The previous program, oh now it's on, okay.
The previous program was Economic Update with Richard Wolff, heard
Wednesdays at 6.30 p.m. Stay tuned for Off the Hook and this is WBAI New York
99.5 FM and WBAI.org online.
Hello, you're listening to WBAI New York. It's just about 7 o'clock which means
once again it's time for Off the Hook.
Really, it is.
It's just about 7 o'clock which means once again it's time for Off the Hook.
And a very good evening, sorry about the program. It is Off the Hook here
we are flying by the seat of our pants. Emmanuel here, joined by Kyle over on the
other side of the studio, who's been silent. Thank you very much for that.
And we have Rob T. Firefly. Good evening. We have Gila. Good evening. And I think we
have Alex. Do we have Alex? We should have Alex. Yeah, you've got me. That sounded more like Rob
than Alex. Good evening. Okay, how are you doing Alex? Alex, it sounds like you're on a plane.
Or maybe not. Maybe I'm not supposed to say that. It did sound like he's on a plane. Yes,
he's muted on a plane. Alex, did you mute yourself? Yeah, we don't need the video but
I think there's some latency, some serious latency. I've been meaning to talk to you about
that for a while Alex but now is not the time. You know what, let's try this. Let's see how
much latency there is. I'm going to count down to 1 and you say 1 the same time you think I'm
going to say 1. Is that clear? Yep. Okay, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. 1. And that's how much latency we have.
Okay, so about a second and a half I'd say is what we have. Now Alex, the real story here is
you're on an airplane. Where are you going? I am on my way over to DEF CON to the other
headquarters. Oh that's right, that's this weekend. That's this weekend coming up in Las Vegas, right?
Yeah, that starts actually tomorrow. So I think it's going to start tomorrow and go through the
weekend. I'll only be there for a couple of days and then talk to you about it. Well, I'm happy that you did not let that prevent you from taking part in tonight's program. Even though you're on an airplane, how high up are you right now?
I'm about at sea level actually. It's not as scary as it sounds. We're actually just taxiing on the runway.
Oh, you're on the runway. Okay, don't scare me like that. You're on the runway. You should be at sea level.
Okay, so what runway are you on? I'm over at JFK. I'm flying out. I'm on one of the runways. So you're in Queens too. Okay,
so everybody's in Queens tonight. That's great. Okay, so I guess you're going to take off while we're talking to you.
Yeah, I think so. I think I will be taking off. And I might lose you because I think at that point, I'll switch over to the WiFi, in-flight WiFi. We'll be able to test to see how effective that is, how much bandwidth there is.
And you can carry on a Skype conversation from 30,000 feet or so.
Well, now here's an awkward question. Are you supposed to be using a device while you're taxiing or taking off?
That's not an awkward question at all, Manuel. The answer is absolutely not. You definitely should not be doing this.
Hold on a second. No, this would count as some kind of interstate crime, I think, if we continued talking like this. And since I know about it now, I really...
I heard that. I heard that pretty clearly. Alex, why don't you hang up now and we'll call you back. Or you reach out to us when you're safely up in the air. How about that?
Yeah, that sounds great. I'm taking off momentarily. Talk to you soon.
Okay. Disconnect, please. For the safety of everybody on board. My God, I didn't know he was taxiing.
Yeah, we shouldn't encourage that. I feel like we have an obligation to let the FAA take over.
You know, it's the second time today Alex has been in the news. You know what the first time was? If you go to newyorktimes.com, there's a picture of Trump walking out of a building after pleading the fifth.
Yeah, and if you watch the video, you'll see Alex standing in the background because it's next door to a building he had business in, and they were basically keeping everybody from getting in.
So what are the odds? What are the odds of that happening? Amazing. Yeah, what a week. What a week. The former president of the United States has his home raided by the FBI.
Today, the former president of the United States, under oath, pleads the fifth. It's Wednesday. It's only Wednesday.
But of course, the big headline is that the Hope videos are out. Yeah, a week ago, we were talking about tearing our hair out and all the software issues and video editing, and I got to give credit to Kyle here for somehow pulling it off.
It's like magic. I don't know how he did it, but he was able to process all of them, all the videos. They're mostly up on YouTube. We'll get to that in a second.
But the fact that they're there, that's all Kyle. So thank you, Kyle, on behalf of the entire hacker community.
You're welcome, hacker community, and it's my honor to help preserve that, and it's important to us to do a good job.
