The number you have called is not in service. 
Please check the number you have dialed. 
If you require further assistance, please call 1-225. 
This has been a free call. 
Thank you for listening to Off The Hook. 
I hope that's understood. 
One minute more! 
And a very good evening to everybody. 
The program is Off The Hook. 
Emanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening. 
Joined tonight by Kyle. 
Hi. 
We have Rob T. Firefly out in Skypland. 
Good evening. 
We have Gila also in Skypland. 
Good evening. 
And we have Alex in extra Skypland. 
Good evening as well. 
And where are you, Alex? 
You're moving around in kind of a crazy way. 
Well, OH. 
I mean, it's part of the course these days, isn't it? 
I'm not surprisingly, like many of our listeners, in Las Vegas right now. 
Oh, yes. 
You're there to see how high the temperature will get. 
That's exactly right. 
We're doing all different types of experiments with temperature and climate, air conditioning, inside, outside, doing lots of comparisons between the temperatures inside and outside. 
And believe it or not, there is a big variation between being in A.T. and outside in the desert. 
So, surprising results. 
I can imagine. 
Of course, as many of our listeners know, you are there for DEF CON, the biggest hacker conference in the world. 
And, yeah, please report back and let us know how things are going. 
You're there early. 
I'm glad you're not traveling during the show for once. 
Yeah, I know. 
I mean, I kind of planned the travel so that I would be able to make the show. 
So, I left early this morning. 
I've been traveling to get to Vegas since, you know, I left New York at 7.30 this morning. 
Flew out of Newark through Phoenix, barely made the connection, and then over to Vegas. 
And I literally just got into the hotel room here. 
So, like I said, it is quite hot, but I'm looking forward to the conference. 
And it's a great thing. 
We actually have a lot of people from my law firm here, and I think it's going to be fun. 
Oh, no doubt. 
No doubt. 
We have some somber news this week. 
Seems like we have so much somber news lately, but yet another dear friend of ours, somebody who most everybody who has ever been to the HOPE Conference will remember, our friend Cheshire Catalyst passed away on August the 6th. 
Something that was surprising to many of us, because I guess we all thought Cheshire was just a permanent part of the culture, of the HOPE Conferences. 
He was part of TAP Magazine before 2600 got started. 
He was just a fixture. 
In fact, you know, he made every single conference that we had in person, every single in-person conference, Cheshire Catalyst was there. 
I don't even know if I've been to all the conferences. 
I'm pretty sure I have, but, you know, I know he has been. 
The only one he missed was the virtual one. 
It's funny that that was the one he couldn't attend, the one that wasn't in person. 
But in person, you were guaranteed that Cheshire would be there, and sadly that no longer will be the case. 
I'd like to play something from our very first show back in 1988. 
This was well before the HOPE Conferences even began. 
It was shortly after 2600 began, and of course it was the first edition of Off the Hook. 
We were just a special feature on that particular day. 
In fact, it was the second attempt to present the show. 
The first attempt in the afternoon of July was canceled because of a fire in the Empire State Building transmitter room right at the time that the show was going to go on. 
So we rescheduled it for late night in October of 1988, and that was, I think, a three-hour special. 
The program wouldn't come back on the air for another couple of years because it wasn't seen as a potential series at that point. 
But Cheshire was a part of that. 
We had a short interview with him, and I'd just like to play a bit of that. 
You'll hear one of the sounds that we played to separate sections of the program, kind of similar to what we do today. 
Let's go back in time and listen. 
Richard Cheshire is known as Cheshire Catalyst to phone freaks, those strange people who love to play with telephones. 
Cheshire Catalyst used to be a phone freak, and he also used to write for TAP Magazine, which was a publication for phone freaks. 
He says that for years, decades even, phone freaks have been making conference calls, and needless to say, they rarely wound up paying for them. 
Cheshire Catalyst recollects that he was a phone freak and needless to say, they rarely wound up paying for them. 
Cheshire Catalyst recollects one of the crude methods of making a conference call. 
I remember back in the old days, back in the days of crossbar switches and electromechanical, good, solid-cut chunking machines, when we used to talk through the busy signal, I don't think you can do that anymore with all the electronic stuff that's going on, but through the beeps of the busy signal, you could hear voices. 
And, bop, if, bop, you, bop, were, bop, to, bop, speak, bop, between the beeps, you could actually carry on a conversation like that. 
And a lot of people did. 
That was from our October 1988 edition of Off the Hook, the very first edition of this radio program, brief interview with Cheshire Catalyst. 
He had so much to say about the phone freak world, the hacker world, the amateur radio world, the world of rockets being launched from where he lived, down in the area of Cape Canaveral, and also the World Cup he was fascinated by. 
I remember having lots of conversations with him about that. 
So, sad to have lost yet another friend. 
You folks have any memories you'd like to share? 
Certainly. 
I mean, Cheshire was, before I'd met him, of course, I knew who he was. 
I was a phone freak back in my day, and he was one of the legends of that. 
And when I finally got to meet him and hang with him, it was in 2000, and I was at my first Hope, and we had the chance to chat for a while. 
And I pulled up, so I could post around, I pulled up a photo of myself and him in 2000, and another photo of myself and him when he was performing at Hackers Got Talent, the very first time we did that at Hope in 2016. 
And it's kind of amazing how he always kind of looked the exact same age over the course of decades. 
And he just had such a spark and a humor to him, and you could speak with him about minutia for ages, and it was always just a real good time. 
And his absence is going to be sorely felt, I think, at Hopes and other Hacker events, and, of course, Space events forevermore. 
Alex, go ahead. 
Yeah, sure. 
Similar to Rob, I mean, I feel like I knew Cheshire before I met him, in a sense because I had read the book The Hacker Crackdown that Bruce Sterling wrote way before I had met Cheshire, had the opportunity to meet him, or maybe it was way before, maybe it was a couple of years before, maybe a year or two before. 
But I read about TAP Magazine, and I knew who Cheshire Catalyst was, and I remember when I first laid eyes on him and met him, and it was at the first Hope in 1994, and I was a teenager. 
I was, I believe, 15 years old, and I remember thinking, oh, my God, it's Cheshire Catalyst. 
That's so cool. 
It's like he was a legend back then, and he's been a legend for so many decades, and he was so approachable and such a great guy. 
I wouldn't say I was particularly close to him, but we would talk and hang out and chat at all of the conferences. 
I thought he was a great human being, a fantastic person. 
I loved hearing his stories. 
I loved hearing him talk. 
And he played such, I think, almost like an anchoring role in the community for so long. 
And I think you're exactly right, though, Rob, that I think he always looked the same. 
I remember him back in 1994 looking exactly like he did last year. 
So that's a pretty funny observation about Cheshire. 
And, Emanuel, I'm wondering if maybe you could talk a little bit about how you met him and, in particular, his relevance to the— it was, of course, one of Cheshire's favorite stories that he would tell no matter how many times you heard it. 
It was the origin of the 3-2-1 area code. 
Well, I know he gave a talk about that, about getting the 3-2— in fact, you can find a talk of Cheshire's at every conference except for the virtual one. 
But the first time I met him, you know, I'm not sure exactly when the first time was. 
I know there was an event in New York City called Telepub 86 in 1986 where he was there to explain the future of TAP Magazine. 
Now, TAP Magazine hadn't been published since 1983, the year before 2600 started back in 1984. 
And there was always speculation that TAP was going to come back someday. 
And in 1986, that kind of reached a crescendo when these people known as the Wacko Cracko Brothers— I'm not making this up— announced that they had taken over TAP Magazine and were going to start publishing it. 
So Cheshire, I believe, coordinated this conference in New York City. 
I think it was at the Best Western Hotel, wherever that was sometime, I think in the 50s somewhere. 
And a bunch of people in the hacker world showed up. 
You know, back then a bunch was 20 or 30. 
And that's where I first met a lot of people that I still am friends with up to this day. 
That might have been the first time I met Cheshire. 
And he was there to address the crowd and announce that TAP was definitely not coming back under his guidance. 
He had not actually put out an issue since he became editor, but he was a writer before. 
And the Wacko Cracko Brothers never showed up. 
So that didn't work out. 
And I don't believe— I think there were some attempts to relaunch TAP, but for the most part it kind of ended back in 83. 
But Cheshire just had this kind of charming quality to him where he could take a crazy situation like a bunch of people wanting to know when they were going to get the rest of their subscription to just basically winning them over, even though he wasn't going to give them anything in return because the magazine was finished. 
He always had stories to tell, you know. 
And always had interest in things. 
And it was very wide and diverse and never boring. 
He always gave so much. 
I knew him particularly after my first visit to Hope, Hope No. 
6, becoming a volunteer. 
And he was a consummate volunteer, but he's also a speaker. 
And I knew a little bit of some of the lore around TAP, but not that much. 
Mostly just through some of his talks, recounting the story and the story of telling the story instead of continuing to produce it. 
I know he was always willing to step in and just do whatever he could in moments noticed, if something needed doing. 
And was just approachable and would talk about anything, and really just could access an old story or relate to a situation that was happening in front of us or help organize and keep a bunch of people safe if we were doing some kind of loading for setup and stuff. 
I just got to know him chiefly through those interactions where you're working with hackers, you know, elbow to elbow on making an event. 
He had that commanding voice that would make you listen if something had to be announced. 
Even if it wasn't the right exact solution to the situation. 
Yeah, but he got your attention. 
The very first conference in August 1994, Hotel Pennsylvania, we were on the 18th floor, and the registration system had completely fallen apart because we were thinking we were going to use a Mac to print everybody's picture and realized that each picture would take about five minutes to print. 
So he had to take charge of the situation and just basically shout out to everybody that this is how it's going to work. 
Give money to the strange Dutch guy that was standing there with a paper bag and you would get something to tie around your neck or arm or whatever. 
But he was able to corral people into organization where there was chaos before. 
Gila, do you have any memories of Cheshire? 
I mean, I do. 
I obviously, not obviously, but I knew him for less time than anybody else. 
I met him for the first time at the 11th Hope in 2016. 
And I just remember meeting him and just immediately being struck with just how cool he was. 
And yeah, utterly timeless. 
I did a little searching, a little sleuthing after he passed away and found his high school graduation picture is online. 
Oh my goodness. 
How did you do that? 
Wow. 
He looked the same. 
He was 18. 
He looked the same. 
Did he have the beard then? 
Full beard, 18. 
Oh my goodness. 
Wow. 
That is something. 
You have to share that with me. 
Absolutely. 
It was just magical. 
But he was ageless. 
He was timeless. 
It's weird, even for someone I didn't know well or for a very long time, this world without him in it feels strange because, again, just a timeless presence. 
Wow. 
Go ahead, Rob. 
And another thing about him is he was always, and as you said about his booming voice and his willingness to throw in, I know over the years I've been going to Hope, he had pitched in with everything from setting up and striking chairs to he helped me tape up signs to the walls and things like that and whatever else came up during the conference. 
But another thing he did, and this would probably be the last circumstances under which I had seen him, Gila and I got COVID during the previous Hope, so we weren't able to go last year. 
But during lockdown, when the 2600 meetings stopped happening in person and I had set up video conference substitutes for a virtual meeting for the New York City crowd and he pinged me and wanted an invite to those. 
