And this is WBAI New York, 99.5 FM and WBAI.org online. 
The previous program was Economic Update with the professor Richard Wolff, heard Wednesdays at 6.30 p.m. 
It is now 7 p.m. 
Stay tuned for Off The Hook coming up. 
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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. 
How are you doing? 
We have Rob T. Firefly out there in Skypeland. 
Good evening. 
We also have Gila out there in Skypeland. 
Good evening. 
And we have Alex also in Skypeland. 
You do indeed. 
Good evening. 
How are you, Alex? 
I have been better. 
Thanks for asking. 
Yeah. 
Well, I can't help but ask. 
I mean, the people at home can't see this, but my goodness, you made rather merry over the holidays, apparently. 
What happened? 
That's one way to put it. 
Yeah. 
You went to Florida, I understand? 
I'm laid up here. 
But you went to Florida? 
Yeah, I guess. 
Oh, no, Alex, we've warned you, we've told you so many times, don't go to Florida, especially over the holidays. 
Okay, so tell us what happened. 
Well, I'm laid up right now. 
I'll start with the results. 
I've got a leg that's broken in a few places. 
I've got some pins going through my leg, holding it together, three different metal rods, an X fixature, as it's called, holding my leg together, and I'll have another surgery. 
So that was one surgery to kind of put this humpy-dumpy type thing back together, and then another one tomorrow to hopefully finish the job. 
So wish me luck. 
But how this all started, how I got here, is really interesting. 
It actually has to do with batteries, believe it or not. 
Well, that's certainly a relevant topic for a hacker show, because a lot of things are powered by batteries these days. 
We see them more and more. 
I just didn't know they could hurt you so much. 
Well, they usually don't, right? 
They usually don't. 
But this was a new battery that was installed in my mother's golf cart. 
As many people know too, I was down in Florida. 
It's been a bit of a rough time for my family, and I'll set the stage with you for a second because I'm down in Florida. 
My mother was in the hospital for a while, and then she came out maybe about a week and a half ago. 
Then my stepfather had to go into the hospital, and the day that this all happened, I had picked him up and took him home from the hospital about 10 minutes before this all happened. 
Maybe 10 minutes after I dropped him off, I got dressed to go to the pool with the kids, and my 10-year-old son wanted to drive the golf cart because he loves driving the golf cart. 
Quite frankly, he's been driving it for many years. 
He probably shouldn't, but we usually let him drive the golf cart. 
My mother had informed us that she put this new battery into the golf cart, and it was a brand new battery. 
You could floor this golf cart and take any turn that you wanted, and it really wasn't going to create that much torque because the old battery didn't have as much power. 
As we got to where the pool was, there was another golf cart coming towards us from the opposite lane, and my son went to make the left-hand turn into the area that had the pool. 
He was concerned about the other cart coming, so he stepped on it. 
He made the turn, and by the way, this has got to be somewhat of my fault, too, because I was encouraging him to go a little bit faster earlier on down the street, but I didn't know he was going to make this turn so quickly. 
I had my other son, my five-year-old son, on my lap as this happened, so he makes this turn that was usually fine to make in the golf cart with the old battery, but with the new battery, there was so much force from the golf cart that the five-year-old and I went flying out of it, out of the golf cart. 
We were literally ejected from the golf cart, and he's in my arms, so I had to protect my five-year-old, so I did. 
He has quite literally two scratches on him, and I don't know how I managed that, but I wound up completely breaking my foot. 
I broke the fibula, the tibula, and the ankle, and my foot was basically facing in a direction that it shouldn't have been facing. 
It was kind of tilted all the way over to the right, and my ten-year-old son saw this. 
He started freaking out. 
He said, �Please go inside, get somebody to call an ambulance.� I tried to keep it together for him as much as I possibly could, and I did. 
He was very helpful. 
He put his back against my back, so I had something to lean up against until the ambulance came. 
