All right, here we are, on Overtime, did everybody make it smoothly?
Kyle, are you there?
Yeah.
Okay, good.
And, Alex, I see you.
I still have some whiplash from that transition, it was a little harsh this time.
And Rob and Gila, are you there?
We're here.
Okay, I'm not sure this is working, because I'm seeing numbers of zero for viewers, and
I know that we're public, it's a public thing.
Can you guys verify that we are actually on YouTube?
Can somebody check?
We are.
Okay.
So maybe we just don't have anybody watching.
I'm not really sure.
But again, the phone number is 802-321-4225.
Again, sorry about the rough start to the actual radio show, Kyle, I believe you wanted
to take credit for that?
Is that what you were telling me before?
Yeah, I wasn't really ready, and basically forgot to turn on the Wi-Fi for something.
Okay, all right, that's fine, that's fine.
But then, after restarting some of the software and doing a bunch of that troubleshooting,
it seemed like it was the station that was having trouble, but I just kept doing that,
and eventually it was blaring in our engineers' ears.
You know, something is wrong here.
I can just tell, because usually our numbers are much higher than this, and now, Rob, if
you're connecting, you're the one that I'm seeing.
And now it's two.
Okay, great, but usually it's like 60 or 70.
So what happened?
I don't know if your numbers are lagging or something.
Well, something's not right.
Don't pay attention.
Well, I'm looking at the YouTube station, and there's 26 watching now.
Okay, but there should be more than that.
And also, we need people to know how to use YouTube better than we do, because apparently
nobody can see this until it goes live.
We need for it to be seen before it goes live, so people know about it before it actually
starts happening.
So, oth at 2600.com?
That's our email address.
Yeah, write to us and help us out with these things and various social media and podcast
issues that we are constantly...
We don't want to be YouTube experts.
We just want to be competent.
Yeah, we want to get it right, and we don't have to waste a lot of time thinking about
it ourselves.
That seems fair.
What do you have there, Alex?
You made a great show of holding it up.
You asked me a question as you see me putting the drink to my lips.
Well, why did you make a big display if you didn't want me to call attention to it?
I was just saying cheers.
That's all.
That's all.
I'm having a Cronenberg, actually.
A French beer.
Oh, that's a good Pilsner.
That's nice, right?
It is.
That's a good beer.
It's Wednesday.
It's after 8 o'clock.
What the hell?
Yeah, exactly.
Now, Kyle, did you plug the phone back in?
You didn't, did you?
Yeah, it's set.
Okay, so our phone number is open.
802-321-4225.
If there's something you as a listener want to complain about or talk to us about, this
is your opportunity.
This is why this particular part of the show exists, so that you can have your say.
We can't do this.
You saw the trouble we had just getting on the air.
Imagine the trouble of dealing with calls at a remote studio that are on delay.
It would just be way too much for, I think, anybody to handle.
Well, don't build it up too much yet, because when they connect, we may have to adjust some
of the chewing gum and the tape that's holding everything together.
Why can't this just stay the way it is?
It's been a couple weeks.
We might have had some jostling.
There may have been a...
Oh, we have our first call.
We have a phone call, but I think you still have to pick up the phone and press 1, because
for some reason, Google makes us do that, and we should look into that as well.
Is there a caller on the line?
Yeah, I'm on the line.
Great.
Hi.
How you doing?
Okay.
I was curious to know what brand phone Rob has, since he said he switched away from
Samsung, because I know they're the 800-pound gorilla in the cell phone market.
So I was curious to know what phone he uses.
Yeah, Rob, tell us all about your phone, what kind of phone it is, and all the details.
My phone is a Motorola phone, and I got it, I want to say, three, four years ago, because
at the time, it seemed like Motorola was actually opening up their attitudes toward people repairing
their own phones, and things like right to repair, and making a phone that you can take
apart if you're expert enough, and put together yourself.
So I went with them.
It's a Motorola phone.
Oh, okay.
That's good to know.
Just one other question.
The photo on the YouTube page, where exactly was that taken?
I'm glad somebody finally asked about that.
I don't know.
I don't know where that was taken.
Obviously, somewhere in Europe.
That's a mailbox.
It's a green mailbox.
And maybe this is something our listeners can help us with.
Where are their green mailboxes?
What part of Europe has that particular custom?
Very arresting image.
It is.
Thank you.
It's a picture I took when we were scrambling for the first edition of Overtime.
We needed an image, and I just jumped into the first directory I found, which happened
to be pictures I took while traveling once, and grabbed that one.
That's literally the story behind it.
So now it's up to the listeners to tell us the rest of the story behind that.
All right.
Well, I look forward to getting an answer from one of your intrepid listeners.
Thanks.
And may we ask where you are calling from?