So I kept him on the list and he attended the virtual New York City 2600 meetings for quite a long time and was a regular on there and was always just really nice to everybody. 
There would be people surprised by his presence and kind of like, what's he doing here? 
Is it okay? 
But he was always just very friendly, very welcoming, a very warm and dare I say cuddly presence to just have there. 
And yeah, it leaves a heck of a gap. 
There's not gonna be another like him. 
No, no, for sure. 
And also, I just remembered this too, back at the Fifth Hope 2004, he was key in getting Steve Wozniak to speak at our conference, which was an amazing accomplishment, something we didn't think was even possible, but he had connections and he used them and he actually, he made it happen. 
It's almost an incredible thing. 
And he never bragged about that either. 
He was also always working on stuff, optimizing, making things accessible, using whatever devices were maybe past there, not as popular, but still useful. 
He wanted to make sure that like schedules and things were really portable. 
So he would always make sure there was like a Moby site. 
I know he hosted a couple of those and he was always engineering, coming up with ways, different ways to do things, ways that some people might want the option to do. 
He's really passionate about that. 
And it was always kind of around making information formatted in a way that older technology might be able to use or that stuff that people liked the way it worked could continue to get something out of it, to get current information over like, whether it's 3G or whatever kind of protocols were sort of there, but unused and underappreciated. 
He was big on using low bandwidth to get full access, whether that's using links or something over a broadcast radio. 
Exactly, totally. 
Yeah, pared down minimalist, like just the bare bones information. 
And then that way it could be put onto very small screens or monochrome, certain displays. 
And it was, I just love that, that may not be something everybody else cares about, but it was something he cared about and it didn't matter. 
He still wanted to spread the word about it. 
And I think that can be applied to so many of us in different ways. 
We have passions, we have things that concern us that maybe we know other people don't care about. 
I don't know. 
I think you hit the nail on the head there because just because you might be the only person who takes an interest in something doesn't make it any less important. 
And that's something that I think the hacker community understands. 
He was somebody that was into this low bandwidth solution to various things. 
He hosted the Titusville, Florida, 2600 meetings. 
Oftentimes he was the only person there. 
But we still would continue to list those meetings because they were important and they were a doorway to have other people possibly cross paths. 
He also was big into, what's it called? 
What three words, where you use three words to describe a geographical location. 
He wanted to use that for everything. 
He wanted to use that for every single 2600 meeting. 
He wrote an article recently about emojis, different emojis for different launches, which was in his area in Florida. 
Yeah, there was always something new, always something. 
Rob, did you have something else? 
Yeah, just talking about what you were saying about the low bandwidth versions of websites. 
Not everyone listening might be aware, but this is pre-smartphone. 
When we had flip phones with small screens on them and some of them were just beginning to get very rudimentary web browsers that most full-featured websites, your little phone web browser, wouldn't be able to make much sense of it. 
But he was pushing to have people put up accessible versions of their sites that could be brought up on these phones. 
And that became less and less of an immediate concern in the smartphone era and everything else. 
But that was his thing. 
And at the time, it was very important. 
And yeah, he was the one banging that drum. 
It was an important drum. 
It certainly was. 
Before we move on, when we found out about this, we found out about it through a newspaper in Titusville, Florida, where he lived. 
And the interesting thing about that was that they were heralding him for all his accomplishments and who he was and what he represented to people. 
Not one bit about the hacker connection, because he was so much more than just that. 
We know him for so much in the hacker community. 
But there, they knew him for all the other things he was doing, for being into space travel and just the various things he would do around his community. 
So he was valued, he was loved in many, many places. 
So it's a tremendous loss, tremendous. 
We must move on, though. 
And we have more things to discuss. 
Rob, go ahead. 
I do want to point out, we've had word from a couple of listeners, and I've just verified this. 
WBAI's website is down at the moment. 
So people who would normally be listening to us that way, I think, are probably finding themselves unable. 
But we're looking into it. 
I've been in touch with Reggie at the station. 
And so we're going to see what we can do about all of that. 
So the only people that can hear us are people listening over the radio, just like it used to be in 1988. 
So maybe that's something from Cheshire, just putting it back to the way it was. 
I have to get some positivity out of this. 
Okay, so the website's down. 
We can't really tell people the website's down, can we? 
Because, I mean, we can tell people over the radio, but we can't tell people on, I mean, maybe we can tweet about it or something. 
Does anybody have access to that thing? 
Yes. 
We're keeping an eye on the Twitter and the Mastodon, and we're putting the word out as well as we can that way. 
Look at it this way. 
Since you can't call in during this hour, that means that you can just listen later. 
It's going to be exactly the same as if you're listening now. 
It just will be a different time. 
Overtime starts at 8 o'clock. 
You can call into that. 
You can be part of a chat. 
That is something that will go on regardless of the state of WBAI's website, because it's on YouTube. 
And you can go to 2600.com, and the link is right there at the top of the page. 
And we look forward to seeing and hearing from you there. 
Yes. 
And a listener known as Fun Socks did let us know over Twitter that there's another site called Radio Station USA FM, and you can find WBAI on there and listen to it that way. 
Well, you could probably command your Alexa device to say, play WBAI. 
And for some reason, you'll hear two minutes of commercials, which are really annoying. 
But after that finishes, you'll actually hear us. 
So I guess this only affects people who are going to WBAI.org and listening that way. 
Okay, enough about that. 
Yeah. 
So, oh, by the way, one other thing. 
Is it possible to paste pictures in the chat that we have on the overtime YouTube chat? 
Does anybody know? 
I don't know, but I will find out. 
If it's possible. 
You can tell how often I use this. 
If it's possible, please paste the picture of Cheshire at 18. 
I think people would love to see that, and it would be a tremendous draw, too. 
Mm-hmm. 
All right. 
Hey, so today's a big deal. 
Trump's Twitter account. 
Yeah. 
So apparently the special counsel got a search warrant for Twitter to turn over Trump's account. 
Yeah. 
Special counsel Jack Smith's team obtained a search warrant back in January for records related to former President Donald Trump's Twitter account. 
And guess what? 
Elon Musk and Twitter didn't really cooperate. 
They didn't really work in an expeditious way and wound up being fined $350,000 as a result for missing the deadline to comply. 
Yeah. 
These details were included in a ruling from the federal appeals court in Washington over a legal battle surrounding the warrant that has played out under seal for months. 
The court rejected Twitter's claim that it should not have been held in contempt or sanctioned. 
I think Twitter should always be held in contempt and sanctioned, but whatever. 
Smith's team repeatedly mentioned Trump's tweets in an indictment unsealed last week that charges the former president with conspiring to subvert the will of voters and cling to power after he lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden. 
It's fascinating watching all this play out. 
No matter what case you pick, this is probably the most interesting case. 
But seeing that, yeah, they're now going to have access. 
Maybe, Alex, maybe you could tell us what will they have access to now? 
I imagine direct messaging, DMs, other things that you might not see publicly? 
Yeah, absolutely. 
They're going to have access to a lot of information that we wouldn't see publicly. 
They're going to have access to his IP address. 
They're going to have access to the device information about when he made certain tweets so that you could tie, perhaps, his device back to a certain tweet at a certain time at a certain location. 
They're going to have access to whatever they ask for, frankly, in the subpoena itself. 
Even things like login dates and times. 
Twitter is tricky like this, though, in terms of how they produce it. 
I've actually litigated with Twitter over this exact issue. 
And I find it really fascinating. 
Remember, I've been on a plane all day, so I'm catching up on a lot of news right now. 
This was actually news to me. 
But I'll tell you, I have a case right now that involves an activist in the Hasidic community in Brooklyn who was being defamed on Twitter in a coordinated way to try to assassinate his character because he was doing things like helping children in the Hasidic community obtain secular education and helping victims of domestic violence, that kind of thing. 
So we had subpoenaed Twitter. 
We had filed an action in the Eastern District of New York and got the right to serve third-party discovery on Twitter to identify the persons behind these accounts that were part of the coordinated and concerted effort to assassinate our client's character. 
And Twitter refused to comply. 
It was really fascinating. 
And this must have been playing out right around the same time that the Department of Justice was litigating with Twitter. 
And I couldn't for the life of me figure out why they were holding on to this data and fighting us tooth and nail to prevent us from getting it. 
So they really put us through the wringer. 
So Twitter has an office in Manhattan. 
We filed the case in Brooklyn because our client lives in Brooklyn. 
And Twitter said, well, through their counsel, they told us that, well, we don't think you have jurisdiction in Brooklyn. 
In fact, we don't think any federal court in the United States has jurisdiction over Twitter except the Northern District of California, where Twitter has its headquarters. 
Because of the rules of discovery and Twitter was a third party, if we wanted to force them to comply with the subpoena that our judge in Brooklyn so ordered, we had to go and file an entirely new lawsuit in the Northern District of California, a miscellaneous action to compel Twitter to comply with the subpoena. 
And we did. 
And the rules change when you go to the Northern District of California. 
There's much more—I wouldn't say respect, but that's the wrong word. 
I would say that there's much more support for anonymous speech in California than there is in New York. 
We'd be able to secure anonymity very easily with a defamation claim in New York. 
It's a bit harder in California. 
So the rules are in their favor. 
And when you look at the history of these motions that are made there, Twitter really never loses. 
So it was quite an uphill battle for us to fight them on their own turf. 
But we fought them on their own turf, and we won. 
We actually convinced the judge in the Northern District of California to give us the data. 
When they finally gave us the data, there wasn't a lot— there was a lot of it that we believed should have been there but was missing. 
And I think that the Department of Justice will probably find the same thing, that the login dates and times probably aren't there because of the way that Twitter login sessions work. 
They're very persistent. 
You don't log in and out all the time. 
So they won't get a lot of that data, but they will get a lot of other information about Trump, his account, the activities, when it was active, when it wasn't active. 
But I bet you, Emanuel and company, that the reason why we might have faced such an uphill battle was because they changed their policy perhaps just to fight Trump, just to fight for Trump and to try to prevent his data from going over to the Department of Justice. 
It must have been going on around the same time, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out why this was such a tooth-and-nail battle because in the past, I had subpoenaed Twitter from the Eastern District of New York and gotten information right away. 
Well, you know, one major change in Twitter is, of course, who owns it now. 
And I think that is when the attitude sort of changed. 
Listen to this. 
This is fascinating. 
And by the way, Alex, if it's possible, could you stay in one place? 
Because when you move, your microphone changes the way it sounds dramatically. 
It's entertaining, but it might be also a little annoying to some people. 
You seem to be running errands or something over there in Vegas. 
Are you? 
I'm just a peripatetic philosopher here. 
Okay. 
Well, anyway, the court found that disclosing the warrant could risk that Trump could jeopardize the ongoing investigation by giving him an opportunity to destroy evidence or change patterns of behavior. 
Hard as that might be to believe. 
Or maybe even notify people that his Twitter account was being searched. 
I can't imagine that. 
Can anyone imagine that? 
So basically, the filing Twitter objected to, which basically they said four days after the compliance deadline, they would not produce any of the account information. 