I'll tell you, Emanuel, it was tough because it took a long time to get him off the ledge of, �This is all his fault. 
This is my fault. 
I hurt my daddy.� It wasn't his fault. 
If anybody's fault, it was mine. 
I shouldn't have been encouraging him to go a little faster earlier on the street, or I should have driven the golf cart first with the new battery. 
You just don't think something this crazy is going to happen so quickly, but it does. 
I think that's why we call it an accident. 
Finally, he's come down off that and realized it's not his fault, it's an accident. 
It's something I'm going to have to deal with for the next two months, probably. 
It hasn't been fun, I'll put it that way, especially when you live in a walk-up in Manhattan. 
I live in a fourth floor walk-up in the village, so that's not going to be my friend. 
I'll probably be spending a lot more time out in Pennsylvania over the next month and a half or so, but it will put a damper on. 
I start teaching again at King's College in London at the law faculty in January. 
I don't think I'm going to be able to go in person in January. 
My trips back and forth to London will probably start in February this year. 
But thank God we're all otherwise all right. 
This could have been a lot worse. 
Thank God the five-year-old is okay. 
But what a way to end the year. 
The year is not over yet, Alex. 
That was just Christmas time, so you still have another week, so be careful. 
That's absolutely right. 
I guess they don't have seatbelts in golf carts. 
It's a good idea. 
I don't know who's in charge of these things, but you can certainly get hurt. 
This is just some kind of routine thing that we do all the time, this five-minute trip to the pool. 
I also will tell you I was very reluctant to go to the pool that day. 
There's something nagging me almost like a premonition about going to the pool, but I thought it was because it really wasn't cool weather. 
It was maybe 65 degrees. 
It was a little chilly. 
You know how kids are. 
They just want to go to the pool. 
They don't care how cold or how warm it is. 
They just want to be in the water. 
So I was just trying to be a good dad, and this happened. 
You should update your sense of foreboding because it wasn't the pool that was the problem. 
It was the ride to the pool that was the problem, and that's what you should have been wary of. 
That's true. 
I'm glad to hear you're on the mend, but boy, that's something nobody needs, and you weren't even playing golf either. 
Just everyone rides around on those things down there. 
No, I wasn't drinking. 
People here, it was a golf cart accident. 
But now everyone in the family has been to the hospital, right? 
So we all have something to talk about. 
Just about. 
I will tell you this, too. 
Because my foot was facing the wrong way, when I got to the hospital, they had to reset it and place it back into that spot, but so to do that, they had to give me a lot of drugs. 
They didn't want to knock me out entirely and do it. 
They wanted me to be somewhat awake, but also not able to remember or feel this. 
So they gave me a massive amount of propofol. 
According to them, apparently I have a very high drug tolerance, so I was still having conversations with them after they pumped me full of this propofol. 
So then on top of that, they had to give me a dose of ketamine, and that was when I tell you, I'm not one for LSD and those kinds of extracurricular activities, so to speak, but I went on a wild trip. 
I was on an incredible trip. 
Once they gave me that ketamine, I felt like I was with my kids, and we were in a mining cart, and this mining cart went down on these tracks, but the tracks led into the heavens, and we were going through the galaxy, and then the colors were changing, and it was pink, and it was white, and then pinkish white, but we were always in this mining cart together. 
It was really, really weird. 
I've never experienced anything like that. 
I had this great feeling of euphoria afterwards as well, that we went on this amazing trip together, and then as the drugs wore off, it quickly dawned on me that I'd be dealing with this for the next two, two and a half months or so, and the logistics of it were a nightmare, but that was an experience, let me tell you, absolutely. 
Well, you know, we had a more quiet time, not the adventures that you always somehow embark upon, but again, happy to see that you're on the mend. 
It's going to take a while, Kyle. 
I know you've been through this when you broke your hand up in Ontario. 
That was a pain after delivering all the dogs with our friend Greg. 