Calling from Nassau County.
All right.
Nassau County.
How much snow did you guys get?
About 15 inches.
Awesome.
Wow.
Still digging out.
Uh-huh.
We all are.
All right.
Thanks for your call.
Thank you.
Have a great night.
802-321-4225.
802-321-HACK to talk to the folks at Off The Hook while we decompress from the radio show.
Phones are lasting a little bit longer.
I mean, unless you need the best features ever, and I think this is true with laptops
and other machines, you might have noticed that you don't need all of the latest processor
speeds unless you're doing something particular.
Most people can get by with refurbishing something or taking something that maybe needed some
components, a little more RAM.
And you can do amazing stuff with some of the contemporary hardware that's even half
a dozen years old and not for very much money either.
And I've noticed this with phones too.
The ones that are harder to repair, and this has come up with right-to-repair conversations
as well.
There's Cottage Industries for cracked screens, as Alex was talking about.
I've been watching someone who actually works for Apple on social media.
She fixes phones, and it's really interesting to see how you have to heat and remove processors
and the steps involved with repairing circuits.
It's really fascinating stuff.
So there's a lot of people working on this so that people who are not interested in upgrading
their phone but willing to spend a couple hundred bucks on it or 50 bucks for a screen
or something cheap that will just keep it going longer, it's perfectly worthwhile to
repair it instead of upgrading just for features.
8023214225.
Go ahead, Rob.
Yeah, there is a site called iFixit.
It's ifixit.com.
And they host really good community-created guides and teardowns and things like that
to repair all sorts of devices.
And Motorola actually went to work with them for a bit, so there are some really good guides
on the Motorola phones.
So what I did was I went on ifixit.com slash Motorola and looked there to see what phones
they have guides and stuff available for and made my selection that way.
We have a caller on the line.
Go ahead, caller.
Oh, is that me?
That's you.
Great.
Hi.
I'm just wondering, is no one speculating why the rioters, since they are terrorists,
why they haven't been talking about them going to Gitmo and sending them off there?
Well, I don't know if we send domestic prisoners to Gitmo, do we?
The sticky thing of the U.S. citizenship might be partly why that's not one of the first
options they're going with.
But it's a good question.
It's a quandary, because really, what is the distinction other than that with a domestic
or international terrorism case?
I mean, for the record, I don't think anybody should be sent to Gitmo.
I think we should be closing that place down and giving it back to Cuba.
Right.
No one should be there, really.
But since they're keeping people there for God knows how many years now.
It's a valid point.
Alex, I think you have something to say?
Yeah.
I mean, Gitmo was really for enemy combatants.
That was the reason for its existence.
Well, these are enemies.
They're combating, for sure.
But I take your point.
True.
But yeah, non-U.S. citizen enemy combatants.
I mean, it's also not the exclusive place where we would hold anybody on terrorism charges.
If you think about it, there are plenty of terrorism charges brought against people in
the Southern District of New York and the Eastern District of New York, and they're
held in the Metropolitan Detention Center and sent to federal prison.
So they don't all have to go over to Gitmo.
But if they were enemy combatants...
Well, they don't seem to be sending anyone anywhere except for one guy.
Yeah.
They are releasing a lot of people on their own recognizance or for affordable bail or
things like that.
They're definitely not treating them the same way they would treat other people, for sure.
Go ahead, Alex.
Yeah.
That's true.
But let's go back to Gitmo for a second, too.
Oh, God.
Let's not go there ever.
For things that they said they were going to do and not do.
I mean, President Obama campaigned on Gitmo in 2007 and 2008 and claimed that he was going
to shut it down.
Yeah, but...
And yet he did not.
Okay.
Again, what is it with people wanting to just point and say that somebody didn't fulfill
their promise without exploring all the facts?
Okay.
People are saying, Joe Biden lied about the $2,000 when, if you do the math, $1,400 plus
the $600 we already got is $2,000.
He's not lying.
It's just somebody didn't understand math.
But the Obama thing, I take exception to that, too, because he wanted to shut down Gitmo,
but Congress got in the way.
The Republicans got in the way.
How does he get the blame for that?
Yeah.
How do you throw that at someone's feet and just, like, you're dumbfounded?
Obviously, you understand that there are two other branches of government.
Yeah.
If the Republicans had gone along, Gitmo would be shut right now.
I mean, I'm all for shutting it with what we have and maybe taking a stronger stance
and maybe not even getting cooperation from Republicans.
Fine.
Because since they've lowered the bar so much, maybe that's the only way to get things done
now.
But I don't doubt his sincerity as far as closing Gitmo.
It just was one of the many things he wasn't able to do.
Your responses are all premised on this erroneous assumption that politicians don't have to
work with the other side of the aisle, and you can just blame the other side.