And we weren't totally prepared, but we responded as quickly as we could. And as with a lot of the new things with this event, we just adapted and came up with some stuff.
But I would encourage people, when you're talking about software, specifically for stuff like video, the Free Software Foundation and the message behind that with all of these video and camera protocols, there's truth to that.
Because you run into that so much with audio and video stuff, and there's been a lot that's been done with good applications for photo editing. The free software and open software movement has done a lot with that.
There's been open cameras. There's a lot of innovation, even audio software. So I think nonlinear editors are next. It's ripe for the taking. I think that the dominance of only a couple versions, if you've seen anything from software like OBS, which is an incredible open broadcast software package, very much like Open Office.
We'll be using it later on tonight.
Yeah, yeah.
We'll use it for the overtime show.
Of course. And OBS emerged from gaming and online streaming communities, and that stuff needs to be encouraged. And the more we're relying on video, the more we're relying on different technologies. I'm thinking of design files for virtual spaces and stuff.
We should be thinking about the kinds of stuff that we're tying ourselves to and then relying on. Because it's fine if someone like me who is avid or something like that has been like an albatross and they just haul around all the abuse that comes with that. And then there are very damaged people.
Avid is the name of software, not your mood at the moment.
Correct.
Or other things like Final Cut or whatever these packages in the industry. I've used all of them, a lot of them, a huge amount of them, even ones that you can't really get access to.
You used most of them this week, I think.
I used two main software packages at the same time for a good part of this. But anyway, my end of rant. But the point is, it's not trivial software and having a lot of different bad solutions, that doesn't really count as much as having a lot of people working on a good solution that fixes it.
There's promising stuff. VLC came through. The first thing we did is ran everything through what essentially uses FFmpeg and converted it all so we had much smaller, more manageable files.
When you say we weren't prepared, I don't want it to sound like you didn't know what you were doing. Basically, we received all the videos in a format we weren't expecting. I believe they were in .mov format. But the thing is, they were entire days at a time in one chunk. And it's really, really hard to work with massive files in a lot of software and on a lot of computers.
Well, we have a humble ability to work with video.
This isn't a Fifth Avenue type operation here, but just to be able to process them and to repair issues, that took some doing. But you got there.
Right. And a lot of people typically, and this is probably not unusual, a lot of people are set up to work with camera formats. Like if you bought a camera that has a specific format, if you're doing real video production, or you're used to working with intermediate formats.
If you get something that's a little bit more finished or the software package you're using doesn't normally work with files that big or your system can't handle files that big, you run into all kinds of crazy stuff. Or your graphics. There's a lot of, you know, we got good recordings and there was a lot of data to go through.
So just getting our heads around how to move stuff around efficiently, that took a little bit of doing. But anyway, we learned a lot and got it completed, which was really the most important part.
And we want to thank all the people from the hacker community who wrote in to us with suggestions, very helpful suggestions on software to use, methods to go about, and it helped get us where we were going. And I just can't believe we got it all done within a week. It actually was released yesterday on YouTube and we have flash drives now and everything is set.
I do want to talk about the YouTube controversy because we did have a little dust up with them. I'd like to do that when Alex is on the line though, so let's give him a few more minutes to reach cruising altitude and maybe we can reconnect with him and then have that conversation.
But in the meantime, Gila, actually I'd like to talk to you for a moment because you have a reputation for uncovering the truth and going after all kinds of, shall I say, people who don't quite have it right. I'm talking organizations, I'm talking cults, I'm talking all sorts of basic bad guys.
And you had a bit of a run in last week when you criticized some Apple products and I understand that your name is now on their most wanted list as far as people who dare to speak out.
You said something about it being difficult to download music that you buy on iTunes and here's just one of the letters. I'm not going to read names here, but basically this person takes issue with that saying there's still definitely a way to manage your music on your iPhone manually.
Granted, you need to use iTunes to transfer the files, but you are not locked to a music bot from iTunes, nor does Apple use a proprietary format. It uses AAC format, which is very open and common, and Apple was the first major digital music marketplace to offer DRM-free files. So, even if you hate Apple, please do not spread needless lies.
Yeah. Well, it was strongly worded. People are passionate, but you don't dare cross the Apple community because no matter what, they'll come back. It's like criticizing Google. They have all the fanboys out there that will speak out and say something. No offense to the person who wrote in. I don't want any trouble.