It's a couple of months in your life that change, right? 
Yeah, it'll heal to be just as strong as it ever was. 
That's the amazing thing, that it'll do that. 
It'll just heal. 
Well, it is, right? 
I mean, I'm going to put you that Hemingway quote, right, where he says, the world breaks everyone, but many are strong in the broken places, meaning that when things break, they grow back stronger, right? 
But then the next part of that quote, I believe, is, with those that doesn't break, it kills, right? 
It kills the very good, it kills the very kind, and something about it will ultimately kill you too. 
Well, he had his dark side, you know, so there's always that. 
Rob Gila, did you have anything? 
Just that, I'm sorry we got you a soccer ball for Christmas, but we'll give you the receipt too, so you can exchange it. 
Yeah, that's unfortunate. 
And the big race, the big race, Alex, in February, how are you going to train for that? 
You know, you're a long-distance runner, I'm kidding, he's not a long-distance runner. 
He can sit at home for a long time. 
I was just going to ask if you'll let us sign your cast. 
Yeah, absolutely. 
And you know, I was thinking, we should figure out a way to all get together and maybe do the show in person at some point soon, because there's some restaurants over near WBAI in Brooklyn that I'd love to go and check out. 
I thought you were going to get us to all come to your house to do the show, because you can't move. 
I thought that's what was the angle of this. 
I'm always dubious of these ideas, but yeah, that's a good idea. 
We can all sign your cast. 
You know, maybe we can make this a BAI premium, where people can sign your cast. 
I'm always thinking of ways to raise money for the station, but you know, we were off last week for an emergency fundraiser, we're off next week, I believe, for a planned fundraiser, so we're kind of the show that's wedged between fundraisers. 
And I'm not entirely sure if we're still preempted next week, I think we are. 
So let me just say for the station, 212-209-2950 is the number to call to pledge, which I think is working. 
And if not, or in addition, give to WBAI.org, give the number to WBAI.org to pledge whatever you can to the station. 
Remember, it's the end of the year, and we're a non-profit, so there's a whole thing where people like to donate lots of money to non-profits at the end of the year, and we're the best one I think you can think of, or that we can think of anyway. 
Go ahead, Alex. 
Yeah, I would just like to echo that. 
I think it's a fantastic way to spend some of that end of year money and decrease your taxable income. 
It's, you know, definitely a worthy cause, and you wouldn't hear this kind of chatter anywhere else. 
Well, you might, but it wouldn't be as interesting, I don't think. 
Go ahead, Gila. 
But, yes, to put on my professional hat for a second, yes, end of year, get your tax deductions. 
If your employer matches your charitable contributions, WBAI is a great choice. 
If you're over 73 and you have not made your required minimum distributions this year, charitable giving is a great way to do it. 
If you have money you have to spend by Sunday because you have to from your IRA, think about giving it to WBAI, and if you do, or if you want to become a BAI buddy, please do that in the name of Off The Hook. 
Let them know that we told you to do this. 
It works out well for everybody. 
But, yes, the more you can do by December 31st, the better it looks on your taxes. 
And a programming reminder, overtime, as always, we'll start at 8 o'clock on YouTube where you can interact with us, and I know, Alex, you have an operation for tomorrow morning at 6. 
Hopefully, you can spend a few minutes with us in overtime just to receive the goodwill of our many listeners who view us there or listen to us there. 
That sounds good. 
I'll hang out for a little bit and then I'll peel off, I don't know, 15, 20 minutes in. 
Okay. 
All right, let's cover some stories relating to the world of technology and computers and things like that. 
Although, you know, golf carts with new batteries certainly does qualify. 
Electric vehicles. 
Electric vehicles, yeah. 
Beware, beware. 
Well, just put your damn seatbelt on. 
If you don't have a seatbelt, make sure there is one. 
Maybe not have 10-year-olds drive, too. 
That's another issue I would lecture you about. 