You have to make a convincing argument.
This is about argumentation.
It's about persuasion.
We elect people to government because they're supposed to be persuasive representatives
of the people.
So when you say, OK, Obama campaigned and said he was going to get Gitmo closed down
and he failed to do it, well, that's something he failed to deliver on because he failed
to be persuasive.
That's how I view it.
You know, I think that we need to hold people accountable to their campaign promises.
But look, that's neither here nor there.
More importantly, I got an email from a colleague of mine with whom I've worked for a number
of years right now, and he believes that the letterbox is actually originating in Ireland,
that it was a picture taken in Ireland.
OK, that's certainly possible.
One way to verify that would be to see what direction the cars are going.
I might have to see if there's an expanded view of that picture.
But that's a good theory.
Yeah.
You want me to give the phone number out?
OK.
You know, you can just say that.
You don't have to write a picture of the phone.
The phone number is 802-321-4225.
I wasn't sure if she was still on the phone.
That's why I didn't give the number out.
Phone line apparently is open.
All right.
Good.
So, yes.
What else?
I just don't think that you can work with people who say, oh, yeah, closing that down
is off the table.
That's not a negotiation.
And being any more convincing with people that say something is off the table,
I don't know.
I just don't find that as constructive as you're making it out to be.
I feel like you're greenwalding a little bit here.
And you know what I mean by that.
Basically, you just attack.
Is that a verb?
It is now.
It is now.
He blocked me for criticizing him.
Don't get me started on that.
But basically, people are so eager to say, aha, the Democrats are just as bad.
No, they're not just as bad.
Are they bad?
Yes.
Are they politicians?
Absolutely.
But to say blame Obama for not having the kind of health care we want, no, that's on us
for not backing up the kind of health care we got and pushing for more.
Instead, we said, nope, not good enough, not going to support it, and add my vote to the
Republicans that don't support it as well.
And then the majority of people don't support it, and you get nothing.
That's what happens when you don't take a proactive interest in actually pushing your
chosen candidate to do more.
And you can disagree with them, but you can still support them.
And I think a lot of people just don't know how to do that.
Look at how people treat de Blasio.
Look at how people treat Cuomo.
And people are going to treat Biden the same way.
And guess who's going to march in and take over when that happens?
Anyway, we have another phone call.
Let's go to that.
Good evening.
You're on Off the Hook Overtime.
Just wanted to say, if you look up those 10 digits on that green mailbox, it is an Irish
tracking service.
Uh-huh.
And where are you calling from?
Queens, New York.
All right.
So you know what you're talking about.
So Ireland, I guess, is confirmed.
Can we say the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland?
Northern Ireland is probably the Republic of Ireland, right?
So this is a lot of it looking it up.
Uh-huh.
Okay.
That's all I know.
Okay.
Anything else you want to say?
No.
Thank you for the show.
All right.
Thanks for calling.
All right.
Phone number 802-321-4225.
802-321-HACK.
And this goes to show that if you ask for information, people are always willing to
find out and give the information.
Alex?
I have a suggestion, if I may, for off-the-hook overtime in the future.
Perhaps what we can do every week is change that photograph.
And this can be the basis of conversation every single week.
Find that photo.
Where is it?
I think it would actually be kind of cool.
Oh, and who's going to do that, Alex?
Who's going to rifle through all the photos and put it up every damn week, huh?
Just give them more homework is what you're doing.
How about this?
I have an even better idea.
I'm going to take a random photo from the parlor leak and post that.
Yeah, there you go.
And those are being posted, right?
Yeah, they are.
Where can people see those?
That's a good question.
I mean, you can find a whole bunch of them on Twitter, right?
And then there's a lot of these repos.
Rob, are you more aware of where you can find these repos?
I don't know about the centralized repos, but yeah.
Follow Duncan underscore NB on Twitter.
D-O-N-K underscore E-N-B-Y.
And there are links to all of these being posted.
There's also a fascinating account I've been following called Parlor Takes,
which allows you to see this stuff without having to actually follow it yourself.
Okay.
How do you spell that?
It's fascinating.
How do you spell that?
It's just one word, P-A-R-L-E-R-T-A-K-E-S.
On Twitter.
Parlor Takes.
Great.
Thank you for that.
We have a caller.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook overtime.
Hi.
You sent me the call and complain, and I wanted to complain about Parlor.
Okay.
Hey, you're in the right place.
This is complaining about Parlor Central.
So my problem with Parlor is, like, it's a giant grift, right?
We already have these frameworks for, like, decentralized social networking,
like Paloma, Mastodon.
There's tons of ways to do it.
And they just, like, created a crappy Twitter clone
and fundraised off of it.