According to the judges, Twitter did not question the validity of the search warrant, but argued that the nondisclosure agreement violated its First Amendment right to communicate with Trump. 
Now, that's just a bizarre statement right there. 
And it strikes me that they wouldn't do this for anybody else. 
And it feels like they're, or if it's Elon Musk doing this, he is just trying to protect him. 
So Twitter said if it had to turn over the records before the judge assessed the legality of the nondisclosure agreement, it would prevent Trump from asserting executive privilege to shield communications made using his Twitter account. 
It's pretty incredible, unbelievable that they went to these lengths. 
I tend to agree there. 
I think it's fascinating that they went to these lengths. 
I think maybe there is some validity that Trump should have the opportunity to assert some kind of privilege before the documents are produced. 
That seems to be customary that you would give notice. 
But the non-notice provision of the warrant definitely makes sense in this context as well. 
I mean, Trump is known to move around documents into showers and bathrooms and warehouses and various things. 
And also it seems to me that the warrant would also be seeking his direct messages, the communications with other people. 
And that's something that would not be available to a litigant in a civil suit because of something called the Stored Communications Act. 
You're not allowed to access content like that. 
But essentially it's kind of like a wiretap or something, something for which you would need a warrant, and that's what the government has. 
I think you're right. 
I think they're bending it over backwards for him. 
The argument that this would somehow violate Twitter's First Amendment rights to communicate with Trump, I would love to see the briefing on that because that just seems very odd. 
Yeah, and it's also very similar to hearing Trump threaten the lives of judges and prosecutors and then say, oh, it's just my First Amendment right. 
It's the same type of thinking. 
Yeah, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. 
I mean, if you have a First Amendment right, and then you consider corporations to freely associate and speak with others, I don't see how a warrant would violate that. 
It might invade the privacy of that communication, but a warrant issues upon probable cause and from the judiciary. 
It's not something that just happens as a matter of course all the time. 
So there's judicial oversight of this. 
I find it a very odd argument, and it seems like there might have been perhaps some kind of special relationship between the platform and Trump. 
I just know when my Facebook account was subpoenaed or looked at by the FBI, I found out about it months later when Facebook, in what might have even been a mistake, let me know, but they never explained anything else. 
They never said a word about it. 
They just referred me to the FBI, and they never said a word either. 
So to this day, I have no idea what that was about, and that's usually how it goes. 
It seems here that Twitter was bending over backwards to try and protect Trump, and that's disturbing. 
That's really disturbing. 
Especially if the platform and their access to it was a source of evidence. 
Totally. 
All right, well, we'll find out more, I'm sure, especially when those DMs get analyzed. 
But there are some other election controversies going on. 
How about this? 
Details of tens of millions of voters could have been accessed by hackers, okay, that's what they say in this news story, who targeted the elections watchdog, the Electoral Commission. 
This is over in the U.K. 
They said there was little risk of hostile actors being able to influence the outcome of a vote, but apologized for the breach in its systems. 
The hack, which was publicly confirmed yesterday, allowed the attackers to access reference copies of electoral registers containing the names and addresses of people registered to vote between 2014 and 2022. 
So to me, that says that whoever did this had access to private information for anybody who voted in the United Kingdom. 
I don't see any other way to read this. 
But they're trying to spin it in a positive light, saying that, yeah, there's no risk of the vote being influenced. 
Okay, that's not really the point. 
The point is that all of this private information is now out there and was not protected properly. 
It's really pretty disturbing. 
Now, this is what they said as part of their apology. 
While the data contained in the electoral registers is limited and much of it is already in the public domain, we understand the concern that may have been caused by the registers potentially being accessed and apologized to those affected. 
So what they're trying to say is that, yeah, okay, your name and your address, that's already out there. 
Yeah, we're sorry it got accessed through us, but yeah, you know, someone could have found it anyway. 
No, that's not necessarily true. 
Many people try to protect their private address, try to protect, I don't know if their phone numbers were in this as well, but whatever information was there, you know, you trust the electoral commission to guard this information. 
And when they get hacked, they try and pass it off like it's no big deal and that the real big deal is that an election wasn't breached. 
Okay, well, that's great. 
If that's your standard, it's a pretty low bar. 
Now, there are parts of this story that I don't understand. 
I don't understand how the system works over in the UK. 
They say the registers held at the time of the cyber attack include the name and address of anyone in the UK who was registered to vote between 2014 and 2022, as well as the names of those registered as overseas voters. 
That seems pretty straightforward right there. 
The names and addresses of anyone in the UK registered to vote between that time. 
But it says they did not include the details of those registered anonymously. 
So what does that mean? 
You can register to vote anonymously in the UK? 
How does that work exactly? 
How do they know that you're able to do that if they don't know who you are? 
Or is there some kind of a feature where you're able to say, okay, I'm registered. 
Now, hide my information, delete it off your servers. 
And if that's the case, if that is a feature, I think everybody in the UK should take advantage of that feature right now. 
And I think this is the reason why. 
Yeah, I wonder if it's for VIPs or bureaucrats some kind of protection. 
People that otherwise would be revealed. 
So not the commoners like us, in other words. 
Yeah, people with all kinds of highfalutin reasons. 
It should be across the board how everybody's handled. 
It seems very, very odd that you have a tiered system like that. 
I want to hear from people in the UK as to how this system works, because it opens up more questions than it answers. 
I really don't know who was compromised. 
I mean, it seems like every voter in the UK was compromised here, except those who are anonymous. 
They should all be anonymous. 
That is the whole point of voting is to remain anonymous and not have a database floating around where everybody's private information exists. 
In the States, that's the case. 
In fact, many times you can get this information just by asking for it. 
New York is one of those states. 
You can get a list of everybody who's registered to vote, what party they're registered with, their address. 
Some states have even more. 
Some states have phone numbers, email addresses. 
Some states don't even allow that information to get out. 
I think those are the ones that have the right idea. 
So it's a really fascinating thing to study. 
Okay. 
So we've looked into this whole anonymous registry deal. 
That was fast. 
How did you do it so fast? 
Information superhighway, dude. 
Okay. 
Apparently, there is the electoral register, which is publicly accessible, and your name and address are on it if you register to vote in the UK. 
If you have reason to believe your name and address being on the electoral register could affect your safety or the safety of someone in your household, you can register to vote anonymously. 
That means you can still vote, but you won't appear on this registry. 
So tell me the advantage of being on the registry. 
I can't see any advantage unless you really want people to come over and check out the cool decorations you have in your front yard or something. 
However, If you have a really awful place, maybe. 
Sorry. 
The requirements that they have to keep, you have to submit evidence to support your anonymous registration, like a court document that is for your protection or the protection of someone in your household or an attestation where an authorized person signs to your application form to confirm your safety would be at risk. 
Here's the attestation, which is a great word, by the way. 
The attestation is this story because everybody who did not do this, their name and address is now out there in the hands of God knows who. 
And so we're looking further into this, and this appears to be something that is there for the use of people who have legitimate threats to their safety, people with sort of orders of protection or stalkers or things like that. 
And the people who can give you an attestation are police officers, directors of social services, people of that sort who can back up your story that you need the special protection. 
Otherwise, the default is to be on the open electoral registry. 
All right. 
Well, now you see why that's a bad idea. 
And yeah, OK. 
So that database is being passed around. 
Alex, are you ironing or something? 
I was ironing a little bit there. 
That's got to be a first for this show. 
Probably. 
But I am paying quite detailed attention. 
And that's why I'm chiming in, too, because I hadn't thought about Rob's point that he just made, which I think is a really fascinating one, that registering to vote could be something that's dangerous for a domestic violence survivor. 
It's really, really fascinating. 
And I would imagine that we should have some kind of analogous mechanism whereby we can shield people from the voter rolls in similar circumstances in the United States. 
But, you know, I say we ought to or we should have that. 
But I doubt that we do. 
It's a really, really good point, I think, that you guys have made there. 
And possibly something that could cause a lot of survivors and victims of domestic violence or sexual abuse to be disenfranchised. 
They may not want them knowing that their names and addresses are going to appear on some public database somewhere. 
So it can really discourage people. 
It's an interesting topic. 
And just because somebody isn't a victim of domestic violence today doesn't mean they won't be next year. 
So are they expected to move? 
Because that information is public, because it's out right now. 
So I don't think people should wait until their public figures or somebody in fear for their lives to be protected from having their private information get out there. 
The story was saying that people in the anonymous side of this weren't affected. 
So it sounds like this whole event was a great argument for being anonymous in that particular jurisdiction. 
It helps you a great deal. 
Or put an address if it's a terrible place. 
You just wouldn't wish on anyone to go there. 
Well, you can't put a fake address in. 
That's probably a crime of some sort. 
Well, move to an awful, awful, awful place. 
You had a good idea of that. 
Go ahead, Gila. 
So I was doing a little bit of research. 
Apparently there are these anonymous voter programs in Australia, New Zealand and the U.K. 
But in the U.S. 
there is an address confidentiality program that goes through Secretary of State of each individual state. 
And they hook you up with a P.O. 
box. 
Or substitute address. 
OK. 
And then most states with this program apply it to their voter records. 
OK. 
It's hoopy. 
It's very hoopy. 
I mean, think of, you know, when you register an Internet domain. 
Now the default is to anonymize it. 
It used to be. 
And I thought this was a useful service. 
You could see who is actually running a particular Web site. 
Now you can't do that. 
You can't run the who is command and find out where this particular domain is coming from or who is behind it. 
I wish we had the same concern for individuals because that is really who would be at risk in a situation like this. 
Alex. 
Yeah. 
The domain thing is an interesting analog here, too. 
And the reason why you don't ordinarily see who is behind a particular domain by using the who is command anymore is precisely because of GDPR in the EU and the data from who is. 
This is a really big debate within the ICANN community that ranged from maybe 2018 or even before that to really even the present day. 
But because under the eyes of GDPR, a lot of the data that would be associated with the domain registry is PII, personally identifiable information, the name, the address, telephone number, all these types of things. 
So the default for many registrars is to mask that data, to make it private, to comply with the law in the EU. 
But what they don't mask in a lot of the who is data, which people don't realize, is that everything shows up as GDPR masked or behind some kind of proxy. 
But because GDPR protects people and not corporations or organizations, you can still very often get the registrant organization from the who is data. 
It'll be hidden amongst all of the other masked data, but you can very often get that, and that can be really useful information. 
But to go back to this issue of the voter rolls, I think what's really interesting to me is that whoever did this, whatever threat actor was behind it, I'm not going to call them a hacker like the whatever media report that was, whoever did this obviously had access to the data, so the data was no longer confidential. 
How can we be so sure it still has its integrity? 
How can we be so sure that the data was not tampered with in some manner? 
Because the object of attacking the voter rolls, if you're a sophisticated cyber adversary or some kind of nation state looking to perform something like election interference, would ordinarily be to tamper with those voting rolls. 
And if you can tamper with the voting rolls, if you can change people's names, take people off of them, add people to them, that's how you can wreak absolute havoc on an election. 
So this all seems very suspicious to me, and I think we should be demanding more. 
I think the UK public should be demanding more information about the forensics surrounding this incident. 
Well, we are going to have to leave it there as we reach the end of our hour. 
