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Stay tuned for Off the Hook here on WBAI New York 99.5 FM and WBAI.org
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We're sorry the number you have reached 99.5 WBAI is now off the hook.
And a very good evening to everybody. The program is Off the Hook. Emmanuel Goldstein
here with you on this Wednesday evening joined tonight by Kyle. Yes, right here.
Over in Skype land we have Rob T. Firefly. Good evening. We have Gila. Good
evening. And we have Alex. Good evening. Alex, are you in some exotic place this
week? I guess it's slightly exotic. It's Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Pittsburgh. Okay, that's great. Wow. Yeah, I'm here for the National Cyber
Forensics Training Alliance disruptions 2023 conference and I gave a
presentation earlier today and I'll be here until tomorrow. I was at a Pirates
game last night with a bunch of colleagues and then actually took the
weird little subway that they have in Pittsburgh. Have you ever been on the
Pittsburgh subway? No, no. I'm sorry. I just I took one look at that and I just
I just couldn't. It's like the Detroit people mover. It's just, yeah, it's nice.
You know, it's a concept but, you know, call me when you have a bunch of
lines and some transfers and, you know, I don't want to sound, you know, all high
and mighty here but it's a city. Deserves a real subway, doesn't it? I think that's
true. I mean, they don't even call it the subway, right? They call it the T and
that's in Boston. Boston calls it the T and that's they have a decent system. It
could be better but it's decent. Yeah, it could be a lot better in Boston. But you
in Pittsburgh, you've got the 412 area code, okay? And the reason why you're 412
is because when they started inventing area codes, they gave the lower numbers
to the the cities that were the most important or at least the ones that you
were gonna dial the most so that you wouldn't have to have your finger go
all around the the rotary dial. So that's why New York has 212, Los Angeles had
213, Chicago was 312, Pittsburgh 412. We had high hopes. Yeah, we did. I guess, yeah,
right in the middle of the rotary dial there. I didn't realize that that the
distance that the rotary had to dial, it had to travel, determined area codes. I
was not aware of that. Look how much I'm learning tonight. Yeah, well, I
mean, if you look at, you know, things like 907, 808, Alaska, Hawaii, you know,
it's way up there. You can just take your time dialing those numbers. No one's in a
rush. Well, it was funny. I was in the elevator with an FBI agent who was from
Anchorage, Alaska. And I saw that on his badge. It said, you know, FBI Anchorage.
And I said, Oh, you're from the 907. Wow. And he said, Yeah, yeah, I am. He said,
you've been to Anchorage? You've been to Alaska? And I said, No. I said, But you're
in Anchorage. And I'm pretty sure there's an exchange there 243. Right. And he used
to have a 907-243 number. He looked at me like I was some kind of freak. And yes, I
totally blew this FBI agent's mind by knowing this area code and exchange.
Well, I know how you know the area code. How did you know this exchange?
Well, because way back in the day, you know, when blue boxing was, not blue
boxing, but red boxing was a thing. We used to call numbers in Alaska, because
it was the farthest phone call that you could make. That was still, you know, by
virtue of that wasn't an international call. So you could dial 907, we had to
figure out what the exchanges were in Alaska. And we just call up people in
Anchorage and talk.
Wow.
Yeah, I know. That's part of my misspent youth.
No, actually, I think that was not a waste of time at all. That was some of my
fondest memories was doing similar things. I was more of a blue box type than a red
box type. And to me, red boxing just seemed too easy. Just hold a box up to a
payphone, because beep five times, you get a free call. Okay, but, but blue
boxing, you had to route things you had to, you know, you heard it in the
recording before the show, you heard what were known as multi frequency tones, MF
tones. Those are the tones I described to people, you know, in the Pink Floyd song
where they make the phone call those tones. Everyone recognizes that they don't
remember the tones from their from their lives so much. But those were the actual
phone company routing tones. And if you could do that, if you could seize a line
using 2600 hertz, and enter those multi frequency tones, you could not only route
free calls in in your area or in the country, you could route all around the
world and talk to internal operators and get to numbers that you could never reach
otherwise.
Yeah, those were the days those were the days you know, if blue boxing was still
possible, when I was a teenager, I would have done it, for sure. But it was a
distant memory. I think you know, those analog switches were, were long gone, we
had switched over to the digital five ESS switches. And, you know, yeah, that's
all history.
You know, this, this is actually a very good opportunity to mention something.