Do you maybe want to correct your statement or modify it in any way or maybe just back off and not say anything at all critical about Apple ever again?
I don't know if it was necessarily critical about Apple so much as it was critical about my own technological abilities. All I want to do…
Good, good. Fall on your sword. That is how it's done. Take note, people. Take note.
All I want to do is drag and drop, and that I'm having a very hard time doing. So, if anyone can explain to me in English without besmirching my reputation or accusing me of slandering a media conglomerate, I just want to put an MP3 burned from a record owned by my father.
It doesn't exist anywhere anymore. I want to put that recording on my phone without having to upload everything I own to iTunes. So, if anybody can explain to me how to do that without making me, A, feel stupid and, B, calling me a liar, I would appreciate both of those things. Thank you.
And that was said without any sarcasm, with the utmost respect. So, I just want to make sure people understand that, that Gila is really asking a true question here. Rob, you're sitting right next to Gila, and obviously, you can't help her because otherwise you would have by now. So, this is not something that is limited to just one person. It's basically, we're not Mac people here. I'm sorry.
The last time I used an Apple product with any regularity, it was the Apple IIgs, which doesn't support MP3s either. But, the thing about this is Apple, as a company, had always, since the old days, marketed itself as the user-friendly option, the option that holds your hand and makes it very easy to do all the things you wish to do.
So, I think maybe the fact that this has not been an easy quest for you, Gila, is maybe Apple's fault as a company and a failure on the part of Apple.
Rob, Rob, please.
Maybe all those fans of Apple are wrong.
Have we learned nothing? They'll come for us. They will. And just for the record, I say I'm not a Mac person. I do own two Macs, two Mac SEs. That's what they are, right, Kyle?
Yeah, they're like classics. No, not classics. They're later classics.
Yeah, they're nice machines. They hold up books right now.
Well, one of them doesn't have any motherboard.
Nobody needs to know that. The point is, they're on display and they're holding up books and they're doing a very good job.
Yeah, they're mantelpieces that support bookshelves.
All right, that bit of controversy aside. Do you want to try, Alex? Actually, I don't want to try, Alex, if maybe they're still taking off, although it sounded like they were imminently taking off.
I'll do what I can.
Hang on, I got a message from him. I put my phone on mute so I didn't hear the message come in, and now I'm trying to get permission to read my own messages here.
He might be appearing.
Okay, it says Skype is not connecting, could be blocked, will try through VPN.
Okay, but there he is on the screen, right? Isn't that him? Alex, are you there?
He's muted.
Alex, stop muting yourself. That's our job.
Yeah.
Oh, there you are. There's your face.
I'm here.
Wow, look at that. We can see him. You can't see him, radio audience, but he looks just the same.
We're looking out the airplane right now. Look at that. The sky is blue.
Wow.
Okay, well, Alex, it's not about the plane, all right? It's about you. All right? Can you hear us?
Something like this. Yeah, I hear you.
Okay, great. So, you know, we mentioned that you were in the New York Times today on the front page for being in Trump's shadow.
I was wondering if maybe you had anything to say about that.
Did we lose him?
Oh, there he is.
Now, I'm here. Just bear with me with the delay, because the sky appeared to be blocked on the plane, which is interesting, because then I connected in.
You're very low, Alex.
Yeah.
If you could move the microphone closer to you, that would be great.
Yeah.
Can you hear me all right?
Mostly. If you just hold the microphone as close to you as possible, that would be good.
Yeah. Any better?
That's perfect.
Oh, it is? Okay, good.
Yeah, I was on my way to work, and my office is right next to Trump Tower.
Lately, there's been kind of a circus, at least once or twice a week, outside every New York.
And today, as I was walking the street, I was waiting to get into the freight elevator side of my office, because that's how I entered the office on account of cycling in.
And Trump was coming up, so we were waiting over there, and I wound up being photographed as part of this crowd standing behind Trump.
I was just waiting, exasperated, angry for being delayed and getting into the office at around 8.20 or so this morning.
And I'm literally in the background between Trump and Bush.
So it's, yeah, I've been photographed.
Just to clarify, not the former president or his family, an actual Bush that you were between, of Trump.
Yeah, and by the way, Alex, as far as sound quality, you kind of degraded a little bit there, so maybe you moved your hand or something, but please go back to the way you were before, where you were much louder and clearer, if that's possible.