And it's just, like, I'm going to ignore the whole content of Parlor,
but, like, the whole thing.
They're just making money off people, and it's crap.
Go ahead, Rob.
They don't care.
Yeah.
One really interesting aspect of why, you know,
people might ask why didn't they just start a Mastodon instance.
And that's because I don't think they were interested in the federation
aspect of it.
They didn't want to put up something that ticks from outside could still get in.
They wanted their own little club, their own little walled garden,
and that's why they just cloned Twitter and put that up.
Alex, go ahead.
You know, I was actually itching my arm.
You were raising your damn hand.
I figured you wanted to say something.
This is like, you know, you would make the worst auctioneer.
You'd have people buying things.
No, you would make the worst auction goer,
or whatever they call people that go to auctions.
Yeah.
But, look, I think that Kohler's point underscores the point that I made
during the main event, during Off the Hook on WPI,
which is that this thing was a crappy instance from the beginning.
There shouldn't have been fundraising.
Perhaps, you know, as I think that Kohler intimates,
it may have even been part of some kind of fraud.
I mean, the fact that they raised money to support some crappy instance
and that they claimed that they had this state-of-the-art cybersecurity,
that they valued privacy, when they certainly and obviously were not.
But, Alex, of course it was fraud.
I mean, Steve Bannon raised money for a wall that was never built
and pocketed the money.
Trump himself, raising money after the election for God knows what,
kept all that money.
So, yeah, this is what they do.
Yeah.
This is what they do.
But when you claim, when you're a business and you raise money
and you take money from the public
and you have services out there for the public to use,
but yet you are not doing on the back end what you claim to be doing,
this is the kind of thing where the FTC may get involved,
or they may look into you,
or they may launch an investigation for something like unfair
or deceptive trade practices.
But what if you're registered in Belize and Russia and Turkmenistan
and all these other places?
Who looks into you then?
Well, they certainly were not,
and they're offering services to U.S. citizens.
They're taking U.S. money from investors, I would imagine.
So they have all of these requisite connections to the U.S. forum,
to the U.S. jurisdiction for the Federal Trade Commission
to launch some kind of investigation.
And I think deceptive trade practices would certainly be something,
if I were on the FTC, I would look into that.
Yeah.
They're definitely on the defensive in sort of a crippled state,
or they want to kind of hold on to it
or let it incubate in its relegated status.
So it exists.
It has a destination, as we pointed out.
But it's, I think, a lot, where I was going with it,
it's a lot of, like, management, crisis management-type stuff,
but without letting go of what they feel is a network
and good money in the sense of a grift, right?
Carla, did you have anything else to say?
Yeah.
It just felt like a more palatable, like, institutional-backed gab.
Because gab did the same stuff, and it's just a repeat that, you know,
people like the Mercers could dump all their money into,
and it just irritates me.
Because there are things like, you know, the Fediverse
that could use that kind of money.
We could do amazing things with it.
But, you know, they're just grifters and stuff.
Well, I think there's more awareness now, so maybe there's hope.
Maybe there's hope that that money will go to the right places in the future
because people are aware of this now.
I hope so.
That's all I had to say.
Thank you.
All right.
Thanks for your call.
Getting good calls tonight, I have to say.
You can be one of them.
802-321-4225, 802-321-HACK.
Alex, were you scratching yourself again or raising your hand this time?
I was not raising my hand.
I was itching.
What's going on over there in Pennsylvania?
Sounds like you need lotion or something.
Yeah, seriously.
Scratching like you're in the gorilla cage at the zoo.
Thanks.
Okay.
We're getting a lot of calls, which is great,
and our viewership is going up, which is also nice, I guess.
And let's take this call.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook overtime.
Go ahead.
Hello.
I'd like to talk.
Just about the DDoS card being business-based in Edinburgh.
This is a company formation called the Scottish Limited Partnership,
and over the last few years there's been investigations into them.
One of the investigations identified about £1 billion in cash
that had been transferred from kind of former Soviet bloc states
through these partnership companies.
They are an absolute scandal,
and that's one of the reasons where they're able to get this lack of transparency with it.
So it seems to me that, you know what I mean,
across the world we have a duty to actually kind of go
and fight against these injustices and shut down these avenues,
but it has to be done, you know what I mean, across the world.
Agreed.
Are you by chance calling from Scotland?
I am.
I'm calling from Edinburgh.
It is half past one in the morning, and I've been tuned in.
If I can give one suggestion,
I would love if we would be able to get more interaction through the IRC channel,
because without having YouTube comments on,
it's not a very convenient time to be talking on the phone,
so it would be good if we could kind of converse by text.
Okay.
We'll take that into consideration.
You can understand, though, why we perhaps chose not to have comments on YouTube,
but we'll look into it.