Kyle and I visited a very interesting place over the weekend. We didn't even
know this existed. It's the Long Island telephone museum. It's located in the
central office in Comac, New York, that's in Suffolk County. And these guys, they're
open the first Sunday of every month from one to 4pm. And it's the most amazing
thing. They have all kinds of old pay phones, they have all sorts of models of
desk phones and key systems. I mean, it was it blew me away the amount of
memorabilia they have collected. And it is just such an incredibly positive
experience to just see all this on display. You know, you can take your time
looking it over, examining it, taking pictures, you meet other people that are
there for the same reasons we brought the 2600 van within within five seconds of
parking. We had an old guy coming up to us saying, Yeah, I knew about boxing back
in the day. They're everywhere there. We parked the van on any corner and we're
going to get people like that walking up. It's great. But Long Island telephone
museum, their website is, believe it or not, Long Island telephone museum.com.
And all the details are there.
Yeah, I hope they keep expanding. And those places tend to because the interest
is strong and it takes the kind of curiosity and random visits and support. I
know they also probably do like special events and educational tours and stuff
like that. That's really important because it teaches people about
communication systems. And even like Alex said, stuff that's outdated. I think for
me, it was very instructive and exciting because it made me think about other ways
and other systems that I could learn how they worked and have fun with tinkering and
playing around with them anew in ways that hadn't been explored yet. So that kind
of fun with electronic and electromechanical systems that are all
around us can be really, really exciting and lead other things too. You can get
involved in these places. You can learn more about administering these kinds of
systems and all the different types of expertise it takes to run it.
Yeah, if you're a teacher, and I know a lot of teachers listen to us, you can bring
your class out to this place, arrange a field trip, and they'll be happy to give
you a tour. It'd be most amazing. Yes, Rob?
So you said this place is in a central office. Is this like a working central
office? Like is this still a telephone company place?
It is a working central office, but they have very thick walls between the museum
and the actual central office part. Not that there's a whole lot in the central
office anymore, and people might not know this. Every community has what's known as
a central office. Usually it's a building that's comprised of brick entirely, might
not even have any windows, and it has a logo of one of the names the phone company
went by, New York Telephone, 9X, Bell Atlantic, Verizon, you name it. And inside
there is the switching equipment for your local telephone exchange. I know a lot of
people use cell phones now. You might not even use a landline, but that equipment is
still there. It's gone from mechanical equipment, which took up an entire
building, to electronic and digital equipment, which takes up a fraction of
that space. But the buildings are still there. In every community there is one,
and this one happens to be in Comac, which is on the north shore of Suffolk County.
And yeah, they've got a good amount of space devoted to this. There are full size
payphone booths with mannequins inside them, making phone calls, obviously. There
are representations of what an operator station was like, answering machines, old
answering machines, huge, big answering machines that you would not believe.
All kinds of tooling and some really good hands-on displays that show you the
different types of cable, outside plant equipment, the stuff that it takes to get
the calls from place to place. All of that's kind of interesting. Oh, and some
examples of modern installations and old literature, statements, bills, historical
stuff that, I don't know, just it has its own sense of mystique around it. You get
this feeling of livelihood of all the kinds of ways people were using this
equipment and how sort of every day it is. We all use the same kinds of technology or
maybe pay the same kinds of bills to this day, albeit maybe at a much greater expense.
But just exploring that and seeing how much it has changed and how much it hasn't
at all, I think is really fun. There's also a lot of stuff from inside, like if you
never worked in the telephone conglomerates, I guess, any one of the companies or for a
large one, or maybe you had relatives, you realize there's this whole culture within
that is kind of interesting, awards and achievements. There was a great display of
all the pins and various things that would be given to managers and people along the
way in their careers and stuff. That's kind of fun to see.
Absolutely. Alex, go ahead.
What I don't understand about this place is that I grew up on Long Island. I was a
phone freak in the 90s. I mean, how did neither I nor you guys know about this place
until this last week?
Yeah, I had heard about it before through Newsday, the Long Island newspaper. But it
was weird because the story they printed said that the telephone museum was reopening
after the pandemic. And it was kind of Orwellian because, well, I don't remember it
ever being open. I don't remember it ever existing. But I'm just going to accept that
there's a part of that history I just didn't know about. They certainly do have a
museum there. It is real. It's real equipment and they know what they're doing.
Gila, go ahead.
I was deep diving because I still consider myself the research department. So I was
reading some stuff. And it appears that the museum has been closed since before the
pandemic. It said reopening after four years. So mapping it out, it's been longer than
that. I mean, the fact that this is completely volunteer produced is incredible. And, you
know, the new vision pioneers, I'm just fascinated by that conceptually, like they're
the folks who are running this organization. But yeah, I am baffled that all you people
on Long Island had no idea that this was in your own backyard.