Unfortunately, I believe the WBAI website is still down, so people can't listen to us through there, but you can listen to us through the archive, so welcome in the future. 
And of course, coming up at 8 o'clock Eastern time, you can join us on YouTube and just go to the link on the webpage of 2600.com or just go to channel 2600 on YouTube and you'll find us there. 
We're going to go out with something that you guys, Rob and Gila, referenced before from the conference in 2016 where Cheshire Catalyst, our dear departed friend, was performing at Hackers Got Talent. 
Anything you want to say about this before we begin? 
I found out that Cheshire and my dad were contemporaries, and that was really, I told you guys, my first memory of Cheshire is this performance, and it reminded me of my dad, and I love the fact that he got up and sang a Tom Lehrer song. 
It's epic. 
All right. 
Let's listen to that. 
You'll hear Jason Scott, our friend Jason Scott, introducing him from back in 2016. 
Write to us, OTH at 2600.com. 
We're off next week. 
We'll see you in two weeks and hopefully on overtime at 8 o'clock on YouTube. 
Good night. 


Hey, welcome everybody on Overtime here on YouTube, channel 2600, where we not only are broadcasting, but we are enabling the online chat, which we're very cautious about, but we're experimenting with it and hopefully it goes well.
Kyle, did you make it into YouTube land okay?
Yes, fully modulated.
Yeah, you are on YouTube. And folks out in Skypeland, Rob, Gila, Alex?
We are present and accounted for, and we sound good on YouTube.
All of this is true.
I'm here. I'm going to probably depart in about five or ten minutes because I've got to go meet some colleagues up here, but I wanted to stick around first.
Where are your colleagues, Alex? Right now, where are your colleagues?
Where are they?
They're in the same hotel.
I couldn't care less where they are. We're talking about, we are your colleagues, and I know where we are, and apparently we're not very high on your priority list is where we are.
I see. So you're using the contraction as opposed to where are.
Yes.
I'm also using guilt trips to get you to stick around a little longer.
Yeah. Well, you're a master at that.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
I know it's like a sport to try to keep me on the phone every week, but one of the things I did want to say, and the reason why I stuck around, too, was that I hadn't heard that clip of Cheshire.
I thought it was fantastic, and it reminded me so much of the singer, songwriter, historian, activist, organizer by the name of Utah Phillips.
Has anybody heard of Utah Phillips?
Yes, yes, I have.
You have, yeah. So, I mean, the way, even Cheshire's kind of booming baritone voice and the way he started the story and told the story and the way he sung and put it all together,
and especially a story about, you know, some kind of dumb war that he made an entirely brilliant farce out of, I thought was very Utah Phillips-like.
And if our listeners haven't checked out Utah Phillips, they should.
And also, I thought about Utah Phillips earlier in the program, too, when, Emmanuel, when you were describing the Titusville 2600 meetings that Cheshire started and banned, and often he would be the only guy there.
Okay.
It's a story that Utah Phillips tells about a minor strike in Colorado, and Rockefeller promised not to send out the militia, and he did, and it's a story about Mother Jones and how President Roosevelt considered her the most dangerous woman in America.
And when she had learned that Rockefeller sent out the militia into the coal fields, she left up, and she was a union, she wasn't really an organizer, she was an agitator, which, according to Utah Phillips, meant that she was hated as much by the union organizers, and often just as much by the bosses.
And so when she found out that the militia had entered the coal mines, she left up, and she screamed, you know, let's go get the sons of bitches, and she stormed out, and she ran up the road and confronted the militia.
And she didn't look to see if anybody was following her, and she confronted the militia alone, and she was 83 years old, and that was when President Roosevelt considered her the most dangerous woman in America.
And so the idea of Cheshire standing there, you know, at this 2600 meeting and not really caring whether he was by himself or anybody who was following him, he was doing it for the principle of it, I think there's something really beautiful about that.
I'm not sure he'd run out and confront the militia on his own, but yeah, I see the parallel there, and I hope she got home okay that night.
I bet she did. I bet she did. She was a tough woman.
Wow. Okay, you guys hear about the Barbie hoax, right? I'm not sure if we talked about that at all last week, but several news organizations fell for an elaborate hoax last week, claimed all Mattel toys, including the iconic Barbie doll, will be plastic-free by 2030,
starting with a new line of decomposable Echo Warrior dolls made with organic materials, including mushrooms, algae, and clay.
The campaign was carried out by an activist group called itself the Barbie Liberation Organization, the BLO, and included a false set of news releases, advertisements purporting to be from the toy giant Mattel.
The group said it wanted to capitalize on the hype that has surrounded the blockbuster Barbie film released last month, which has earned $1 billion already.
I call attention to the use of plastic in toys.
It turns out our friends at the Yes Men were behind this as well, so it's good to know they're still out there, still engaging in pranks like this.
And this is a good prank.
Actor and environmental activist Daryl Hannah, in one of the clips, is strolling along a picturesque beach where she plucks a barnacle-encrusted doll from the sand.
Barbie and I are about the same age, except she will never die, Ms. Hannah says, saying more than a billion of the plastic dolls lay abandoned in landfills and waterways.
Another clip depicts the dolls modeled after environmental activists, including Greta Thunberg and Ms. Hannah, using bolt cutters to break into a shell facility.
It's brilliant. It's so brilliant.
And if you're going to engage in pranks, these are the kinds that I think people should be part of.
And, of course, Yes Men were part of the HOPE conferences, for a couple of them at least, and hopefully more in the future.
Yeah, and the Barbie Liberation Front has been a project of the Yes Men for quite some time, predating this hoax.
They had one, I want to say, maybe 20 years ago or so, which was there was a Barbie doll that had a voice box, an electronic voice box, where you could push buttons to say things like, math is hard, and let's go shopping.
And Mattel also had a G.I. Joe doll with a similar voice box that would say, like, you know, battle cries and things like that.
And the Barbie Liberation Front, I believe, was switching the voice boxes and putting the toys back on the shelf, which I imagine was great fun for all concerned.
Absolutely. Absolutely. Shall we give out the phone number?
Yes.
Let's do it. 802-321-4225, 802-321-HACK, and see who is out there.
If anyone has any thoughts or feelings or opinions, please share them with us here on Overtime, because we're just about talked out.
Absolutely. While we're waiting, I do have a note that we've been sent over Twitter.
While we're talking about the loss of Cheshire, the ham radio community has also lost one of their luminaries, James Fisher from Pennsylvania, also known as AJ3DI, passed away on August 1st.
And there's some memorializing and more information on angelonefuneralhome.com, where he has an obituary.
So if you were a ham user and you knew AJ3DI, yes, we feel your loss as well.
Okay. Well, this has gotten so depressing lately. I really don't know. We need some positivity to look forward to and to share amongst ourselves.
It's getting hard.
There are people that are prepared, more or less, and there's sudden things like this, people that we've checked in with and looked out for for a very long time.
It's just - it hasn't felt good at all. It's stopped being fun in a lot of new ways, and that, I think, can be really, really difficult for all people involved in the community.
So check in on people, and please share with us some good things that are going on.
And inject a little spirit of fun into the things - the security, I hope, the events that are going on.
There's more fun in how we talk about these very dry, serious things about corporate largesse or security and all of this kind of technical stuff.
We can't lose sight of having some fun.
A pathway that they, right or wrong, believe in, and it's a comfort.
It's a comfort knowing that, you know, when this is over, there's something else.
Now, you know, I think it takes as much faith to believe there's nothing as there is to believe there's something.
And I think the one thing, and this gives me comfort, is that nobody who has ever walked the earth, no matter how important or how revered they are, nobody knows more than you do about what lies in the hereafter or if anything lies there, as well as what lies beyond in the stars.
These mysteries, I think, are connected.
I think there's, you know, the things that we know nothing about are the things that are the potential, the future, and the unknown.
So, yeah, I'm comforted by ignorance, I guess.
I guess that's what I'm trying to say.
Also, in people's micro universe, in their personal lives, the kinds of struggles and travails and just difficulty, adversity they've faced along the way, you must understand that there's so many dealing with all kinds of different things in the present.
And we can just extend our listening and patience and so forth.
I think it's so important to reach out to people, you know, while they're around you and not take it for granted.
I know we say this, but we don't do it enough.
It's way easier to say than actually do.
And people aren't talking as much or they're talking in guarded, you know, PR-ready ways.
On social media and stuff, having personal phone calls with regularity, that kind of stuff is, you know, meaningful in ways that a post or a like just isn't.
Just remember, everyone's going through similar things, if not the same things.
And how they deal with it, it might be something that is beneficial to you or vice versa.
So communication and being around and being engaged in things, I think that's how we succeed, how we get the most out of things.
Go ahead, Rob.
And in cases like this, I'll give you an uplifting side to all of this, I think.
I went to the 2600 meeting last week and we spoke about Kevin Mitnick's business card, his metal business card that was a set of lockpicks.
I had one of those and I decided to wear it on a lanyard, a conference lanyard around my neck, just as a little observance.
And so I'm at the 2600 meeting, you know, chatting with people.
There are a lot of younger faces there.
And someone asked what it was and someone asked who it was and that that person then from like every side, someone chimed in with, oh, this is what Kevin Mitnick was about.
This is, you know, things he did.
And somebody had a somebody brought their copies of his books and was passing them around.
And that that speaks to me of sort of a positive side to all of this, which is that these people whose work lasts long after they do.
We have so many talks by Cheshire, so many talks by Kevin, you know, just on our YouTube channel from from decades of the conference.
And there is so much other work by them out there and things that we could keep finding and keep discovering and keep sharing and keep telling each other about.
And that's how any of us can hope to go on in this world after our time here is finished is if people are still talking about us, if people are still celebrating what we had to contribute while we were here.
And I think for a very long time, we're going to be celebrating Cheshire, we're going to be celebrating Kevin, we're going to be celebrating all the people in our lives, public figures and people just from our own lives who who we miss.
And we're going to be able to keep talking about them.
And sharing those stories is key, I think, to just keeping their contributions going.
Yes, Alex.
You know, on that very point, Rob, you know, I arrived here in Vegas today and a bunch of my colleagues are here and and our practice group leader is, you know, has also has got a long history in the community as well.
And it's really funny.
He set up a group chat for all of the lawyers and a lot of the younger lawyers just may be their first DEF CON or first hacker conference that they're they're going to there that are part of our practice group.
And he made the icon for the for the chat, a picture of Kevin Mitnick.
And I just thought that was super cool.
And he had said that, you know, whoever can recognize whoever figures out who this person is, you know, aside from Alex, of course, you know, gets free drinks tonight and people figure it out right away.
But it was I just thought it was a really cool tribute to to Kevin and and shows that we're all still thinking of him.
And and he's here with us as Cheshire, as I think in many ways.
And I do think you're right, Emmanuel, that this was probably Cheshire listening in and screwing up the feed in some way so that, you know, only a low bandwidth links browser or go for server could access our stream during that particular period of time during his memorial.
But yeah, but they're all still with us in many, many ways and spirit.
And and I think we carry them with us in everything that we do because they were such meaningful parts of our lives.
And with that, I am going to go meet my colleagues and have dinner.
So it is a real pleasure to see and chat with all of you.