If there are moderators and things, yeah, it can be manageable.
Alex, I know you have something to say.
Yeah, I think this is such a great call to have received about something we said on the air,
and it just really underscores to me why we do this off-the-hook overtime right now
and the interaction with the callers and why it's so important as well,
because I had no idea about that.
I don't think anybody really knows about those interesting investigations
that have been happening in Scotland into DDoS guards,
the money transfers that seem extraordinarily irregular,
and the fact that they're using Scotland as a home base
or at least having telephones that ring into Scotland is a nexus to that jurisdiction
that allows those investigators and those regulators to make those types of inquiries,
and it sounds like they're doing it.
It sounds like they may get it somewhere,
and I would love it if the caller could continue to update us about those particular investigations.
So definitely stay in touch, whether it's IRC, whether it's off-the-hook overtime,
because I do think that the connection, this DDoS guard connection,
there's something incredibly underhanded and shady about it,
and I will say as well that one of the things that I did
when I saw that they had transferred their hosting over to DDoS guard
was I looked up their NS records, and I found every single domain name
that DDoS guard was hosting, every single domain that had NS records,
name server records that related to DDoS guard,
and I'll tell you there aren't a huge, huge, huge amount of them.
What I found was slightly over 6,000,
but I wasn't looking in all of the country code top-level domains.
We know that they host a lot in Russia, so there may be a whole bunch of .rus
perhaps that weren't available,
but what I did see was that there were 6,000 or so, which is not a big number,
but a good portion of those were domain names that were cyber squatters
or domains that were registered that could only be used for illegal, malicious,
or fraudulent-type purposes as well.
So DDoS guard itself I think is hosting a tremendous amount of content
that it probably knows to be either borderline unlawful or unlawful itself,
and that's something else I think should be looked into with respect to this host,
and it says a hell of a lot about Parler that it had to go to DDoS guard
for another hosting arrangement.
Thank you very much for that information, Culler, and definitely stay in touch.
Yes, and I really miss Edinburgh.
That's one of the first places I want to go when all this ends.
Well, we'd be happy to have you back.
That's right. We could go, Culler, if you're still on the line,
we could go to the espionage bar.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, love it.
Uh-huh, definitely.
And I want to visit the guy—
Sadly closed at the moment due to lockdown,
but I'm sure they'll be opening it up in the next few months.
I want to visit the guy in Shetland who got my bottle in the middle of the ocean
and drifted over to Shetland.
And I think you can get there pretty easily from Scotland, correct?
Absolutely so. You can get the ferry or take the plane.
Wow. Okay. Awesome. I'm there.
All right. Thanks again for the call.
All the best.
Keep listening.
And we say one more call?
Do one more call.
All right. 802-321-4225.
So good connecting with our listeners again.
It's been too long, you know, and I really miss the studio.
I really miss the street.
I really miss going out afterwards and just doing the things we all took for granted.
Maybe we'll never take them for granted again.
Let's hope so.
802-321-HACK-802-321-4225.
I figured I'd do that just for entertainment.
I'm sorry.
Apparently when you hit that button and there's no call—
I'm up.
That's how you know there's no call.
I'm up.
Wow.
So if there is a call, that doesn't happen.
If there isn't a call, that does happen.
Please don't do it.
I'm learning.
This is—OK, we have a call, so that won't happen when I do the exact same thing.
I wanted to take this call.
See, that's the Google lady.
That's the Google lady.
OK, got to press 1.
Don't press 1 for too long, otherwise you'll annoy the person.
OK.
Go ahead, caller.
You're on the net, I guess.
Off the hook overtime.
Go ahead.
Oh, thank you so much.
I'm wondering if you get a current iPhone with facial recognition on it,
if you're more likely to be tracked?
Well, one of you iPhone people answered that.
I don't have face recognition, so I can't tell you.
Alex, how about you?
It seems that's the kind of thing you would like.
Well, I mean, it depends on what you're talking about by tracked, right?
I mean, are you concerned about setting up facial recognition,
having that data then transferred over to some third party,
and then it sent over to law enforcement in some way or another,
and then tracked that way?
No, I wouldn't intend.
You know, my reasoning for getting the phone in the first place is for
convenience and for the camera, and I wouldn't be using the facial recognition.
So I'm wondering about getting a model that doesn't have it.
Because when I called Apple, they said, oh, no, it's only about, you know,
logging in, and you don't really even have to use that.
But I'm thinking about the new reset and how we're going to be, you know,
spied on even more.
It's interesting, Quandary.
I know kind of where you're getting at, and I think you've got to be a little
bit careful going forward because there are going to be some new technologies
that we're going to want to talk about, and they're going to seem pretty
futuristic.