Oh, no, no, no, no. Don't make it about us on Long Island. All phone freaks everywhere,
that includes you guys. None of us knew about this. And it's pretty incredible. But
they didn't know about us either. So, you know, it's like we're living in different
isolated worlds. They were amazed by the phone company van that we have. But what's
even amazing is that they have an even older phone company van. Do you know that? I
don't think you guys are old enough for this, but I just I just had this memory jarred
recently. But New York telephone trucks used to be green, used to not have stripes on
them at all. Used to be kind of like an olive green. I remember those trucks as a
child, but I had not thought about that in many, many years. And I can't find pictures
of them anywhere. But these folks have one. They have one. And it's it's it's pretty
incredible. Beats the 2600 van.
I just want to add that these places are very hard to run and this place is growing. So I
think it was it's a kind of thing that it was a chapter for the pioneers or that it
was a meeting space and a place that was collecting things like phones. And the the
possibility is really, really inspiring. And it takes people checking it out. And we
found it was pretty well attended to when the doors were open this weekend. So that
itself is a good sign. But it's the kind of place that needs more interest, more building
and stuff and that people will come around projects and and get together if someone
drops off a big piece of equipment or if they're doing something like more outreach
oriented. The place itself attracts that kind of interested, I don't know, affinity
group. And that that is the best part, getting people that don't know much about it.
They're hands on checking stuff out so that they can tell friends and they can maybe
explore stuff. But expanding that makes it easier to work on stuff together, whether it
is like a service project in the community or something like building on site as far as
like an exhibit or something you can take to to have as a spectacle at like other events
to promote the place. But it all takes so much to volunteer and put it together. So the
fact that they're able to reopen and get get people through there is is a good sign
because it'll galvanize that in the future.
Absolutely. And there is a connection with the Telephone Pioneers of America, which I
believe you had a T-shirt of. You gave a talk at HOPE about the Telephone Pioneers.
Oh, yeah. They're a national organization of people that have worked in in the telephone
industry. And so I believe this was a chapter. The museum itself seems to have an
affiliation. I didn't chat them up about it and I'm sure they could tell you exactly who
has membership. But that definitely is, as I think, a group throughout the kind of
fledgling national network of telephone museums. They're a strong steering group.
Basically, the types of folks that can help basically guarantee space through through
like working central offices and come up with people to staff it and lead the tours and so
forth. Alex, you had something?
Yeah, I just wanted to say, you know, it it seems like it's not open very often. You said
the first Sunday of every month and it's only open for three hours. Is that right?
Well, yeah, but it's open by appointment. If like I said, if you have a bunch of third
graders or something wants to see a telephone, some telephone history, they can make a
arrangements with you. But yeah, it's a volunteer. It's a volunteer job. Look, we only
have meetings once a month, you know, for about the same amount of time. It takes time.
It takes work. The fact that this place exists at all is a miracle.
I'm in agreement with you there. It sounds like there should be a twenty six hundred field trip
there. Well, there was one this past weekend.
Honestly, there were a lot of people there. So check it out if you're in the area or if you
have a telephone museum near you. Take some people and just have fun looking at some.
And it reminds me of the Telecommunications Museum out in Seattle, which is famed for for
what it brings to people.
Oh, absolutely. That's kind of what I mentioned is like these places, you know, every once
in a while the weekends are there.
Somebody stops by and says, you know, I've got this five ESS.
I need to drop off. I'm I don't know where to store it.
They do not got to clean out my garage.
Stuff like that happens in these collections grow over time.
So, well, the difference there is it's incredible.
It's called what's the official name?
The Telecommunications Museum.
Is that is that its name?
Yeah, it's changed names over the years.
But the Museum of Communications, they have a history museum.
They have working equipment there where you can actually place calls using old equipment,
which is kind of cool. Oh, yeah.
It's very cool. It's yeah.
It's got demonstrations, basically negative 48 volt power supply from the central office.
And then it also connects.
I'll bet they could do that.
A couple of phone lines.
There's many different teletype and all working UNIX systems even.
I could go on and on about that.
That's also in a central office, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
It's got two floors and they're basically connected.
And the exhibit, you can basically go up and down through different displays and see each
generation of functioning switch, see it work, see it in like test states and maybe even
some of the working demonstrations.
It's got smaller switches.
It's got some really, really interesting stuff.
But it's been something that people have been contributing to for for a really long time.
And it's it takes a lot of work and a lot of energy to collect that.
I mean, they've got an incredible library of all the BSP manuals, which are the Bell system
protocols. I mean, just just like the microfilm and all the information and history at
these places. It's incredible just what what people have saved.