And I hope we get some interesting calls and see you all next week.
Right. We're on next week, aren't we?
Oh, yeah. Why don't you show up next week, Alex?
Yeah. Be there bright and early.
All right. Well, we'll see you then.
OK. All right. Good night, everybody.
All right. Good night.
All right. Now he's gone.
Of course, we're not on next week.
Nobody else show up, please. Let's let him do that.
And so he has to pay attention.
That's just how he learns.
Always learning that, Alex.
He's really, though, I mean, he has.
OK, look, let's talk about his microphone, because this has to be passionate about knowledge.
I am so sick of turning on CNN or whatever and hearing people being interviewed.
And they're talking on these crappy microphones.
You know, they're cutting out.
They sound awful.
Well, what happened to telephones, you know, landlines where people sounded good and the connection didn't die and you could hear what they were saying and you could talk at the same time and they'd hear you.
You know, it's not like that technology doesn't exist.
Why aren't we using it?
People don't have it readily.
It hasn't been.
I mean, it's wireless just basically has been kicking butt and people are using something that can very easily be interfered with and drop out.
OK, Kyle, it kicks butt on some things, on apps and features and pictures and things like that.
It's wonderful.
But it doesn't kick butt on audio quality for a phone call.
Sorry, it just doesn't.
I mean, I'd love for it to do that, but they haven't prioritized that.
And that's why, you know, people are using technology that is not quite ready for prime time to do things in prime time.
Well, they've cut the cords, right?
But they haven't, you know, taken another look, you know, come back around to their landline that they cut and infused or maybe taken advantage of some feature with maybe their broadband or some service over the top of their broadband.
There were entrances.
Vonage, that was one of the early ones.
Oh, I remember them.
Remember all the IP phone companies?
And, of course, you can do it yourself, but it takes technical acumen and negotiating, navigating all the nuances of doing that.
The technology is there.
You can use broadband to have a voice call.
We're doing it with a service now, but it's just not gotten the attention.
And so people, when they're interviewed, what do they grab?
They grab the only and the most sort of reliable in that they can contact people, but the quality of service, I agree, is just terrible.
Yeah, you're right.
The technology is there.
What isn't there is the prioritization.
They are not prioritizing having a good audio sound, and we're not complaining enough about it.
Every time you see somebody interviewed on a news program that sounds like crap, you should complain about that and ridicule them and say, not the people being interviewed, but the network that accepts this, and say, next time, use a damn landline.
And don't tell me they're not around.
They are.
In fact, 802-321-4225, how about you call us from a landline?
If you have a landline, call us now, 802-321-4225, and, you know, we'll see how good you sound.
Unless you have one of those, like, crackly connections because the wire's loose.
If it's a call from a caller who's being interviewed from an office or something, they have the infrastructure because the company or it's a campus system, they have invested because they are concerned and make it a priority for people to communicate.
But at home, people are just doing the most affordable things.
So maybe they'll pay for broadband, and then they'll have a cell phone.
And they won't have both necessarily.
So, yeah, and I don't know.
People are often interviewed from home or not from their office where they have a fancy phone system.
But it needs to be addressed because people should have a backup.
A mobile phone should be for when you're moving around and mobile.
It shouldn't be the only option you have.
You should be able to pick up one or the other.
And if there's low signal or your landline, for whatever reason, you don't have enough bandwidth or something breaks, then you can use your wireless in an emergency or send a text or something.
But there's just not enough emphasis.
And we do not have a call.
We don't have a call.
Maybe nobody has landlines anymore.
Maybe we're alone here.
It's weird, though, because I know, like you said, the technology exists.
I have talked to people on cell phones, and all of a sudden, it sounds great.
It sounds like FM radio.
And if I'm talking to somebody I don't know, I don't really feel comfortable asking them, what kind of phone do you have?
But the phones are out there or the networks are out there that are providing enough bandwidth to give you good sound quality.
And that is the kind of thing that should be embraced.
Imagine if phone calls sounded like the radio.
They certainly could if we cared about it.
So if you're not in Las Vegas or going out to dinner in Las Vegas right now, please call us.
Yes, there is active discussion on the chat.
People are saying they don't have landlines.
Are they still allowed to call in?
How would we know?
We wouldn't be able to tell.
I mean, we'll tell by the sound quality.
So you might get mocked a little bit for bad sound quality.
We're going to judge you.
We are going to judge you.
But, yeah, what I'm curious about, though, is there anybody out there that actually has a landline?
And how do we define a landline?
It doesn't have to be a copper line, right?
It can be something attached to your cable company, right?
Oh, yeah.
That's considered a landline.
I'm using that in the broadest sense, okay?
We're not trying to say, like, you can only be on this type of switch and only a rotary phone.
Yeah, but if you're on, like, you know, a wireless phone, you know, using a cell tower, and you don't have the best connection.
You know, like, what we heard Alex doing before, you know, or maybe you don't have the best equipment.
We're better than that.
We can, you know, sound like we used to sound in the 60s.
I hate to have to say that.
We have a phone call.
I take it.
Yes.
All right.
And good evening.
You're on Off The Govertime.
Go ahead.
Evening, Governor.
This would be...
You want to borrow it by your base?
This would be Zap from London, I believe.
He's got a database for sale?
I'll bet, I'll bet he has a better connection to us than somebody calling from down the street.
Well, I'm not on a landline, so I am cheating.
Okay, what are you on?
Mobile phone.
But see, his mobile doesn't cut out.
He's got good service.
Well, not yet.
He's only said a couple sentences.
We've never been on a phone call with Zap, and his phone has been the problem.
Yeah, I don't know why that is.
No.
Maybe England is just better, maybe.
They've thought it through.
Uh-huh.
Hey, Zap?
So, it's late at night, the network isn't being used, and I don't move when I'm on the
phone.
Okay, well, that's good, yeah.
That's the secret.
You should have seen, Alex, he was moving all over Las Vegas while he was talking to
us, so that's why the audio was going in and out.
It was really something.
Well, he's a lawyer.
He's probably chasing an ambulance.
It's a very demanding environment, that Las Vegas.
Well, the legal environment as well.
Well, that too, yeah.
But, Zap, can I ask you, do you understand the whole voting registrar thing over there
in the UK, the anonymous thing that we were talking about before?
A little bit.
Yeah.
Yes, a little bit.
It's one of the reasons why I was phoning in.
Okay.
Because, you know, once I've got information from London, I phoned in.
When I registered to vote, there was two options.
It happened maybe three, four years ago, not too short in time.
And they said you could go on a public record, which is viewable, and also get sold on to
wherever they sell big, large databases of stuff.
Or you could go on the private database, where your details are not publicly seen on the book,
so they wouldn't get sold on.
That's all I know.
And I don't know why anybody wouldn't pick the latter if they had that opportunity.
Well, I chose that option because I know in the old days, they used to have the electrical
registers publicly viewable in the library.
So it had your name and address, and if you were silly enough to register your children
as they came up to the age of 18, so they were legally to vote, I think they could go
on the register when they were 16, and it would have their date of birth on there.
You can register other people?
Well, if you're a parent, I would have thought.
Huh.
Okay.
Well, I don't think that's how it works here.
A form comes through the letterbox, normally around about September, and then you put all
the names of who lives in that household who would be able to vote at the next general
election, which I believe is next year.
So I live by myself, so there's only one name.
And if you've pre-registered before, normally your name is printed on there, and I just want
you to confirm that the details are correct.
I see.
It sounds like they make it easier for people to register to vote over there.
Well, it used to be, they've just recently introduced a new law where you need ID to
vote.
Really?
In the UK, you need ID in order to vote?
You need photographic ID.
And unfortunately, for whatever reason, I don't have photographic ID.
It's valid.
Wow.
Yeah, you know, there's a big debate going on in many states.
A lot of states require photo ID, but a lot of states like New York do not.
And it's difficult for people who don't have easy access to either get out to a place where
they can get their picture taken or fill out the right forms or pay all the fees that are
involved.
Is there anything you can say about the challenges that this presents to people?
Well, the poor basically are normally the ones that don't have passports or driving license
or photographic ID that's valid.
They're the ones that are going to be stopped from voting.
Yep.
Same concern here.
Yep.
Well, there is a system in place where you can actually get a voter's card, which can be
used as ID in the next election.
And that's what I'm hoping to get.
Now, as far as I know, the only two things that you need for ID is you need a digital
photo, which is like a passport condition.
You need to have certain criteria.
It has to be a plain background.
You can't wear a hat.
You can't wear glasses like sunglasses.
You know, the usual stuff like the passport photo.
And you need something called your national insurance number, which I think is your social
security number sort of thing, equivalent in America.
Okay.
Except we don't get any insurance from that.
Yeah.
Well, this is meant to be sort of paying for our medical.
Oh, yeah.
You don't know about that, do you?
No.
But, yeah, it pays for our medical stuff and when you're on welfare, unemployment, stuff
like that.
Uh-huh.
And it's called national insurance.
So, yeah.
That's basically all I know.
I don't know anything about an anonymous register.
That's new to me, so I'm not too sure what was meant there.
Yeah, the information is normally you can go to the library from the area that you can
vote in and basically your name and address would be listed there.
It used to be in the old days.
We're talking about, I don't know, 30, 40 years ago when I checked.
Uh-huh.
I haven't done it recently because I'm not stalking anyone anymore.
So, I'm kidding.
So, basically, I don't know if that's still true, but normally you can go to where they
register the votes and I think there might be a book in there you can check and you can
maybe check on other people and stuff.
I'm not too sure.
We have a somewhat low-tech system in New York where basically, you know, you give them your name.
You have to walk into a place in person when you vote.
You give them the name and the address.
You say the address.
They look you up.
They find you.
You sign your name.
And you have to - the signature has to match.
Period.
Now, you know, I don't know many people, I don't know any people who commit voter fraud,
but in order to commit voter fraud, you'd have to be able to walk in there, show your face,
get the address right, and on demand sign the name the same way the person signed the name the last time
and not get caught in that particular way.
There is not a problem, at least not in this part of the country, not in this state with voter fraud
that has ever been revealed, and that's why people argue against this.
Also, every assumption that people make, oh, it's not that expensive.
Well, to somebody who's poor, it is that expensive to go and get a photo ID.
It's not inconvenient.
Well, to somebody who works all day long, maybe has two jobs, yeah, it is inconvenient to have to go stand
on a line at some agency somewhere to get an ID card.
It's enough to keep you from voting, and I think that's really why you see so many conservatives
pushing for voter ID because they know those people will be weeded out
and you won't have those mostly Democratic voting people online on Election Day,
and I think they'll do everything possible to ensure that, even if there is no crisis that they're conjuring up
and making people think that this is something that needs to be done.
Yep, it's the same in the UK, same kind of things that they're planning, same kind of problems.
Yeah, it's funny how that's become a tactic worldwide.
It's sort of exported.
It's very familiar, what you described earlier, so funny play there.
But it's not the way voting should be.
It shouldn't be this impossible thing that you have to do all kinds of testing and qualifying.
It should just be an act that participants, citizens, citizenry has ready access to when the time comes.
Yeah, well, you know, they've got to get the New World Order in there somehow.