And I really hope that conspiracy and sort of unfounded stuff doesn't take
over because it's really in the interests of the people that are unrolling
these technologies for people who talk about the technology to come off as
conspiracy theorists so that the actual functions aren't evaluated and looked
into and talked about with seriousness.
So there's a little bit about handsets and hardware going forward and stuff
that is going to have a lot of implications.
And so it's important to find out as much as possible as consumers.
And for, like, an instance like this, it would be where is the information
that is used to create a sense of recognizing my face?
Where is that stored?
And as Alex said, you know, it could be something that's held elsewhere.
Then if it's in sort of a data escrow like that, who is in charge of it?
And is there some mechanism for law enforcement or some other authority,
a government or a private entity that sells that facial recognition information?
Those are all important questions.
As far as from what I know or would guess, I would say that that is not
stored off the device, and Apple is being as honest as they might be as a
corporation when they say, no, it is just to unlock your phone.
It is probably held in the hardware on the phone in a chip that is not easy
to exfiltrate data from.
But I'm not an iPhone person, so I don't really know that.
But absolutely, these questions and stuff, without getting into, like I said,
unfounded stuff, we've got to ask this stuff.
We've got to know as consumers.
Go ahead, Alex.
Yeah, and speaking of which, you know, further to Kyle's point,
and to your point as well, Cole, which is that you spoke to Apple and they said
there was nothing untoward happening with that particular data,
which seems to really underscore Kyle's point.
But the issue then becomes if they are not doing anything untoward with it now,
what if they change their policies?
What if it becomes much more profitable to share that information
with third parties or to share it with some third party who is using it
for some kind of innovative purpose, something like that?
Then their policies are always going to change.
What they're doing now may not be what they're doing tomorrow,
may not be what they're doing in a month or a year or five years from now.
But then again, that being said, you know,
what we're talking about is pictures of our faces, right?
And for most of us and many of us, you know,
we willingly put that information out there on LinkedIn or on Facebook.
And so there are many other instances or data out there by which you could be
tracked already.
So I see this as somewhat low risk,
but the data surrounding your face and what they're taking in,
how you use your phone, when you log into your phone,
all of that information is metadata that could be surrounding that particular
image that could also be really interesting to some third party advertiser,
malicious actor, law enforcement, et cetera, at some point down the road.
So I think you're right to be skeptical.
One last thing I wanted to mention is I'm reminded of a sign I used to see at a
cafe that I went to and it was just something I'm sure people have seen and said
all over the place, but it was, we reserve the right to confuse service.
I would encourage you if you're around one of these technologies,
reserve that right.
I know Emmanuel says it all the time, you know,
maybe your dog's face unlocks your phone or,
or a particular knothole in a tree or something, you know,
do what you can to mess with things as much as possible.
That's something we always want to remind people that they have the power to
do.
Right. I hear you. And, and I did say, and he did,
they did tell me that I could still use a code to unlock my phone,
which is my preference.
But I'm wondering if just having that facial recognition capability on the
phone can be accessed by say, you know,
police or whoever to interface with my phone,
unbeknownst to me.
The way I look at it, if that is possible,
it's going to happen and we'll find out about it and it's not going to make
them look very good at all.
And they are, they're putting their business on the line.
They're betting their business in a lot of ways on privacy.
If you've seen a lot of Apple's ad campaigns, they're,
they're really trying to reaffirm people's trust in a lot of the ability to
have compromise in, in,
in the regular environment or with in the case of law enforcement,
they've not been cooperative in a lot of ways because they stand by the security
of their devices.
And we've reported stories about law enforcement having to use other,
other third party devices to gain access and with whatever level,
varying levels of success to do their work.
But it is not in Apple's interest to appear as though they are giving this
willingly without consent in any way,
let alone selling it in some way or so forth.
All right. Thanks. Thanks for your phone call.
Thank you for your show.
All right. Take care.
Bye.
I'm glad people are asking questions or they're so right to ask those questions.
Our viewership goes up as the show goes on.
But you know, we, we, our energy is being depleted. We have to,
we have to call it a night.
You can't take one more?
No, we gave out the number.
I think we, I think we, we've taken, I mean, you know, people insist, but
It's a good 40 minutes, 45 minutes. How, how long is over time?
Well, it started out like 10, 15 minutes.
I think the first one we did was like 20 minutes.
And then people got more and more involved and you know,
it could be all night. That's what's going to happen.
We were making up for a little time because the show ran a little,
a little late. So that's true, but we made up for that time already.
Yeah, we did.
I think we should take another call. Like we can do one more, one more call.
All right.
One more, one more.
Well, then you give out the phone number. How about that?
802-321-HACK.
In numbers?
4-2-2-5.
Thanks.
All right. Well, we got a call.
So, but next time I expect you to say the whole thing, all 10 digits.