I mean, it would have been thrown out and dumped if if it wasn't taken care of and
people didn't appreciate that it has sort of a place in people's understanding of what it
took in a corporate sense to in a business sense to to have this technological
like abundance emerge and then now, you know, be what it is today.
I just want to read a couple of lines from their website and then we'll move on to other
things. But in many other museums, things can only be seen in our museum.
Visitors can handle, listen to and touch authentic, interactive exhibits and artifacts.
Long Island Telephone Museum has numerous mannequins and animatronics to showcase our
many displays on operations, service and the history of communications.
The Pioneers Telephone Pioneers of America, founded in 1911 with the help of Alexander
Graham Bell, now consists of active and retired employees who volunteer thousands of
hours of community service each year.
And again, their website is Long Island Telephone Museum dot com.
And I understand also they have an Instagram account, Long Island Telephone Museum.
And the address is 445 Comack Road, Comack, New York, again, open first Sunday of every
month from 1 to 4 p.m. and by appointment.
So look them up.
Pretty, pretty amazing.
And it makes me wonder what else is out there that we don't know about.
OK, some of the news this week, last week we talked about how the MTA has abandoned
Twitter because Twitter wanted them to pay $50,000 a month for something they were using
for free, namely a means of getting a schedule notifications out to the public.
MTA felt it wasn't right to be charging $50,000 for the privilege of being able to tell
people things like that.
And Twitter has now backtracked a week after announcing it would stop using Twitter to
post updates on delays, service outages and other travel information.
The agency has reversed course after Twitter dropped its demand that government
agencies like the MTA pay 50 grand a month for access.
The MTA had also earlier said it was worried the service had become unreliable under the
ownership of Elon Musk.
But officials said Thursday they received assurances riders could count on the alerts.
The MTA informed Twitter senior management that it would not pay to provide the public
with critical service information.
Twitter got the message and reversed its plan to charge the MTA more than half a million
dollars per year for for these alerts.
So now no transit agency will need to pay.
Well, that's good news, right?
So apparently, if you speak loudly enough, these these companies will hear you and will
actually take action or stop taking bad actions.
It's really interesting, though, because so many of these moves by Twitter management and
by that it I primarily mean the the really impulsive dude who has been in control of it.
Um, you know, they they have made so many things that were seen as bad moves and they're
like, oh, yeah, OK, we won't do that then.
But they have really lost the trust of people who had grown to depend on this sort of thing
from them.
So, yeah, they they could they could invite like, you know, radio stations back on that
it decided to leave.
They can invite, you know, public utilities back on that it decided to leave.
But, you know, when when anyone goes back onto the service, they're still under the
threat of like what if he changes his mind someday and we find ourselves, you know, crap
out of luck.
And so this is this is really this is really just, I think, opened our eyes to what it
means to depend upon sort of an unrelated third party for information like this.
Absolutely.
Now, how do I get my blue check back?
That's that's the big challenge at this stage.
But we'll get to that.
We'll get to that at some point.
Yeah, the craziness continues.
Gila, go ahead.
But one thing I did discover is that during the period of time when the MTA was not using
the API, a user, a random user, a man named Will Davis jumped in to use the user level
API, the $100 tier, basically just feeding it straight in from other updates.
Sorry, I'm looking, calling it the MTA alert bot, pulling data from the MTA's general transit
feed specification and basically just doing this in, you know, in the hacker spirit and
was not pardon me, not pulling in bus information because, you know, it would have broken the
API, but at the $100 level, I thought it was a very interesting way that this dude
jumped in to kind of stop gap.
Well, how did people get his updates?
They just subscribe to this.
I think he's gone.
Is it still up?
I see it.
The second one down there has not tweeted in a week.
So I think it may have once the API, once the MTA got back on the API, I think he may
have dropped out.
Or maybe everything is running on time for a week.
That could happen.
It could.
It could happen.
It's to the world where you're living, if that is the case.
But yes.
The screen name of this account that he had set up is MTA underscore alerts underscore
bot.
And did it have a blue check?
Because you can just buy them now.
Here's the thing.
Imagine this Will Davis character was evil.
OK, and just wanted to spread bad information, was able to get a blue check, have a username
that says MTA and it's somewhere.
How would you know the difference?
You know, the only way you could possibly know is if you look into the history, saw
who had more followers, who was around longer.
But, you know, the problem with Twitter right now is that there is no actual verification
that something is real as opposed to completely made up and bogus.
And I don't know how they're going to get that trust back.
Nor do I.
And the fact that they're now talking about getting purging accounts that haven't been
used in however long, how I'm, again, thinking about people who used to have Twitter accounts
who are no longer living, you know, and how we're not going to have a mass impersonation
of dead people.