Copy that.
Okay, see, that sounded great. That sounded amazing.
So listen, as long as we have you here, we wanted to talk about what happened with YouTube this past week, where basically we put all the Hope Talks up, and they're getting a great response, and people, your talk is on there.
Every talk that took place at the Hope Conference a couple of weeks ago is now available to watch, except for one.
There was a talk entitled Hacker Representation Throughout the Years, a Guided Tour of Hacker Appearances in TV and Cinema.
This is a talk I really wanted to see. I wasn't able to see it live, but it's the kind of thing that I'm fascinated by, how have hackers been portrayed in television, in the movies.
They did a great talk. It was 90 minutes long, and they basically kind of guided you through how hackers have been portrayed, what's realistic, what's not realistic, how the image has changed over the years, etc., etc.
It's a fascinating, really good response, and it got our stream taken down by Google in the middle of the conference because they were freaking out over copyright issues, since they were showing clips of movies and TV shows.
We basically had to cut the feed to that room to prevent losing the entire conference being streamed online.
Bad idea to use YouTube as our main way of streaming. We're having very serious discussions about how that happened. It was a bad decision, no question about that.
Now, we've moved to the stage where we're putting the videos up online, and YouTube is the preferred method of seeing them, only because of the ease of use and the fact that everybody is able to get to it immediately, but it's certainly not the only place that we want them to be seen.
What happened was, when we tried to publish that particular talk, it was blocked.
In fact, they wouldn't even allow us to put it up on the site where we could say it was blocked. It's hidden. You can't even see where it's being blocked at all. It's just not there.
The reason they gave, and this is the ultimate irony, we had a snippet, and by snippet I mean something like 25 seconds, of a TV show.
Do you know what TV show it was? Mr. Robot. Probably the best program ever about hackers, the one that gets it, the one that is on our side on all these issues, and the one that would condemn these idiotic copyright issues more than anybody.
Yet, it's their publishing company, NBC Universal, that says, nope, you can't do this, and we're blocking you, and that's just the way it is.
First of all, fair use is a thing. When you are giving an academic lecture on a particular work or a particular field of study, you are allowed to do exactly what these presenters did, and the audience has every right to see that.
I'm really getting sick and tired of how we are all living under some ridiculous interpretation of freedom that allows these megacorporations like Google to just say, no, you can't express this particular thought because we deem it owned by somebody else.
I'm not Alex if you're still connected to us, but if you are, I'm curious if you had any insider thoughts on this.
Yeah, how is it? Can you hear me alright?
No, we hear you fine as long as you keep loud.
Alright, good. I think that's a perfect storm of potential copyright infringements being flagged multiple times by these algorithms that we discussed in the previous last week and the week before, which are really there for the administrative convenience of these ridiculous...
Alex, you're fading. I don't know why you're fading. Are you wandering away from your microphone or something? If you just cram it up to your face or whatever, you start off loud. You've just got to stay loud.
Yeah, that's very weird. What about now? Better?
Every time you address the issue, you sound fine.
All right. Yeah, well, I think I'll just keep going. I think it's a function of these.
Obviously, these algorithms are used for the convenience of potentially flagged copyrighted materials and just keep them down.
Now, if you notified people, you said, no, no, no, hang on. This is fair use. All of these things are being used for criticism, for academic discussion.
And then NBC came back and said, well, no, we still don't believe you have the right to use these particular techniques.
At that point, people...
But Alex, what you're talking about, you're talking...
If I can understand, what you're talking about is having a lengthy discourse with these entities going back and forth saying, yes, we do have the right.
And yeah, you know, I think we would win any such conversation, at least logically we would.
But we shouldn't have to do that. Nobody should have to do that. Think of all the creativity that's being stymied as a result of this.
And, you know, what's really funny is that I was looking around on our YouTube account and we've been given access to the same tool.
Yeah, I just sort of slipped in there. There's a copyright button.
And you can basically do the same thing to other people that use your material.
And so I checked it out because, you know, we have no intention of doing that to anybody, but just to see how it worked.
And they basically give you a list of every instance where your work is being used by somebody else.
And you know who the number one offender was?
It was some guy who posted a Negative Land film. It wasn't Negative Land.
It was somebody who posted a Negative Land film.
And somehow YouTube thinks that that's our property.
And I don't know how they reached that conclusion, but maybe it was when Mark Hosler from Negative Land gave a talk at one of the HOPE conferences and excerpted part of that film.