Is it possible to talk a bit about Cheshire?
Please.
There's one thing I'd like to know.
Did he ever get his book published?
That's a good question.
I know, Robin Geely, you were asking about that earlier.
Yes, indeed.
We have been asked about that.
And also, somebody in our chat seems to have a copy in storage somewhere, possibly.
So they're going to, I think, if they would be so very kind as to have a look for us and see.
Or if anybody else is listening, because apparently he was selling early drafts, and I vaguely remember this.
He was selling early drafts of his book on a three-and-a-half-inch floppy just for $5.
And so there are people out there who have these.
And we would be very interested if anybody were into archiving or sharing the data that was on that.
Yeah, I didn't even know there was a book until just recently.
Yeah, I've got some good news and bad news on that.
I've got good news.
I did have a copy of that disc, but it's from 2000.
The bad news is I don't know if I've still got it.
Okay.
Well, that's not really news yet because you don't know.
So it's a possibility.
I'll take it as good news that you might have a copy someplace.
Or I'm sure somebody has a copy somewhere.
Well, I was going to say, there's somebody in the chat that said they've got a copy.
It would be interesting to find out what year he got that disc.
Because I got my disc in 2000.
So if he got it after 2000, he may have a different version or a longer version of Cheshire's book.
Well, I know Cheshire had a website.
Probably it's still there.
And knowing Cheshire, he probably would have just put the book on his website.
So I don't have the website's URL in my head right now, but I can probably track it down.
And we can look there.
Yeah, Google can do that too, so I won't worry.
Yeah, a lot of problems, technical hitches today.
I don't think that was Cheshire.
I think that was Kevin.
They're battling it out.
So we'll see.
Yeah, well, also, has anyone checked on Rebel?
He normally is the first person to phone in.
Is he still alive?
Well, it was last week.
I'm pretty sure he's okay.
Maybe he was traveling somewhere?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I think he said he was traveling this week.
I don't keep track of Rebel's whereabouts unless it's too close.
Yeah, no, I was surprised.
I waited quite a while to phone in, wondering if Rebel would phone in, because he has a tradition of phoning in first.
Yeah, I think everybody was waiting.
Yeah, everyone was being very, very courteous and saying, well, Rebel has to be first.
And then, well, he didn't call, so thank you for being the first.
Now the rush comes.
Yeah, now the gates will open.
Yeah, now that they know they can ring, they'll be ringing, and they can ring on failure phones.
And if they've got a landline, it'd be even better.
I'm really sad about Cheshire, because I've actually got more interaction with Cheshire.
And when I, I remember in 2000, we stayed at Knotwork, and he was there.
There was my South African buddy was there as well.
And, you know, I got to know Cheshire quite well in those few days of Hope H2K.
I remember that.
And he was a lovely guy.
That was actually Beyond Hope in 1997.
No, no, no.
I went to Two Hopes.
Oh, you went to Two Hopes.
Okay, because you guys were there for Beyond Hope.
But you were also there for H2K.
No, that was the first one.
All right.
That's probably the first time I met Cheshire.
Uh-huh.
And he used to like paying his way by, as he called it, schlepping the stuff that we had
to carry up to set up the conference.
Uh-huh.
And in fact, he's actually, I was watching a documentary on YouTube called New York City
Hackers.
And he's got a little section in that, because I know he was in that, because he was from
2000 when I was around again.
Right, right.
Um, I think that was made by a friend of ours in Norway.
I think he made that film, New York City Hackers.
Someone from Europe did it.
Yeah, Stig.
Stig from Norway.
Yeah, Stig.
If you're very keen on it, you'd like to see me for about two seconds or something in it.
But, um, yeah, I remember I had a lot of memories.
Um, and then seeing him in 2000 again, um, you know, when I really got to know him sort
of thing.
And we got chatting.
And like I said, I bought, I bought the disc.
Somebody on, on, on the chat said that he got given the disc.
And I'm like, hey, I got ripped off.
But, you know, that's Chester.
He used to, like, pay his way to go to these conferences by doing things and selling things.
But he was a nice guy.
And, um, it saddens me that he's passed.
Um, I don't know what God's doing upstairs at the moment, but he's building one hell of
a hacker team at the moment.
That's true.
That's very true.
All right.
All right.
That's all I've got to say.
Uh, I'll, I'll get off the line.
Somebody else can phone in.
Great hearing from you.
And, uh, hopefully we'll hear from you again in two weeks when we're back on the air.
Well, I hope nobody dies in two weeks.
Cause you know, if I know them, I'm going to phone in again.
Like I said, it's, this is the way it's always been.
It's just going to continue in unpredictable ways.
All right.
All right.
Be well.
I'll see you later, ladies and gentlemen.
Okay.
Bye.
Good night.
Thanks for checking in.
Thanks.
Um, before we go to our next caller or while we're waiting for our next caller did have a
clarification question.
Um, Emmanuel, we have, uh, somebody asking, didn't you call the show one time from a satellite
phone when you were traveling?
Uh, yeah, I wasn't aware I was on trial here, but yeah, I used a satellite phone.
Why?
Whatever.
In the discussion about mobile phones, landlines, copper wires.
Okay.
Let me explain.
Somebody asked.
Let me explain.
I was on, I was either on the Trans-Siberian Express or a freighter in the middle of the
Pacific ocean.
Those are times when you don't have a landline.
I get that and a satellite phone was, was a good alternative for that particular situation.
But if I'm, if I'm in an apartment or an office, you know, landlines are, are, are fairly
common in those kinds of environments or they're easy to get.
Um, you know, I, I, I wouldn't want to sound like I'm on the moon if I'm actually just down
the block.
So I, I just wish we wouldn't accept that as, as, you know, the norm these days.
We have a phone call.
I hope that answers the question.
We have a phone call.
Okay.
Uh, let's see, uh, who's out there.
Good evening.
You're on off the cover time.
Yeah.
Hi.
Um, did you guys hear about this, uh, story I just read on Gizmodo about CNET that they
deleted, uh, thousands of articles in an attempt to improve their performance in Google search
results?
Oh my God.
Really?
That's so sad.
That's so pathetic.
Was that intentional or an accident?
It sounds like it was intentional.
No, no, it's intentional.
It said, uh, tech site, uh, CNET has deleted thousands of old articles over the past few months
in a bid to improve its performance in Google search results.
Well, that's, that's a bit Orwellian, don't you think to, uh, you know, change the past
so that you improve your future?
Yeah.
That's counterintuitive.
Like what's, uh, no, it's actually something I would expect to happen at some point though.
Is that like a band, like, like site loading performance or just, I mean, that's search
optimization.
Someone, uh, they're director of marketing and communications.
Removing content from our site is not a decision we take lightly.
Our teams analyze many data points to determine whether there are pages on CNET that are not
currently serving a meaningful audience.
This is an industry-wide best practice for large sites like ours that are primarily driven
by SEO traffic.
That's disgusting.
I'm sorry.
That's, first of all, I want to know, uh, examples of the pages they deleted and who
this, uh, what was it, what was the phrase you used?
Uh, insignificant audience or what, what, what do they refer to people?
It said, um, meaningful audience.
It said, uh, yeah, it said, uh, they're looking to see whether there are pages on CNET that are
not currently serving a meaningful audience.
Yeah.
I'd like to know what they, what they consider to be, uh, not a meaningful audience.
You know, is it, is it numbers?
Is it the type of people?
Is it the subject matter?
That's, uh, you know, I, I don't, I don't really, um, uh, embrace the idea of changing
something that has been printed.
You know, I come from the printed magazine world, so it's, it's kind of hard to do that.
But even on, um, on, on, uh, social media, if you say something stupid, you've said something
stupid and you shouldn't unsay it.
First of all, all these people will be commenting on your stupid remark.
If you remove it, it's not going to make any sense.
All these people are commenting on something you have no idea what they're talking about.
You said it, deal with it, improve it, correct it or whatever, but don't erase it.
That's, that's just my perspective.
And it seems to be a shrinking one because most everybody these days seems to think they
can just go back and change something they don't like, uh, even in, in magazine articles.
And, um, you don't get a very good sense of reality by doing that.
And he goes on to say, in an ideal world, we'd leave all of our content on our site in perpetuity.
Unfortunately, we are penalized by the modern internet for leaving all previously published
content live on our site.
I'd like to know how are they penalized?
Exactly.
What is, what does Google do to them that makes them cower in fear?
So, you know, I don't know.
It just sounds ridiculous.
It is ridiculous.
Thank you for pointing this out.
This is, this is terrible.
And it's, it's something that I think, uh, we need to focus on.
Rob, you seem to have something you want to say.
Yeah.
I mean, the, the, the issue with CNET in particular, I mean, this is, this would be terrible on
any site, but CNET has been around for such a long time.
They were one of the first sort of, uh, tech news sites that were, you know, legitimizing online
news.
They were doing this in the nineties.
They are, they, this is a historical record that they have of material they've been putting
up since, since the very early days of the modern web.
And it's a real loss to not have access to that stuff anymore.
Yeah, it's terrible.
I mean, and it said they've also laid off thousands or hundreds of journalists and, uh, they'll
lose access to their articles.
Um, you know, if they're looking for other work, they don't have access to their articles
anymore because they've been deleted.
It's not a good week for CNET.
Are they going to kick some puppies too while they're at it?
They're just not doing good things.
This is like, this is the, the, um, preface of really bad stuff.
Usually like, like the end of, of places like that, because this sounds like a wholesale cost
cutting thing.
Like they don't want to host it and they're blaming the search engine because, uh, nobody
wants to find out about operating systems from 1998 or, um, you know, whatever articles
there are, I mean, why wouldn't they have something built into their life cycle of their articles
for older stuff?
Yeah.
Why don't you call Dnet or something?
If you don't want to hold it, you know, host it on CNET, it doesn't, you don't erase things.
You don't erase your history.
No, it's terrible.
It says they were bought out by Red Ventures, a media conglomerate in 2020, and they laid
off 10% of their staff recently.
So they're, they're liquidating it.
That's what sounds like they're gutting it and, and they're going to try to trade on the
brand, CNET brand and stuff.
Yeah.
Um, I.
Terrible.
Go ahead, Rob.
Um, Gila did just point out to me a section of this article on, uh, on Gizmodo, which does
say that when an article is slated for deletion, um, CNET is maintaining its own copy and also
sending the story to the internet archives way back machine.
So it's not being completely lost, but, uh, it's still, it's, it's putting another barrier
between, you know, that information and somebody who might benefit from it that, uh, wasn't there
before and, uh, offloading the responsibility onto the internet archive, which, you know, I'm glad
the internet archive is there, but, uh, this, this is just, this is still just a very sad
occurrence.
It's also the reasoning behind it because they're afraid of what Google will do, uh, search engine
optimization, uh, you know, it's, it's, it's just, it's pathetic to see, uh, decisions made
based on that.
I had a question.
Uh, what was the topic of Cheshire's book that you were talking about just a few minutes
ago?
What, what was the content in that book that he'd written?
I think this is an autobiography, but I've never seen it.
Yeah.
I don't think we have any idea.
Oh, I don't hope it sees the light of day.
Yeah.
I don't know either.