This is so simple to solve, though.
You can have archived sites of people who have passed away.
You know, there's simply a way of coordinating that.
But they have to take an interest in doing it so that those sites are preserved, not
taken over by fake people, not presumed to be inactive simply because the people aren't
alive anymore.
But at the same time, other accounts which just were abandoned by people for lack of
interest, yeah, they shouldn't just be lying around for 10 years.
And, you know, a great example of that is one that we've been trying to get for years.
And this is something Elon Musk could actually help with if he was truly interested in this,
because the old Twitter wasn't able to do anything about it.
But there is the Twitter account called Hope.
And we run a conference called Hope Hackers on Planet Earth.
We would love to have that Twitter account.
It has not tweeted in years.
It's not run by anybody.
How do we get it?
We've tried.
We've asked.
We've done all kinds of things.
And I just know it's going to wind up in the hands of somebody who is going to squat on
it or try to sell it for millions of dollars or something like that.
But boy, that would be nice.
That would be nice if we could actually get something out of this.
At what cost?
At what cost?
No cost.
Twitter doesn't cost anything except for your brain cells.
All right.
Thank you to our program director, Linda, for forwarding this piece of news to us.
New York Attorney General Letitia James has secured $615,000 from three companies,
LCX, LeadID, or is it LeadID?
Not really sure.
And Efficient, spelled wrong.
Spelled with an I instead of an E, which I don't know if that makes many less efficient.
But anyway, they supplied millions of fake public comments to influence a 2017 proceeding
by the Federal Communications Commission to repeal net neutrality rules.
Remember that?
We reported on this.
Fake comments.
Lots and lots of fake comments.
Now, net neutrality prohibits broadband providers from blocking, slowing down, or charging companies
to prioritize certain content on the internet.
An investigation by the Office of the Attorney General found that the fake comments use the
identities of millions of consumers, including thousands of New Yorkers, without their knowledge
or consent.
Collectively, the three companies have agreed to pay $615,000 in penalties and disgorgement.
Okay.
Alex, I'm going to ask you.
One, in God's name, is disgorgement.
And where does the $615,000 go?
And how does it help the situation?
Well, the disgorgement essentially means that it was money that they made from the activity
that they shouldn't have been performing.
And so now they're being disgorged, right?
Now it's being taken away from them.
This is fascinating, though, because, yeah, this really confirms what we were talking
about several years ago, which we had all suspected that there was astroturfing of these
particular comments.
But what's really odd to me, and I'm not aware of the story until you just read it moments
ago, what's odd to me is that there are some corporate structures associated with that
astroturfing, so that this was some kind of service that people had purchased.
Perhaps as a massive scale, what would be really interesting to me is, you know, for
what else did they provide these bogus comments?
Yeah, that's a great point, because the logic might follow that, okay, so who were the clients?
Because if that's their business, this might be just a cost of doing business that they're
going to write off based on their clientele already having foot the bill for whatever
activities they were doing.
Can I just read a bit of this press release?
Because it really, I think, gives an idea of how sleazy this was.
Basically, this is all part of an investigation by OAG, the Office of the Attorney General.
It uncovered widespread fraud and abusive practices surrounding efforts to sway the
FCC in the agency's 2017 net neutrality rulemaking proceeding.
As detailed in a report by OAG, the nation's largest broadband companies funded a secret
campaign to generate millions of comments to the FCC in 2017.
These comments provided cover for the FCC to repeal net neutrality rules.
To help generate these comments, the broadband industry engaged commercial lead generators
that used advertisements and prizes like gift cards and sweepstakes entries to encourage
consumers to join the campaign.
However, nearly every lead generator that was hired to enroll consumers in the campaign
instead simply fabricated consumers' responses.
As a result, more than eight and a half million fake comments that impersonated real people
were submitted to the FCC and more than half a million fake letters were sent to Congress.
How are people not going to jail for this?
I don't get that.
$615,000 seems like nothing as a penalty for this kind of fraud.
And, you know, the FCC ruled on this and they did not rule in a good way.
Should this be reversed as a result of all this?
Yeah, that's light as far as charges.
Yeah, I agree.
I agree with Kyle.
$615,000 does not seem like a success story here for the Attorney General, I have to say.
I had no idea that they actually concluded that the clientele were the broadband companies here
that actually profit from the repeal of net neutrality rules.
This is totally insane.
I mean, this should be a much, much bigger story.
It sounds like they were insulated by having contracted them and, I mean, to that end,
it sounds like they got away with it.