Yeah. 
It could happen to anybody, though. 
Hindsight. 
You're driving probably the same thing. 
You probably would have been flung further, you know, because it's... 
You're probably right. 
Yeah. 
So... 
If I were driving and I had, you know, the kids would have flown out. 
That's right. 
I would have been dead. 
That would have been bad. 
It would have been a different conversation. 
Okay. 
So there is this story that's been circulating, I would dare say trending, about this teen hacker. 
You might know him as the Grand Theft Auto hacker or the Rockstar Games hacker, because he keeps hacking them for one reason or another. 
The story, you know, that happens all the time, apparently. 
I don't know why it happens all the time, but it just does. 
He has been sentenced to life in a secure hospital. 
That is what the headline in this story on The Verge read. 
I'm going to read you how it begins, and we can assess it from this point. 
The 18-year-old... 
I believe I'm pronouncing this right. 
The hacker group is called Lapsus, but the last S is a dollar sign, so I think that's how you pronounce it. 
If not, somebody correct me. 
The 18-year-old Lapsus hacker, who played a critical role in leaking Grand Theft Auto 6 footage, has been sentenced to life inside a hospital prison. 
That's according to a report from the BBC. 
A British judge ruled on Thursday that Arianne Cottage is a high risk to the public because he still wants to commit cyber crimes. 
Wow. 
I've never heard anything stretched so much as that. 
Because he wants to commit cyber crimes, life in prison. 
In August, a London jury found that Cottage carried out cyber attacks against Grand Theft Auto 6 developer Rockstar Games and other companies, including Uber and NVIDIA. 
However, since Cottage has autism and was deemed unfit to stand trial, the jury was asked to determine whether he committed the acts in question, not whether he did so with criminal intent. 
During a recent hearing, the court heard Cottage had been violent while in custody, with dozens of reports of injury or property damage. 
That's according to the BBC. 
A mental health assessment also found that Cottage continued to express the intent to return to cyber crime as soon as possible. 
He's required to stay in the hospital prison for life unless doctors determine he's no longer a danger. 
A rather big if there, but basically what he's alleged to have done is leaked 90 videos of Grand Theft Auto 6 gameplay footage last September. 
Now, he was out on bail and under police protection. 
I'm not sure of protection from who. 
He was, let's say, police guard during this time, but even without his laptop, he was able to hack Rockstar Games by using the hotel rooms included Amazon Fire Stick and a newly purchased smartphone, keyboard, and mouse. 
He was able to hack them with just that. 
Apparently, that outraged everybody so much that they're really out for blood here. 
I cannot think of any instance where even the specter of life imprisonment in any form is justified. 
And yeah, okay, he got violent and caused property damage while imprisoned. 
I don't know if any of us have been in prison for a long period of time. 
I was locked up for a couple of days during the RNC in New York, and I got to tell you, my mind was different than when I went in, and it would have been way more different the more time goes by. 
Locking people up has an effect, so I cannot look at that and say, oh my God, that's an unforgivable act, what he did by engaging in property damage while being confined. 
It almost seems like a human reaction. 
Alex, any thoughts on this as far as a legal perspective, locking somebody up for life, for hacking into a video game? 
And I don't mean to dismiss it. 
I don't mean to say that it doesn't matter, that this is just a video game, but people are still buying the game. 
The company is still doing well. 
They're getting a lot of publicity. 
They probably should beef up their security, because this seems to happen all the time, but this kid is just obsessed, and people do get obsessed. 
I think you're right. 
I think it is an obsession, and I think obsession does seem to be the right way of looking at this, because it seems to be more of a psychiatric type of sentence than something that actually sounds in the criminal law. 
As a matter of criminal law, this would be wildly disproportionate to the offenses at issue, even if he intended to commit the offenses over and over and over again, that probably would not justify some kind of life imprisonment here. 