I assumed it was an autobiography, like his, his story, but, um, I don't know.
No one has said, well, maybe somebody will send a file to you guys and you can post it
on, on, um, on a website somewhere, you know, on the 2600 website.
Yeah.
I'd love to read it.
Or we'll find Cheshire's website where he might've already done that knowing, knowing
him.
I think he could have.
Yeah.
And I just wanted to mention speaking of death.
Uh, I just saw that Robbie Robertson from the band died today.
So yeah.
Uh, you know, people are dying left and right.
It's, uh, yeah.
Uh, and, and everybody will at some point.
So maybe that's the comfort.
Yeah.
Well, um, grab those articles from CNET while you can, uh, before they, before they go belly
up or, you know, go out of business.
Yeah.
I don't think it'll be long now if they have, uh, decisions like this.
Thanks.
Uh, thanks for letting us know.
All right.
Have a great night.
Take care.
You too.
What does CNET stand for?
Why is it called CNET?
Does anybody know?
Like, uh, it is short for computer network.
Is it?
Um, according, according to Wikipedia, it is a short for computer network.
All right.
And, uh, I'm not sure if that really pertains anymore.
Wow.
We have another call.
Yes.
And good evening.
You're on off the cover time.
Go ahead.
Greetings.
It's Del Chai out in Vegas.
Hey, Del Chai.
How you doing?
Hey, we've got a call from Vegas.
Hey, good.
I was the one who brought up Cheshire's book because forever ago at H2K2, he gave me a
three, three and a half inch floppy and he'd handwritten Cheshire's book on it.
Oh, wow.
Well, that sounds like you have a book.
It was, it was a kind of autobiographical thing.
I can't lay my hands on it right now.
I think it's, it's honestly, it's in my collection of old cassette tapes in my lab here somewhere
and I haven't found it yet.
But as soon as I find it, I will get it and upload it so you guys can have it.
Okay.
Yeah.
Get to work then.
We expect you to, don't go to DEF CON or anything like that.
Go and search for this floppy.
Oh, yeah.
Go to DEF CON.
No, this is.
Well, you know, the first, the first thing I got to do is get a three and a half inch drive.
Right.
Okay.
Maybe, all right.
Go to DEF CON, get a three and a half inch drive, come back and search for it.
Yeah.
That could help you.
That will help.
There you go.
This one little task is actually going to get all of that stuff very organized.
I just know it.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
What's funny is this is the second historical find for me this year.
Oh.
And it's kind of interesting.
My first historical find is I actually validated a piece of urban legend.
And I was going to release it at DEF CON.
Uh-huh.
Okay.
Does anybody remember being a kid watching cartoons on Saturday morning
and you saw this cartoonish PSA and it was a picture of a guy walking towards you
and his face got red and his steam came out of his ears as he threw out.
And there was a song slash poem being sung in the background called Hate Hurts You.
Hate, it makes you feel like hating.
Hate, it's a poison that corrodes.
And it was a PSA from a Jewish society, Chattaclotic society.
And it was an anti-hate message.
And what it was was this little mini cartoon of a person exploding from all the hate inside of them.
And it ends it with a guy slamming on the guitar and goes,
Hate hurts you.
Buh-da-dum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum.
Now, this was very short-lived because it freaked kids out across the country.
If you do a cursory Google search for Hate Hurts You,
you will find people in boards and messaging all over the country.
Oh, my God, that thing terrorized me as a kid.
That commercial was so scary.
One guy even said he stopped watching cartoons because they put it on in the middle of a cartoon block.
Wow.
Now, here's the thing.
The original disappeared shortly after it aired, within three months.
And no one heard about it again until the 80s.
And in 82, 83, a shortened 10-second version appeared on TV.
And again, bang, disappeared.
And no one will talk about it.
I've made FCC inquiries.
I've made FOIA inquiries.
I've gone through acres of TV station documentation.
And no one will talk about this thing.
I finally tracked down people in charge of the Information Society.
And that organization disbanded.
And there was no information on it to be found.
And then I found one person who claimed to have been the chancellor.
And he said, yes, I remember that ad.
No, I can't help you.
Goodbye.
And bang, he was gone.
And over the years, people have put it.
You would think, right, this is on YouTube.
This is on Facebook, right?
No.
Every single instance of this that has been on the net has been taken down, except for a handful of YouTube videos that show the 10-second version.
And it's funny, because Internet Archive has the long version, and they took it down, and they would not answer any emails asking why they took it down.
Then they had the 10-second long version, and they took that down, but somebody made a cam picture of it playing.
So you can see the old Internet Archive user interface playing the 10-second version in a YouTube video.
Wow.
So over the years, I looked over this thing, and all over the Internet, there are pictures of it.
There are still pictures.
People talk about being spooked by it and freaked out by it and how it destroyed them as kids and stuff like that.
So I decided to dig into it, and I honestly could not - I kept getting dead ends, legal stoppages, you can't see this, you can't do this.
People denied that it ever existed.
And then I came across a small miracle.
There was a guy, a J. Michael McDonald, who had an immense collection of television shows, commercials, PSAs that he made in order to have a history of broadcast TV in the United States.
And it was an amazing collection, huge collection.
And when he died, that collection went to the government.
It's in the Library of Congress.
And when I started piling through that collection, I found a copy of the full version of that PSA.
How did you go through that collection?
How did you go through the collection?
Because there was a website dedicated to it, and it had an inventory.
And what happened was I just got a hit searching for key phrases, and I found the inventory.
It's on a particular 16-millimeter reel.
And it's buried in the 16-millimeter reel along with other commercials and stuff.
So I found it in text, at least.
It said it did exist in this collection.
That collection went to the Library of Congress.
The Library of Congress had put it next to the Ark of the Covenant in, like, one of their underground bunkers where things they'll get to eventually.
And I spent the last two years going back and forth with them trying to get a copy of this.
First, they said it didn't exist.
Then they said they found it, and they had to send for it.
It took three weeks to get it out of the archives.
And then one of their people said, yes, we found it.
We verified it.
We watched it.
You can't have it.
And I'm like, okay, what the hell is so about this that you can't have it?
And after going back and forth and back and forth, it turns out that there's actually a copyright issue with PSAs.
Not that the PSA itself is copyrighted, but its contents, music, video, so on, can be copyrighted.
So you have to go through this incredible process of requesting and finding the original copyright holder and getting permission for them to make a copy for you.
That sounds like the ad agency or something, the production company that actually made it, that retains it.
Right.
But nobody will admit that it exists.
So I spent another six to eight months, and finally, I discovered a loophole.
First of all, you can argue the fair use doctrine because it's a PSA.
And that isn't always successful, but you can.
Second, you can say, and I am doing scholarly research on it because I am doing a big write-up on this thing.
And so, but then they said something really interesting.
They said, if you want to, we can get the reel for you, and you can come in and watch it in a viewing room.
Oh, definitely.
Do they, what, go to the Library of Congress and watch something on a reel?
Definitely.
Yes.
And the thing is, I'm on the wrong side of the country, and, you know, all of my fans and foes alike know I'm super Captain Disabled now.
So I can't really travel.
So I hit another dead end.
And then they said, oh, yeah, by the way, you can watch it, but you can't do anything with it.
So I stumbled across a group of people, and this is really bizarre.
I didn't know they existed.
There's a list of people that are professional researchers who will go to the Library of Congress for you and do your research for X dollars an hour.
So I hired three different ones, and one of them finally got through and found it.
And they were able to go there, and they were able to watch it.
And they said, yes, this is it.
This is the full 30-second version, and it has different, it's different sound, different audio from the 10-second version.
And this is what you've been looking for.
And I said, great, now get me a copy of it.
Well, they refused, they refused, they refused.
And then I pulled out the magic wand, which I very rarely do.
And I said, look, I'm a disabled individual, and I can't go there.
So I think it's a reasonable accommodation to make a video of this and send it to me because of my handicap.
And they agreed to that.
Interesting.
So they allowed my researcher to go in with a cell phone camera and make a copy of the full 30-second version, which I now have.
Wow.
Okay, when can we see it?
I can put it up on Dropbox, and I'll email you the link.
Okay, what's going to happen to us if we see this?
Are we going to go crazy?
You might.
You may actually go, it may be one of those Videodrome kind of things, you know?
You may end up saying, you know, death to Videodrome, long live the new flesh.
That's kind of scary.
But, you know, hate hurts you.
It is.
Hate hurts you is a very controversial thing to say.
I mean, you know, these days, hate is a platform that people run upon.
So, I don't know.
That's why I started looking into it.
That is the exact reason, because hate is the platform of choice right now.
Everybody is utilizing hate in order to get people to gather under a flag of hate and vote a certain way.
People are being exploited by this in the most fundamentally rudimentary way we haven't seen since, you know, anti-vaccine stuff.
But I've got a guy, I've got this vocal guy who's a complete whack job, who is literally going around telling people that the COVID vaccine is the mark of the beast from the Bible.
Yes, it was prophesied.
And that getting the injection of COVID into you puts the 666 on your forehead, because these are the end times.
And that's how we're going to be judged.
The 666, it can be anywhere on your body, by the way.
Mine's on my foot.
Oh, yeah.
Traditionally, it's supposed to be on the forehead, I think.
It's supposed to be.
My life is not guided by other people's mania.
We have got to.
What kind of heresy is that?
If it's not guided by someone else's mania, what is it going to be guided by?
For God's sake.
I realized what I said when I said it.
Listen to the people.
Never mind.
The people who did their own research, listen to them.
And shut up about your research.
I'm sorry, Delcher, I continue.
What I was saying was that, of course, I'm not saying that it's a thing, but if you read the King James Version of the Bible,
that particular fingerprinted version, they say it's on your forehead.
Okay.
Now, people would put it all over them.
So I've seen people with it on their ass cheeks.
I mean, it's not.
You've seen people with it.
Okay.
I won't get into that.
But, yeah, the kid on the old man, it was under his hair.
I used to live in New York City, Emmanuel.
You know this.
Yeah, no, I do.
You know I used to live in New York City.
I'm not going to pursue that.
There are things I've seen that most people should never see.
Uh-huh.
Which is why you're where you are now, all the way out in Nevada.
Yeah, it makes sense.
Yeah.
That's another story.
Uh-huh.
But, yeah, it's bizarre that they're getting away with this, that people are so inundated
by hate and, quote, unquote, educated.
By the way.
Educated for ignorance.
A fun Nevada fact that I'll bet people don't know is that Reno is further to the west than
Los Angeles.
I saw that in a bar.
It's true.
Look it up.
Yes.
I know.
I know it is.
I've been to Reno.
Well, yeah, but being in Reno doesn't mean you know that it's further west than Los Angeles.
I'm still not entirely sure how that works.
I've driven to Reno, and I've driven to Los Angeles, and I know how to read the odometer
on my car.
Okay.
Well, actually, we can just look at a map, I suppose.
That's probably the easiest way.
All right.
Well, Adeltra, so congratulations on getting this.
It makes me wonder how many other things are being, you know, kept from people, like
this 30-second PSA.
This has been, yeah, this has been a very, very weirdly kept thing since the 70s.
Uh-huh.
Well, I'd like to know who made it.
I mean, are there names behind it?