Straight up because we know how the FCC ruled.
Yeah.
I mean, the only way in which I think that would be a reasonable conclusion of this investigation
would be if the broadband companies contracted with this lead company, whatever it is,
this corporate entity that provided essentially astroturfing as a service,
and the broadband companies had no idea what they were doing on their behalf.
But you do have to assume some responsibility for the actions of your agents, right?
I mean, you hired them to do something.
What did the contract say?
What was it that they thought they were going to be doing and was there any auditing?
I mean, I'd love to see the communications about this at the time because this really does seem
like an issue of public trust, and if an agency action was predicated on those comments,
coming from what they thought were real people, then the agency action, to me, seems to be
invalid.
I think there would be grounds to bring a lawsuit alleging that the agency action was,
in fact, arbitrary and capricious or not predicated properly.
Yeah.
It doesn't seem nearly strong enough, as far as I'm concerned, a reaction to this should
be outrageous, not just on the part of the attorney general, on the part of all of us.
This is outrageous.
And yeah, you're right.
It should be much more in the news.
It should be headlines in every newspaper.
Go ahead, Rob.
It should definitely be much more in the news, but about the $615,000 not being enough punishment,
I think if you look at it as this was the attorney general of New York getting it back for
the New Yorkers who were affected by this, and there are 49 more states in the union
with their own attorneys general who can now follow suit, so to speak.
And so if this piles up, if more states take the lead on this and follow up, this could
turn out to be a lot more of a punishment for them.
Have you seen some of the attorneys general in, did I say that right, Alex?
Attorneys general in other states?
They're too busy fighting the trans community and making sure nobody ever gets an abortion
again to care about people actually being defrauded in this manner.
You know, my hopes are high, but realistically, I don't know.
Okay.
Well, we have this update for Google.
You know, if you try this, folks, if you go to Google News, right, there's a technology
section.
I just tried this a little before the show.
I know about that section.
You know about that section?
Okay.
So you get a bunch of technology headlines, maybe six of them, but you can click on the
word technology.
Then you get a whole lot of stories.
Yeah, that's all of them.
But I noticed that the first at least 10, maybe a dozen stories are only about Google.
Yeah.
Have you noticed that?
And then below that, there's nothing about it.
It's all Apple.
It's all Twitter.
It's other companies, but they really put themselves up on top.
Now, I don't think that was a coincidence.
No, not at all.
This section in general for news, I've found it's hard to take.
It really is.
It's a lot.
It's all sort of industry self-aggrandizement or something.
Like you said, it's these four companies.
It's very highly concentrated, just certain types of technology, and that's it.
And I feel like it really narrows what technology is.
I find and in fact, prefer the science category over technology because it's just so commercial.
And now, yeah, just one company, the very company that you're using this news filter on.
Yes, Rob.
Yeah, I pulled it up just now.
And even allowing for different people getting different Google results, because that's how
it works now.
The first eight results on this page are Google's releasing this.
Google's producing that.
Google's doing this.
Isn't it great?
And the eighth story is not about Google.
Instead, it's about Elon Musk slamming Meta's WhatsApp.
So it's not about Google, but it's about how terrible their competition is.
And look out for Android, too.
Sometimes the Android story will slip in there, which is also Google.
Yeah, after that, the ninth story is now about a vulnerability in Windows.
But it's a vulnerability.
Again, it's something bad.
It's not Microsoft is releasing this.
And I'm not saying Microsoft needs any more positive platforms.
But I think this is kind of an abuse of a news aggregator.
Well, and you're so focused on your own brand.
It seems like you could maybe reserve that for what everybody else is doing.
You know, that make it kind of fresh.
People that might see a lot of Google stuff because you're in that ecosystem.
How kind of eye-opening would it be to just maybe not have so much of that in that particular
section so you can compare and see what the rest of the so-called technology category is up to?
You know what I prefer, though?
Google's busy.
They have all kinds of things going on.
Everything's simmering on the oven there.
And they're important.
Let's take, you know, they don't have to do this.
Let's instead have another company come up with a news aggregator
that does a better job than Google News, because, boy, Google News has become so useless.
Every story you click on, they want money to read.
You know, you can't subscribe to every newspaper in the world.
So what is the point of having an aggregator that shows you all these
stories you could read if you were a subscriber to that particular newspaper?
Used to be that if you went there through Google News,
that you'd be able to read the story.
That was the whole point.
And now it's kind of pointless.
You can see the headlines, not much more.
Subscribe to a newspaper.
You don't have to subscribe to all of them, but maybe like a local one that
you got a soft spot for.
Especially a local one.
Absolutely.