And that wound up on a YouTube channel and YouTube said, oh, that must belong to the HOPE conference.
So now we can technically go after Negative Land and say, yeah, you shouldn't have this material online, even though you didn't post it, somebody else did, because it belongs to us, even though it's 100% yours.
This is the logic that we are dealing with right now.
This is the absurdity and the incompetence.
It's high time it stopped being the default.
So yeah, you know, while having our content on other services is a great idea, and I want to do that,
we need people to coordinate it, but we also want to keep this on YouTube because we want to have conversations like this.
We want to be able to expose things like this.
And you have the situation where that's exactly what's happening.
And also, I should point out, we are not preventing that particular talk from getting out on our full collections.
And we're certainly not discouraging anybody from copying it or making it available in any forum.
But this is, I think, the beginning of a bit of a battle over this.
I think we need to stop buying wholesale this attitude that it's only in place to protect publishers or copyright owners.
The truth of the matter is they're profiting on keeping people, limiting the distribution of ideas.
And in this case, a talk like this actually goes a long way to educating people to the harms and the tropes,
the stereotypes and behaviors that have really defined and been things that the hacker community has grappled with,
and especially media portrayals, how the media around archetypal characters that are hackers or mysterious, unusual technology-centered protagonists,
how that hurts cases, real-life cases where people are made out to be some incredibly capable person that is thus to be feared.
And that is truly what's happening here.
They're protecting some publisher, but it's an academic discussion about the groups that really are due a little bit more protection in light of how wrong this has been for them.
And in discussing it, you have to be able to show examples to open it up and reframe how all of that stuff has built to the juncture or to the kind of present state of all of those issues for our community.
So I think it's just so crucial and ironic, darkly ironic, that this talk, one that is to set things straight from hackers and from everything they know of what has been produced creatively about hackers.
And I just get really passionate about that because I know that's the work that the magazine does and that a lot of the writers, listeners, people who've authored articles or shared their know-how and stuff,
they take very seriously their ability to tell their own stories.
And we want to honor the kinds of information that people provide and to get things right and to be corrected or at least accurate.
It's so important.
But to have this under the guise of protecting some starving content owners, it's just so misleading.
And that's why I think it's just wholesale.
It's not really what they're protecting.
They are profiting, and I think this is the way we should look at it.
They're profiting on limiting the distribution of ideas.
I mean, that's what a lot of the music, a lot of the publishing, a lot of the now cinema and digital art, a lot of that is communicating, is telling stories but also spreading information about what's going on around you in the world or about specific things in technology or otherwise.
And to limit that and to profit off that, I think it should be more taboo than it is.
Bravo.
Yes.
Now, Alex, I think you're going to give it another shot as far as talking, and then we have Rob saying something.
Go ahead, Alex.
All right.
Sounds good.
Can you guys hear me any better now?
Yeah.
It sounds like you're getting your teeth drilled, but other than that, yeah, you sound fine.
Did you roll up an in-flight magazine?
Oh, no.
That's right.
Yeah.
All right.
Good.
I'll take it back maybe a couple of minutes here because I couldn't hear what was going on while I was switching in and out headphones and speakers.
Go right ahead.
Yeah, you sound fine now.
Well, you did sound fine, and now you're kind of breaking up, so maybe you're going over enemy territory or something.
Yeah, don't brag to me.
Rob, why don't you go ahead with what you were going to say, and then we'll go back to Alex, and hopefully he will have cleared up by then.
Go ahead.
Okay.
It always chills me a bit when takedowns and warnings and legalese and stuff are left to the robots to do because the copyright robots will –
Okay.
Here comes Alex.
That was some long lag there, Alex.
Now, go ahead, Alex.
Okay.
Rob, why don't you continue?
Alex, you be quiet.
Go ahead.
Okay.
So the copyright robots are never going to know the intricacies of legal and fair uses of material that belongs to someone else, like in this panel,
which I think was using them as clips to illustrate a larger academic point.
And I think there's an argument to be made for fair use as in effect there.
And there are so many perfectly legal, perfectly legitimate reasons that something you put out there could use bits and pieces of some existing intellectual property.
But the default setting on these robots is they're infringing, they're breaking the law, threaten them, take down their work, what have you.
It reminds me of something that happened to 2600 Magazine in 2015.