Maybe we can find them.
It's the Jewish, I can't pronounce it correctly.
It's the Jewish Charaquata Society.
They no longer exist.
They changed their name and rebranded themselves.
We'll find them.
But it's an organization of people of the Jewish faith doing educational outreach.
All of their other PSAs are just about celebrating the Jewish faith, you know, here's a video
of us having dinner together, here's our heritage, and just educating people.
And none of them were animated.
This was the only one that was animated.
And are the other ones easy to get access to?
Very easy.
Okay.
A cursory YouTube search will find tons of the other ones.
Interesting.
But not the hate hurts you one.
Well, I'd like to know who is behind the attempted burial of this particular message.
Because that's telling.
If I'm to believe the person I spoke to on Facebook, who said they were the chancellor
of the organization during that time, he basically just, you know, said, yeah, I know what you're
talking about.
It's gone.
Forget about it.
And that's it.
And don't ask any more questions.
Yeah, don't ask any more questions.
It seems like logical that they would be the entity suppressing it if they had aired it
in multiple markets or a very large market, got feedback from the stations and said, hey,
look, people are outside with pitchforks.
They're upset about their Saturday cartoons being interrupted by this.
It's not landing.
And then they yank it and then maybe want it not to be a part of what they're known for,
which is, as you said, the more polished cultural outreach stuff going forward after
that incident.
Yeah, but the hate hurts you.
I would want to be known for that message.
They should revisit it.
It's a worthy message, right?
Yeah, I mean, it really is.
So what if it traumatized a bunch of kids in the 70s?
You know, they should have known better.
Here's the thing about the people with pitchforks.
Oh, yeah, I'm making that up.
No, no, no.
You're not wrong.
But television stations are required to hold on to those complaints.
Unfortunately, they're only required to hold on to them for X many years.
Right, right.
I think it's like seven years.
And then they don't keep the records anymore.
So any records of that are gone.
I found that out.
I went to several TV stations.
I used to work in broadcast TV.
Okay.
So I know the lingo and I know who to talk to.
Plus, I filed a FOIA request with the FCC.
And the FCC came back and said that they had nothing on record about the complaints about it.
But again, just go onto Google and search for it.
You'll find all kinds of, like, lost archives or lost television or, hey, do you remember when you were a kid?
Sure.
And people were talking about this thing, like, some people, they claim it still haunts them.
And then they're in their 50s now.
Okay.
Well, I'm not disputing that it could yet be mysterious.
But I would.
I just wanted to decide on that.
You're not wrong.
Yeah.
If there were any complaints, they were long since gone because the retention period was passed.
Right.
They weren't looking back at their own stuff.
They were moving on.
And there wasn't as much intrigue.
People were just dealing with the impact of the broadcast.
Here's a thought, though.
Do you think it's possible that this PSA might have been played in other countries?
That is something I never explored.
Okay.
Because maybe it's available in other places.
Maybe somebody listening has seen it, too, and isn't in the United States.
But, Delta, let me ask you this.
Would you be daring enough to play the audio that we could have on our YouTube channel and see what YouTube does?
We could try it.
I'd have to make an audio file and ship it to you.
But, yeah.
Okay.
Well, you know what?
Maybe we'll do this in a future show.
And we're conspiring.
It's not likely that their automated stuff will pick it up because it's so old.
But it's possible that somebody might freak out and get them to punish us severely.
And, of course, right now we're conspiring.
So, I guess that's another offense.
We'll see what you two does.
The thing is, is that, legally speaking, okay, I don't see any problem for a number of reasons.
Number one, this is scholarly research.
We are researching for an informational article about an event that happened in the 1970s that is pertinent to social structure today about the use of hate to control people.
Number one, number two, it's a PSA, public service announcement.
Those things are technically in the public domain.
Now, again, as they told me, the music and this and that and other may not be, but the PSA itself is in the public domain.
Three, because it was broadcast on open television air long before the days of cable, this thing is out there.
It was openly put out there.
We should have a fair use case.
It's being transmitted into outer space, in fact.
That's how out there it is.
And four, we, constructive debate and education.
And there you go.
We've recovered four different ways right there.
So, a question.
Now, you've seen this now, right?
Yes.
And you haven't gone mad, right?
Actually, I did go a little mad when I was a kid.
No, I mean, yeah, I mean, after seeing this, obviously, I'm not talking about those days.
Yeah, no, I mean, I remember being traumatized by it as a kid, but that's why I remembered it.
And I can watch it now without a problem.
It's good marketing.
If you're traumatized, people remember.
Yeah, that's definitely true.
Yeah.
So, now, let me just ask you, is this the kind of message that would work on the radio, or do you need the video?
Do you need the video?
So, just saying, on the radio, on the radio, the message would be obvious.
It'd be a good message.
You know, when you hate, who do you hurt the most?
You hate, you hurt yourself.
Yeah, what's wrong with saying that?
Hate hurts you.
We could say that on the radio, right?
Nothing wrong with saying that.
So, let's pledge you to do that.
Oh, one thing that's interesting about the audio portion of the video, I forgot to mention, is that at the very end of it, they say, when you hate, who do you hurt the most?
You hurt you, or hate hurts you.
And then there's a gunshot.
Oh, okay.
If you're listening carefully, you'll hear there's a gunshot at the very end.
Oh, that's a new addition to this whole thing.
Oh, wow, okay.
Yeah, when I was doing the analysis of it, it's not a great copy, but it is a copy.
It's not the 10-second version.
Now, I've heard rumor, rumor that there was another version of the 30-second one, but I have never seen or heard of that one.
I think that one was just a myth.
I think this is the actual, what I have is the actual original 30-second version.
I see one right now on YouTube.
It says, hate hurts you, 1974 version reconstruction.
Yes, it's only 10 seconds long.
No, it's 31 seconds long.
There's another one above it that's 11 seconds.
That is the PSA 1982.
I don't know about the reconstruction.
I haven't seen that one before.
Uh-huh.
Well, I don't know if I dare to play it on the, on the, on the, well, it's on YouTube already, so what's the worst thing that can happen if I play this?
Should I, let's take this, put this to a vote.
Maybe it's a before version reconstruction.
Let's see.
Okay, this looks like, I'll tell you, that face is freaking me out.
It's all, the audio is all screwed up.
It looks like they're just playing the 10-second version at a slow speed.
Oh, is that what they're doing?
Okay.
If you listen to the audio, it's like, roar, roar, roar, roar, roar.
So yeah, they're playing the 10-second version at slow speed.
How about this one?
Also, hate hurts your original 15 seconds below that.
Uh, really good.
That's the shorter version.
Yeah.
You get the one that says 1982?
Yeah, that probably just has titles or something.
There's a bunch of disturbing things here.
Yep, but they're, they're mostly all the 10-second versions.
And if you look, there's one that says hate hurts you PSA.
That's the one you see that has the old internet archives, um, interview, a graphical user interface doing, uh, in the right-hand corner.
I see one here.
It's 21 minutes long.
That's called the scariest lost PSAs.
I had no idea this world existed before tonight.
Oh, yes.
There are other PSAs that are scary.
There are other ones.
I mean, there are whole public service movies.
Have you ever heard of Red Asphalt?
I have not.
It's a shock movie that was made for driver's education.
Oh, wait, it's about, it's about people getting hit by cars or run over and blood on the asphalt.
That's why it's Red Asphalt, right?
Yes.
Okay, that's a PSA?
Yep, well, it was a PSA, but it was an educational film.
Okay.
See, you know, here's an, okay, here's another one.
It says hate hurts you original, but it's not the original.
It's the, it's the same text of the song, the lyrics of the song, but they're using copypasta and spooky images.
Yeah, it's like original Ray's Pizza.
You can never get the actual original.
Gila, did you have something?
I found something interesting, which is the advertising column from the New York Times, December 19th, 1975.
Excuse me.
Talking about some PSAs, including this one.
Speaking with a woman named Jane Crowley, who is in charge of standards and practices at NBC.
She used to be a nun, and the people on Saturday Night Live hated her.
Wait, wait, wait, people on Saturday Night Live hated her because she was a nun?
No, she was like, they hated her because she was standards and practices.
Also, she used to be a nun.
I get it now.
Among the public service television commercials now in hand at the NBC TV network, according to Jane Crowley, who is in charge of that division of work, are spots dealing with bigotry from the National Conference of Christians and Jews, Religion and American Life, an ad council effort, the Jewish Chautauqua Society, the theme Hate Hurts You, and St. Francis Productions.
Interesting.
So that was in the New York Times in 1975?
1975.
And that's probably before everything hit the fan, right?
I would think so, yeah.
That must have been before.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, we'll peruse that article and do some more research into it.
It's fascinating.
Thank you for sharing this with so many people.
Yeah.
It's not often you get a chance to debunk, or not debunk, but to validate an urban myth.
Yeah, we're bunking it, I think.
I think we're very much bunking it.
Yeah, I'd like to see that article.
I don't think I've seen that one before from the New York Times.
Dushai, if it would help, I can drop it in the YouTube chat.
Yeah, that'd be cool.
Hey, by the way, were you able to drop Cheshire's picture from 18 years old?
Unfortunately, there is a 200-character limit, and I cannot drop a picture.
I cannot paste in.
I can't paste a picture in.
In other words, you can't paste a picture, because pictures don't have characters.
You don't have, like, a, yeah, it's not hosted anywhere, but short URL.
We'll get that.
We'll get that picture out there.
We'll get something up.
Wow.
I want to see Cheshire at 18 years old.
That would be something.
And also something very interesting is that it's a signed picture.
Like, it's a copy of a picture of himself that he had given to someone, and it's written on.
And this is an amazing piece of ephemera.
That's great.
Okay, folks, I think we're going to wrap it up for tonight.
So thank you for that call, and have a great time at the conference.
Hoorah.
All right.
And I look forward to seeing where this goes.
Take care.
Yes, it'll be interesting.
Yeah, definitely.
All right, good night.
So that was our friend Delta out in Las Vegas.
Definitely fascinating.
It's the kind of stuff hackers get up to, you know?
When you get obsessed with something, you want to track it down.
You have to do that.
We talked about it earlier, but you never know what other people are toiling with or what they're hacking on in small and big ways.
It's not always published.
It's not always in a paper or in a book or posted online.
But, you know, have fun in the process.
Be passionate about that stuff.
And share what you can with other people.
I think those are some true lessons in what we talked about and what we're experiencing as a community.
So stay safe at all these events, too.
Yes, yes, do that.
And keep in touch.
We'll be back in two weeks.
Rob, did you have something?
Yeah, I just want to tell listeners out there, if you're interested in the sort of thing surrounding finding that old PSA,
there's a whole scene online of people into lost media.
And if you go to lostmediawiki.com, you can begin exploring that whole world.
There is this community of very resourceful people who have all sorts of things they're looking for, ways to find them.
And the community comes together and makes incredible things happen.
And they have a page about this PSA.
They also have countless other things.
And it's a lot of fun to get involved in that sort of scene if you're into it.
Sounds like the topic of a Hope Talk in the future, perhaps.
Write to us, OTH at 2600.com.
We're going to sign off for tonight.
We will see you in two weeks.
Good night, everyone.