Everyone did that.
You might have a lot more free stories on Google.
Subscribe to a newspaper that you believe in.
Let's say the Washington Post or the New York Times or somebody you think is, you know,
maybe they do a bad job occasionally, but mostly they do a good job.
But also something local that covers your community.
That's run by human beings.
That's run by human beings that basically you're supporting them rather than just
looking online and having, you know, artificial intelligence do it.
Because that's what's going to happen.
Alex?
I mean, I think you can bring this right back full circle to the Long Island
Telephone Museum because apparently you guys learned about the museum from Newsday.
Yes.
So there you go.
There's the cause and effect.
Anyway, the story I wanted to read about Google.
Yeah, I'm glad we took that long to get to it.
They are announcing major generative AI-powered updates to their search engine.
What the hell does that mean?
Well, it means that Google is now moving its BARD, artificial intelligence entity,
into the Google search bar.
So according to this particular story.
How do we even know Google is in control of that?
Maybe BARD just decided it was taking over.
This could be straight from BARD, yeah.
But this story, which came from Yahoo or a bot that works at Yahoo,
says that if you search for something like,
good bike for five-mile commute with hills,
search will then provide you with the generative AI page,
which will provide you with a list of suggestions for things to look for
when searching for bikes for commuting.
And below that, you'll see potential follow-up questions you can ask,
which will pull you into a conversation panel,
complete with the ability to link directly to bike retailer websites.
Yeah, during a live stage demo,
BARD pulled up answers for why do whales like to sing.
The app quickly provided a list of potential reasons for why whales sing,
provided images of whales, and allowed the user to ask follow-up questions.
Google is positioning generative AI as a future of search.
And as the company's most important product and largest revenue source,
it's no wonder it's moving fast to add the capability to the platform.
Um, yeah, this is going to be interesting.
You're going to be pulled into a conversation every time you ask a question now,
uh, in, in Google, might even remember previous questions that you asked.
So, um, I don't know, good, bad, scary.
What do you guys think?
Do we think anything?
Look, I, I think, I think it's inevitable, right?
I mean, I think this is something that,
that Microsoft had been, uh, already putting in place.
And I think that we see Google getting really scared about this.
So I think that they're rushing to get BARD connected into the search engine too,
because people's conception of what it means to search for information on the internet
has really changed over the last couple of months.
I mean, since the beginning of 2023, when we started talking about
chat GPT and all that it's been up to and all the amazing things that you can do.
And I think that maybe it wasn't even the beginning of 2023,
maybe it was the last quarter of 2022 when things started to really change.
But if you think about it, and we've talked about this in the past too,
but you do a search for anything on Google and you have to scroll through,
you know, a whole bunch of paid advertisements that nobody trusts anymore.
Some of them might even be malicious.
Some of them are definitely misleading.
And it does seem like, and I'm sure Google feels like,
their search engine is quickly becoming outdated.
So they have to migrate over to this natural language searching and still have the veneer
of a technology company that's on the cutting edge.
And they can't do that without plugging into the BARD system.
So I see them doing this as almost as an emergency measure
to save the relevance of Google searches.
But I also wonder about whether it's premature.
I kind of hear that.
Like it may be like too early, the whole diving in to it.
But there's another thing that I'm getting out of this.
I think it's sort of overdue and appropriate.
Like it is the technological tool that I think people are,
that we have been using in a way that this evolution is really conducive to.
Like natural language in search, people have been talking to Google
as though it was sort of AI or sentient.
I mean, maybe not without all the like arguments and pluses
and things that you can do to sort of guide Google to give you better results,
which there are things, ways you can type and enter.
That's an entire field of study we could go off on.
But the point is now it's sort of here.
It's actually here.
And whenever I actually, it's just to me a good fit.
And I think they were pushed in a lot of ways by Microsoft,
maybe because of their own cautiousness.
So in other words, maybe what we think might be rushed
has actually been a long, long time coming from the inside,
looking out as far as product development goes.
So there is kind of an excitement that I have for this at the same time.
I got to say, though, as far as artificial intelligence,
search results and explanations of various things that you ask it,
I think Bard is lagging.
I really do.
I think Chad GPT is doing a much better job.
I just asked Bard right now, briefly, tell me the history of WBAI.
I got so many facts wrong.
It said WBAI's first broadcast took place on May 1st, 1955.
Well, it didn't.
It took place in 1960.
I believe in January.
It just made up a date.
Yeah.
And I get this.
Here are some programs that have aired over WBAI.
Democracy Now.
Okay, they got that right.
The Lionel Hampton Show, jazz program hosted by Lionel Hampton.