You may remember the August or the spring 2012 issue of the magazine that was a nice cover which featured as part of it a picture of an ink splatter that was a piece of clip art basically used by the cover artist.
And some company, which represented the owners of some completely different image that also used that ink splatter clip art, claimed that your cover was – that 2600 cover was an infringement and sent a nasty email about it or a nasty letter about it.
A bill as well.
They wanted us to pay.
Yeah.
And that clip art of that paint splatter was not the property of anybody that was threatening you.
It just happened to match in the eyes of a computer part of this other image with part of the cover of the 2600 issue.
And it was another case of just the robots defaulting to threatening, no humans looking at that and trying to figure out if, hey, maybe this isn't legit before sending out a threat, a bill, all that sort of stuff.
It's interesting too because eventually it did get the attention of humans at that organization who said, of course, this is nonsense and negated the whole thing.
But it became known as Splotchgate and it was a good example of how something as innocuous as an ink splatter could turn into the center of a copyright battle.
And it's just the absurdity of this.
It's funny, but it's also serious because a lot of creativity is being stymied as a result and a lot of people are living in fear and overreacting too.
Saying, I better not do this because it might have this effect.
So maybe the next time somebody wants to give a talk on hacker representation in the media, they'll decide not to do it because of what the robots might do.
I can't believe I just said that sentence, but it's literally what people are living right now.
So, yeah, it's a serious issue.
It's a funny issue, but it's also a serious issue.
And I think it's one that we need to get on top of.
It's an example of how if you give an inch, they take a mile.
And right now we're living under these bizarre rules where a particular musical note can land you in trouble if it's in the wrong place.
Gila, it looks like you have something.
Well, I do because there was an ongoing issue with a YouTube creator that I follow who got copyright struck.
Three copyright strikes were filed against her channel in very quick succession by someone who she was parodying who took umbrage.
And there was a time when it looked like they were going to take the whole channel down.
But because of the personal copyright, there were people involved on both sides.
So I can't help but wonder if there was an actual action from an actual copyright holder, like if that could escalate things in a way and get the attention of some sort of moderator in a way that perhaps the automated processes are not.
That's one of the reasons why we're talking about it, because we hope to have that kind of a back and forth where common sense prevails.
And what's funny is you mentioned copyright strikes.
We don't even have any copyright strikes.
What we got were just notices that this is something that another company has claimed as theirs and they're going to monetize the channel or look at the graphics or the statistics from the channel or something as a result.
And in all cases, this particular talk had 11 different instances.
But it's the Mr. Robot one that supposedly got it blocked in most of the world.
And that's what wound up happening.
It was blocked in the United States.
It was not blocked in the UK for some reason.
I don't know.
Maybe people in the UK can see it.
Maybe some of our British listeners can let us know if they can find that talk on the Channel 2600 page under A New Hope.
But basically, we don't have any copyright strikes.
These were just notices telling us that this is the way it's going to be laid out.
It's going to be claimed by another entity 11 different times.
And one time, it was blocked.
And we can't get access to it to change that.
Yeah, and I just want to reiterate how here we are since we're not able to interrogate robots, overzealous robots about it.
Here we're talking about it, and it appears like we should not have been prevented from continuing our stream.
But the real-world impact was a lot more significant than what I think our discussion has led us to,
which is this was innocuous and not a reason to be shut out of our ability to stream.
And it took an appreciable amount of time to fix that.
And we were directly involved in scrambling and making sure that people were able to continue to enjoy our event.
First of all, yeah, let me just, again, reiterate what a bad idea it was to have YouTube be the primary carrier of our conference for the stream.
But what was happening then while that talk was going on, we got one warning, and then it was cut.
And when they cut the livestream, they also cut the ability for people to go back and see any talk that took place the two days before that.
And that really sucked.
And then they issued this warning.
These are all robots doing this, by the way.
They issued this warning saying, if it happens again, your entire stream, meaning the entire conference, will be cut off.
So nobody would be able to see the rest of Hope.
So we had to basically overthink everything from that point, saying, okay, if you show this image or play this particular bit of sound, is this going to upset Google, YouTube enough to cut us off and cut off the whole conference?
It's a horrible way to think.
It really is.
And we should not be doing that at all.
And, again, yeah, we will not be using YouTube as our primary source ever again.
We will use YouTube because it's a great way to reach people and also to uncover things like this.
But you always, always must have a backup.
And this is a great example of that.
