAI by calling Oxford 7-2288.
Subscriptions are $15 a year or $10 a year if you're a student.
And if it weren't for these people who subscribe and send us money,
we would not be able to broadcast, because we don't sell anything on this station but radio programs.
Nobody tries to talk you into borrowing money or depositing money in the bank
or buying that kind of cigarette or this kind of car
or fixing your transcription or something like that, whatever.
This is a radio station that cuts out the middle man.
We sell our listeners our radio programs.
And, of course, you can get them for nothing for a while.
But if people don't support us, then the money doesn't come in and we go off the air.
The equation is relatively simple.
Of course, you can continue to let other people pull your load, eavesdrop,
but that's not nice.
Call Oxford 7-2288 and say, all right, okay, I don't want to go straight.
I don't want to be billed for a subscription.
Oxford 7-2288.
Or you can send a check to WBAI, 30 East 39th Street.
I guess I should probably step in here and say don't do any of that,
because all those numbers are long disconnected and that address no longer works.
That was Bob Fass from April 4th, 1967, one of our most beloved radio hosts here on WBAI.
And that was part of a show that he did with Tiny Tim.
And, by the way, that counts as us asking for support from you, because it all still applies.
The only things that changed were the phone numbers.
212-209-2950 is the phone number to call if that inspired you to pledge something to WBAI.
You could also go to our website, which was something that was unheard of in 1967.
Give to WBAI.org.
Give the number to WBAI.org.
But, boy, that was incredible.
What do you think, Kyle?
I love hearing it, and definitely a different time.
I don't know if I could like, well, maybe I did.
I don't know.
It seemed like there was a lot going on in whatever room, whatever broadcast control room.
Well, I had the good fortune of sometimes doing a show next to Bob.
So, basically, what that meant was I'd see all the chaos that followed him when he did a radio show.
And there'd be crowds of people, you know, about five or six people that were part of the show in one way or another.
So there was always ongoing dialogue going on.
But that was the chaos that he lived in and that he brought to the airwaves to kind of bring us all together.
It was magic.
And he had that same magic throughout his entire career, you know, into the 21st century.
Even when we were listening to him when he was doing a show from his home in Staten Island when he couldn't come to the station anymore,
it still had that magic, that kind of chaotic getting together and doing something.
Very much like what we've been experiencing and a lot of other people producing shows have been doing during the pandemic, but this was well before that.
Having people help out, engineer at the broadcast control so that he could communicate.
I know we did. I heard a couple of shows like that.
You might have heard a reference to a sweep-in in that last excerpt.
That was something that Bob Fass coordinated with his thousands of listeners to basically descend upon the East Village
and start cleaning the streets because the sanitation department was on strike.
It made headlines, but that was the kind of magic that you could have with radio.
One of his steady listeners was said to be a young Howard Stern,
and you could very much see the influence in the way he did radio and the way Howard Stern would later do radio.
Again, like Dan Kaminsky, this voice is so inspirational to so many,
and it's just terribly sad that we won't hear it live anymore.
Folks, Rob Gila, Alex, did you ever meet Bob Fass, or were you able to hear him? Rob?
Yeah, I didn't have the pleasure of meeting him, but since I was young, when I discovered BAI, I would listen to his show regularly.
It was one of those things where you could just, whatever else was going on in the world or in your life or whatever,
you could tune in and you knew what you were going to get, and you knew it was not going to be boring, whatever the heck it was.
Sometimes it was the most random stuff, the most random people, but it was always a chunk of radio worth listening to.
Never at the end of Radio Unnameable did you feel like you just wasted an hour or whatever. It was important.
I've got a last excerpt. I really don't want to cut this off, and we can continue this conversation in overtime on YouTube after the show.
Again, go to 2600.com, click on the link there to join us and call us.
But this is a sign-off, a sign-off from that same show. You'll hear how WBAI used to sign-off. It's pretty unique.
Write to us, oth at 2600.com. Please continue to listen to WBAI, and we will see you next week and in a few minutes on overtime.
And at this time, WBAI concludes another day of broadcasting.
WBAI is owned and operated by the Pacifica Foundation, a nonprofit educational institution operating noncommercial stations in the New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles areas.
We operate on Channel 258 at 99.5 megacycles with an effective radiated power of 5.4 kilowatts.
Horizontal. And 3.85 kilowatts. Vertical. By authority of the Federal Communications Commission.
Our transmitter is located in the Empire State Building, and our studios and our offices are at 30 East 39th Street and 489 5th Avenue.
And you, and you, and you out there in Radio Land.
In New York City. And we thank you for joining us today.
Until the dawn breaks through.
And we hope that our broadcasting has encouraged you to join us again later this morning when the dawn breaks through with Larry Josephson.
And in the beginning.
At about 7 o'clock.
Radio Unnameable will be on the air at about midnight.
Until then.
Bye bye.
Bye bye.
Louder, he can't hear you.
Bye bye.
Bye bye.
Bye bye.
Say it to the microphone, come quick, quick, quick, over here, over here, quick, quick.
Oh.
Are you okay mom?
Now sit here, say bye bye, say bye bye to the microphone.
Bye bye.
Again.
Bye bye.
More.
Bye bye.
More.
At our brand new old number, which is 212-209-2950.
Again, that's 212-209-2950.
Hey, it's our old number, but it's new again.
Cause everything old is new again.
I like it.
Cause everything old is new again.
Hi, this is Hannah from WBAI's premiums department.
As you may know, WBAI now has a new phone number to call to make donations or to pledge for premiums at 212-209-2950.
Thank you for being a WBAI member and for making a contribution to keep the station afloat.
But, if you have a question about a premium, please do not call that number.
All the call center can do is take down the info and send it to premiums at WBAI.org.
And time on the line costs us money.
Instead, please email us directly with your question or concern.
The email is premiums at WBAI.org or call 212-209-2870.
We promise to get back to you within a week's time.
Again, please call 212-209-2870 if you have a question about a premium you ordered or email premiums at WBAI.org.