Not counting the one.
Country code one, and you need a one anyway.
Good evening, caller. You are our last caller. Where are you calling from?
Oh, great.
New York City.
Oh, cool. That's pretty close.
Yes.
I love the show.
I went to Hope one year, a couple years ago. I had a blast.
Uh-huh. Cool. And hopefully there'll be another Hope soon.
Cool. Cool.
My question is about WhatsApp.
What's that?
I heard that they were going to back down off of the invasion of our privacy with the new update.
Do you have any information about that?
I haven't heard this. Does anyone else know?
Or can you tell us a bit more about the story you found?
It was going around on the internet that the new update since, you know, what's-his-name bought WhatsApp,
that he's going to now start selling ads and using information to, you know, push ads towards what you're looking at, what your interests are.
Just to clarify, we're talking about WhatsApp, not WhatsApp, right?
That's what I'm trying to make sure. WhatsApp. Okay. Got it.
Right. So the invasion of your text messages and everything and what you're looking at is going to happen.
And he started backing down because he saw people exiting, going to like Signal and Clubhouse and things like that.
I think, Alex, you've got something?
Yeah, there was quite, I think, a bit of press over this issue the last couple of weeks or so.
And I think you're right, Collar, too, that originally Zuckerberg said, especially when he was going through the due diligence process and the government review process for the acquisition of WhatsApp,
that that data would not be cross-pollinated with other Facebook data.
They started doing that. People started calling them out for it and then migrating from WhatsApp.
And what was interesting about this was that a lot of researchers and a lot of people had put together these infographics about the data that WhatsApp collects compared to the data that something like Signal would collect.
And you would see these massive data points, massive amount of data points, rather, that WhatsApp was collecting and then sharing with third parties, whereas something like Signal wasn't doing any of that.
So you had a massive migration of, I think, around 40 million users or so over to Signal within the period of a week, which was extraordinary and also caused a lot of annoying notifications for everyone on Signal, seeing that all these people are popping up, people coming out of the woodwork.
I hate that feature, by the way. I really hate that feature where you're told preemptively that people, I'm glad to complain, absolutely, people that you know have joined Signal.
Well, maybe they didn't want you to know that they joined Signal. It's like you're advertising with a megaphone, all these people are on Signal now, and you start getting welcome messages from people you don't even know.
It just seems like an invasion of privacy for a service that you're using for privacy.
I agree. It really is stupid. It's so stupid that they do that.
What have you been hearing?
No problem with the new update. Because I didn't do it, and I've been shut down until I do it. So I didn't do it yet. I'm trying to find out something.
So the update itself is supposed to alleviate some of the stuff that was integrating ad systems or ad networks into the application. Do you know anyone who has tried the update themselves?
I haven't done it. I don't know if anybody else has. But what are you hearing? What's the reaction been from what you've been hearing?
Nobody I know is being forced to update. I seem to be the only one that I know of that has to do it right now.
I wonder why they're treating you differently.
And they don't know it, and they're not paying attention, but I don't have what it matters. I get prompted, and I said no, so I've been shut down temporarily.
Well, somebody should try it. Understandably, people are a little bit nervous, and they backed off. As Alex was talking about, 40 million, that's a lot of people to step away from something like that.
But it should be something that they're a little bit more transparent about. Of course they won't be, because there's so many things like algorithms and stuff under the hood that they want to keep closely guarded.
But if they did change it, and they removed this, it should be something that we can verify. How do we know? You shouldn't have to be concerned. You should be confident as a user.
And it's in their interest. If people are uncomfortable, they're not going to be really interested in coming back. I think that's kind of the point you're making, right?
If a service you're using treats you in such a hostile manner as to prevent you from using it unless you upgrade on a mandatory upgrade, maybe look at a different service. Maybe that relationship isn't going anywhere.
Especially when they lead it that way, and they trust us. Well, if you let us down before, we're not going to just dive right back into that. We actually want to know.
Yeah, they kept warning me. Three days you're going to have to update. Two days you're going to have to update. So on the day of, like 12, high noon, it was like, you didn't update. Your service is down.
Just like that.
It was never supposed to be about that. You just want to talk to people.
These are bullying tactics. They're literally—well, not literally, but shoving you into a doorway, forcing you to accept their terms or be miserable. I just don't think that's a good premise to continue with. Alex, go ahead.
I have a theory about the caller and why he was singled out for updating as opposed to everybody else. I think that the caller is rightfully skeptical of lots of different things, updates included, and he has failed to install several updates to the application, meaning that he is about to be on an end-of-life version of the actual app itself.
And that's what's forcing him to do the update. So maybe, caller, can you tell me if my theory is right? Have you done all of the updates recently? When was the last time you updated the app?