Okay, so Alex is no longer here.
We don't know where he is.
I guess he's in flyover country, right?
That must be where you go when you can't talk to anybody anymore.
Maybe we'll hear from him in the ten or so minutes we have left.
Maybe he'll be there for overtime.
We'll see.
He's probably getting his beverage service.
Probably getting beverages now, yeah.
We'll see.
Pretzels.
I don't know.
When I flew airplanes or flew in airplanes decades ago, there were phones on the planes.
You could make a phone call.
They cost $10 a minute.
But, still, it seemed to sound better than this.
Okay, we have a letter from a Robert, different Robert, not Robert D. Firefly.
I was just listening to you talk about A New Hope, which I was a virtual member of as I was at MCH myself.
MCH, they contain hackers, the Dutch camp.
What happened to them?
They were supposed to be communicating with us during A New Hope throughout the opening ceremonies, the closing ceremonies.
And we never heard from them.
It's like 1997 all over again where they just vanished.
I know they probably had some technical issues.
But, boy, you know, Dutch people usually figure it out much quicker than that.
But, yeah, so if you notice the MCH logo on many of our cards during the videos, that's what it was supposed to be.
And I assume those talks are available someplace as well.
So I'd like to see those.
Anyway, I love the fact that you streamed the conference at your location.
We should have done the same and reserved some location.
I'm not exactly sure what they mean by that.
Hopefully they streamed it.
Hopefully they saved it.
I heard you say that it'll take a while before the videos are online on the infamous YouTube.
Well, that was last week.
They're online now.
Have you considered hosting all your video content at the CCC Archive?
I consider their archive and video team just awesome.
We do, too.
They are very awesome.
And we certainly have no objections to having our content archived at the CCC Archive,
CCC being the Chaos Computer Club, I guess, is the official title.
Also the Chaos Communication Congress and the Chaos Communication Camp, all of which could be CCC.
But they're the German hackers that really get things done.
And they have a great archive as well.
And we certainly would like to be there.
It's just a question of should they be the primary source.
Well, maybe they should.
Maybe they should.
But, again, we still want to use YouTube as well.
Anyway, it would also be amazing if you would use their streaming facilities during an event the way the content is online right now as stream dumps and hours later as content.
I think what he's saying is that it'll be available immediately, which is what we were hoping to do
and weren't able to pull off quite as well as we've done in the past.
Well, again, this goes back to a lot of the new teams that we were building and a lot of the influence, of course, of CCC using various tools and trying to take on some of these things as a group
and overall basically reduce some of our overhead and really build up skills.
We have a lot of really talented people.
Let's be fair here.
In Germany, every newborn is wired for fiber immediately.
They just have technology that works.
They have infrastructure.
I'm not saying it's easy, but I'm just saying it's the challenges that we go through.
And this, as Kyle said, it was new, a new space.
We had a lot of things to try out for the first time, so we knew there were going to be some rough patches.
But the good news is that we got it all in the end.
Sure.
And, I mean, yeah, don't get me started on challenges.
It'll be a different kind of show.
But we like challenges.
Okay, Rob, go ahead.
I think I heard something from Alex.
Yeah, just for anyone interested in the Make Contain Hackers Conference, they do have their videos up.
You can see it at mch2022.org.
That's mch2022.org.
You can rewatch the talks.
Most or all of them seem to be in English, and you can check that out there.
Okay.
So Alex just texted me saying, I don't seem to be able to reconnect.
What I've been asking him, though, is if you're able to send me this text, why can't you connect via using signal?
I'm going to just be unprofessional here and call him live from my phone and see if it goes anywhere.
Let's see if that works.
It might be as simple as that.
It's ringing.
His phone might be ringing on the plane.
Can you guys hear that?
Yes, we can.
Well, let's see if he picks up.
Of course, his phone may be in his luggage.
Maybe his phone's in the seat and he's in his luggage.
We'll try this again during overtime, which, by the way, starts at 8 o'clock.
We're doing that again this week.
It's on our favorite site in the world, youtube.com, channel 2600.
And I think Alex is just ghosting us.
I think that's what's happening here.
Can I just comment on the YouTube critique?
I think that, in our defense, we can comment about all of these services, but we're still operating in the same space that everybody else is.
And, yeah, we have a YouTube channel.
We've curated it much in the way many millions of people around the world have curated their YouTube channel.