Lionel Hampton do a show on WBAI?
I mean, if they did, I didn't know about it.
The Takeaway, a daily news and interview program hosted by John Hockenberry.
I thought he was on NPR.
But you'll see things like this all the time, where all kinds of things that sound right,
they sound credible, but they're wrong.
They're fake.
And yet it's presented as truth.
And I just worry that people are going to start believing this.
And you can basically ask any question.
For instance, I was asking for a list of monarchs in the United Kingdom in the
19th century, and I was told there were none.
And I know that's not true.
And I even confronted Bart about this saying, but look, this person was a monarch.
How do you explain that?
And Bart said, oh, I made a mistake.
I'm sorry.
That's not good enough because it continues to do the same thing even after you've corrected it.
So it's going to be a very interesting adventure that we're all embarking on right now.
I'm all for embarking upon it.
But let's not take it too seriously.
Let's realize what we're getting into.
Yeah.
I think because it could become very close to home.
How long before your home assistant device is asking Bart questions or somehow fused with it,
and all of a sudden you're having this much more powerful conversation
with your home assistant device, you can see the pathway.
I mean, Siri on your smartphones and so forth.
There's a lot of stuff here that has been sort of sizzling,
and it's now the foundation for something anew.
Okay.
So this weekend is Eurovision.
I don't know how many people in the United States know this,
but Eurovision is an annual song contest.
And experts from the National Cyber Security Center have been called in
after the government and Eurovision organizers raised concerns that the competition could
become a digital front of the Ukraine war.
If you recall, last year, Ukraine won the contest,
which meant that the contest should have been held in Ukraine this year,
instead of being held in England,
because obviously you don't want to have Eurovision in a war zone.
A senior Whitehall official said the biggest worry was the potential hacking of the voting system.
Like last year, when police in Italy, where the contest was staged,
said the Killnet Hacker Group targeted the first semifinal and the grand final.
This year's contest will be held in Liverpool.
It will have reinforced cyber defenses by NCSC experts
working with the Home Office and the Department for Science.
In 2022, Italian police managed to thwart attacks by pro-Russian hackers
at the competition in Turin,
especially during performances of the Kalish Orchestra,
which represented Ukraine and won the contest.
We are actually going to go out with that particular song from the Kalish Orchestra,
the winner of last year's Eurovision.
This year's Eurovision contest will be held in Liverpool, I believe on Saturday, the final,
which I'm pretty sure you can watch on YouTube.
Not entirely certain about that, but it's a lot of fun.
It really is.
Music might not be your cup of tea,
but the enthusiasm certainly is something we can all get behind.
Next week, maybe we'll play the winner of that particular contest.
We're coming back in just a few minutes over on YouTube.
Go to channel 2600 or simply click on the link on the 2600.com webpage.
It's your opportunity to give us a call if there's something you'd like to talk to us about,
or to just hear our voices for another few minutes.
You can write to us, oth at 2600.com,
and you can tune in again next week at 7pm on WBAI
for another exciting broadcast of Off The Hook.
But again, at 8 o'clock, we will be on YouTube, channel 2600, for overtime.
And now, from Ukraine, last year's Eurovision winner, the Kalish Orchestra.
Good night.
Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey
Mama, where are you? I'm plowing the field, and it blooms. Sing to me, mama, a lullaby.
I want to feel your wind again.
Mama, where are you? I'm plowing the field, and it blooms.
Sing to me, mama, a lullaby.
I want to feel your wind again.
Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey
WBAI's Local Station Board, the Pacifica Foundation Board responsible for local management and operations, is holding its next regular meeting on Wednesday, May 10th at 7 p.m.
As events unfold within the Pacifica Network and multiple stations cope with financial weakness, it's important for the LSB to identify and keep up with what local priorities should be.
We're working to ensure that a robust WBAI 99.5 FM remains where the 99.5% can find it on the dial.
Again, the LSB meeting is Wednesday, May 10th at 7 p.m.
The meeting will be held through the Zoom remote meeting service.
The meeting, accessible to the public, includes an opportunity for public comment.
The fastest and easiest way to join the meeting is by using the link on the Pacifica calendar at kpftx.org and on the WBAI website.
You can also access the meeting by calling 929-205-6099.
That's 929-205-6099.
And enter this meeting ID, 922-457-2995.
Enter your meeting ID again, 922-457-2995.
And as if that wasn't enough numbers, we also have a password.
The password is 995, like BAI's frequency.
So it's 995-995-99.
Do you have to contribute to WBAI to access the meeting?
No, but we sure hope that you do.
212-209-2950 to support WBAI in New York City.