The last update probably was mandatory also, but the thing about the privacy and selling your information wasn't going around, so I didn't. I didn't want to, but I did it. There was no threat of breach of privacy, so I went on ahead and did it. If I didn't have to, I wouldn't have, but now maybe I'm going to go to Signal.
Yeah, maybe that's a better idea. I have to say, Signal annoys me because half the time there's a big dialog box that says, there's an upgrade to Signal, and you can't read your messages because it's there sitting over everything, and that happens like every week, so they're all kind of annoying. Sometimes I'm just happy with what I have, and I want to leave it the way it is.
You're talking about the desktop?
Desktop, yes, desktop. I'm sorry.
You guys ever use Clubhouse, anybody?
No, I haven't.
No, okay.
I haven't either. I see a lot of people talking about it. I just don't want another thing to look at on my phone. I'm trying to unclutter rather than sign up for more things.
You need a second phone, then.
That's funny.
All right. Caller, thank you for your call.
Thanks, guys. Appreciate your show.
Thank you. Take care.
Great to hear you. Have a good night.
You too.
All right. I'm glad we took one more call. That was good.
So, folks, I guess that's going to do it for us here tonight. We'll be back again next week.
Again, you can listen to all prior episodes, not only of Off the Hook, but of all our shows, and shows I was involved in before Off the Hook even happened, before 2600 even happened. Wow.
And you can listen to us on WBAI at 7 p.m. every Wednesday for Off the Hook and, of course, Off the Hook Overtime following, which you can get at 2600.com or wherever the hell you get your podcasts.
We will be back. And write to us, OTH at 2600.com. Any last words from everybody out there?
Yeah. We were talking earlier of things we used to be able to do that we can't right now, and among those things is 2600 meetings, which are still suspended.
But a lot of local meetings are still doing meetups virtually to mitigate the loss a little bit. We're doing that in New York, so if you'd like to join in on Friday, go to nyc2600.net. All the info is there.
I also saw on the 2600 subreddit, actually, that there's going to be a worldwide virtual meeting.
Okay. I don't know anything about this. Okay. Well, great.
Hang on. Let me…
How do you connect to a worldwide global 2600 meeting?
I'm going to tell you as soon as this loads. Okay. The Hispogatos Collective, who did the Anarchist Hacker Village at Hope, are running a thing at matrix.hackers.town.
And they are through Mozilla hubs, apparently, and you don't need to have VR, but you can. And that is a worldwide 2600 meeting that is occurring on Friday.
Is there a time?
I don't know.
Zulu time?
Yeah, it's kind of an important part of all this. Or just a place where people can find out more info.
Okay. 530 Eastern.
Okay. All right.
So…
Yeah.
If you can figure out all that stuff, then by all means, do that.
Yeah. Hispogatos.org, apparently.
Excellent. We do like Matrix. We've used it.
Yeah, that's what we used during Hope.
Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff that we used for Hope.
It was very, very successful. Alex, it looks like you want to say something.
Yeah. Kyle, did you call that out as Zulu time? As something that was going to be Zulu time?
I was requesting in Zulu time, yeah.
In Zulu time. Is that a shout-out to last week's show, or whatever the hell it was?
Yeah, we had a good talk about it.
Three weeks ago, and yes, we did talk about Zulu time a bit, and I learned a lot about it.
We did. So that would be 1030 Zulu time.
So, on the subject of meetings, if you are currently involved in a meeting anywhere in the world,
we suggest you follow the Twitter account, 2600meetings,
and also update that account or the email address meetings at 2600.com.
Let them know if you intend to continue your meeting after all this craziness is over,
because I understand we're going to just be rebooting the whole thing,
so that all the meetings need to, I guess, re-register,
or at least let us know that you're out there and still having meetings.
Check in with us.
Yeah, I know what's going to happen.
A lot of people won't do this, and we're going to go down quite a bit,
but I think that's necessary.
I think we have to double-check, make sure people still are interested in having the meetings,
or maybe they've been replaced by other meetings.
So, sometime before we actually go back to having in-person meetings,
and who knows when that will be? Hopefully in the next few months.
Might be longer. We're not sure.
We'll have a comprehensive list, and it'll be great. It'll be really amazing.
If you're eligible for the vaccine, please get that vaccine,
so that we can start bringing these numbers down,
and hopefully this will be history, something we think back on.
Maybe not so fondly, but maybe we'll learn a lot from these experiences.
I have.
Me too. Last words, guys? Anything?
Welcome to the Biden administration.
You know, I've gone entire days now without thinking about who the president was.
It's been such a tonic.
I'm sorry for playing that clip, which probably brought it back.
But it was a gem, and I felt we should share that.
Okay, until next week, then. Good night.
Have a good night.