We aren't head over heels for all and every of these platforms, but just denying ourselves at every turn the ability to be on any one of them and then fielding questions and comments from everybody about why aren't you here and why aren't you there and you should be there and you should do this.
It gets exhausting.
Yeah, by all means, we should be in all those places, but to expect us to do all the legwork for all those things, it's a full-time job.
Oh, everybody is so willing to point and share all their ideas, but to do what it takes to actually implement that, you're really asking a lot, and I get a little bit perturbed.
Yeah, but let's be fair.
I mean, you know, suggesting things, there's no harm in suggesting things.
There is a harm in assuming that we just can do it all ourselves.
Obviously, we need support and more people involved.
The thing is when you say, okay, this is a great platform, let's use CCC as an example.
Okay, we're streaming on CCC.
How many people listening right now know what to do to be able to get to us?
If I say we're on YouTube, bang, everybody knows how to get there.
That's the issue.
We need to make these other alternatives as easy to use.
We could put links up on our page and all that kind of thing, but it has to be something that is also intuitive.
YouTube has an advantage.
They've gotten a big foothold.
Let's see if we can get that advantage moved to some other places as well so that we do have true alternatives.
Don't mistake the use of it that we're somehow lauding it and completely blind to its nuances and shortcomings.
No, we absolutely understand what we're getting into, perhaps more so than a lot of folks.
Please, back off.
Okay, well, I don't necessarily agree with that.
I think people should come at us with all kinds of ideas.
Just don't expect us to have all the magic answers because we're only mortal humans.
As Alex just demonstrated, he said he tried to answer the phone.
I don't know what that means.
Tried to answer?
How do you?
Okay.
It was ringing.
Maybe he dropped the phone or something.
We'll try again after 8 o'clock on YouTube.
We'll see what happens then.
Let's see what else is going on here.
A couple of stories.
Actually, Alex just texted me again.
He missed an audio call.
That's what he told me, or that's what the message told me.
We have all kinds of potential issues, such as FEMA saying that there is compelling evidence to suggest
that certain unpatched and unsecured emergency alert system devices are vulnerable.
That's according to the Chief Engineer for Integrated Public Alert and Warning System,
which is the national system that state and local officials use to send urgent alerts about natural disasters
or child abductions, among other things.
The agency last week urged operators of the devices to update their software to address the issue,
saying that false alerts could in theory be used over TV, radio, and cable networks.
The advisory did not say that alerts sent over text messages were affected.
There is no evidence that malicious hackers have exploited the vulnerabilities.
They say it's unclear how many emergency alert system devices are running the vulnerable software.
FEMA referred a request for an estimate of that figure to the FCC,
which had no idea what they were talking about, apparently.
So, yeah, that's something to be a little concerned about when EAS starts to become compromised.
But it's not something that surprises us, because it's all over the air.
It's all controlled by various beeps and frequencies and things like that.
EAS, wow, who knew?
Anonymous has jumped into the Taiwan issue.
The cyber-hacking group Anonymous has hacked a Chinese Communist Party website
and welcomed U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan.
Boy, they're really trying to start World War III, aren't they?
According to reports, the website of the Heilongjiang Society Scientific Community Federation in China was hacked by Anonymous.
After hacking the website, the group posted an HTML page with the text Taiwan Numbawan,
a Taiwanese flag and emblem, and images of Pelosi and Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen.
It also wrote Taiwan welcomes U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
This comes amid Pelosi's one-day visit of the self-ruled island,
which has been severely condemned by the Chinese government.
According to reports, the hacked website showed the Anonymous group logo,
followed by the Taiwan Numbawan meme.
This was a reference to a statement made in 2015 by video game streamer AngryPug
to rile up Chinese streamer Emo.
Really?
During a match of the game H1Z1.
Because this is how the wars will be fought, really, through video games.
The website further showed the national flag and national emblem of Taiwan,
followed by the welcoming note for Pelosi.
However, the website was later taken down by the Chinese authorities.
And who can say that we're surprised by that?
All right, we are pretty much out of time.
Please write to us, othat2600.com.
We are not on next week on WBAI.
However, we are on in a few minutes on YouTube.
Just follow the link on top of the 2600.com web page
or just go to youtube.com slash channel 2600
and join us at 8 o'clock.
You can call us.
You can share your ideas and thoughts and suggestions and things like that.
We'd love to hear from you.
And maybe Alex will join us.
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