It seems to me that the sentence here is custodial in nature almost entirely because of the psychological angle to the crime here and that the offender does not seem to be able to help himself in some other way. 
It's almost like some kind of irresistible impulse to continue to break the law. 
With that in mind, a judge could say, ìLook, I'm going to sentence you to some kind of psychiatric hospital for the foreseeable future, only if you can demonstrate that you're no longer a threat to society, are you going to be able to get out of that psychiatric hospital?î It's like involuntarily imprisoning somebody on the basis of their psychology and assuming for the moment or for the next several decades on behalf of this person that there's nothing that can be done, that there's no diversion that this person can go through, that he has no other redeeming social qualities, and that's what I think really hits me in the heart here. 
It's about this person who's obviously extraordinarily smart, probably very, very talented when it comes to identifying vulnerabilities, and here is this person going to be wasting away in a psychiatric hospital in misery for the foreseeable future. 
It seems to me like even if this was somebody who said, ìI'm going to continually punch people in the face, commit some kind of physical crime, and I intend to do this again and again, and again and again,î I don't think it would justify the same type of disproportionate response. 
I think we would say, ìYou've got a problem. 
You need to have some kind of treatment,î and that's it. 
It wouldn't be this life sentence. 
Alex, if somebody is actually going out there punching people in the face, they are a physical threat and they should be kept away from people that they could hurt. 
We're talking about somebody who released videos, and not only he didn't release the game, he released clips of the upcoming game. 
The game is still coming out. 
The game is still doing well, I believe. 
The trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6 was released, and that had 128 million views in just four days. 
They're claiming it cost them $5 million to recover. 
I'm not sure what they're recovering from. 
The game itself wasn't released. 
I know it's a crime. 
I know it's illegal, but it's a different kind of crime than doing something violent or burning down a building or something like that. 
This is someone who sees a challenge, and yeah, he's misguided in the way that he tackles that challenge, but boy, maybe not make it so easy for him. 
Wasn't it the case that he was found to be unfit to stand trial? 
This is entirely a sentence that has been meted out on the basis of the psychological makeup of the offender. 
That was really the point that I was trying to portray here, is that there seems to be this assumption that this person is beyond some kind of rehabilitation here and needs to be locked away from society. 
I think you're right too, Manuel, to look at the damages and to question them. 
However, I bet $5 million is probably a bit accurate. 
Any kind of breach winds up costing companies millions of dollars these days. 
You have to do forensics, there's an investigation, there's lots of legal fees, notification to customers, regulatory authorities, all this kind of stuff gets really expensive really quickly, so that's quite possible. 
This reminds me of a lot of the trumped up damages charges that people like Kevin Mitnick faced when it came to, I think it was Novell, where Novell had claimed that he managed to exfiltrate or steal the source code that was worth, I don't even remember what the numbers were, but it was so incredibly inflated that it just didn't sound in reality. 
I think this type of decision is hiding behind the laws that are designed to protect minors. 
This is another problem that I have with this, is that there isn't a lot of scrutiny here because minors especially in the UK are afforded a lot more privacy protection than had this happened in the United States. 
There isn't a lot of scrutiny of the process by which the sentence I think has been meted out, but I do certainly hope that he and the family appeal, presuming that this is a he and not a she, but whoever it is, I feel like this is a tough sentence. 
It's really hard to swallow. 
To me, the sentence just says that the rest of us don't know how to deal with somebody like this, and the only answer we can think of is to lock them away and not deal with them. 
I think that's where the real failing is here. 
What he did, yes, it's not following the rules, but it is not something that in any way mandates a life sentence or even the threat of one. 
This is the legal system in the UK, which I think is important to point out, but also as you said, there's a lot more privacy afforded to juveniles in this situation. 
In fact, Ariane Cortage is being charged alongside another individual who was 17 at the time, and therefore there is no info about that person out there beyond the fact that they are a minor. 
In a case like this, it's very obviously, okay, there's some sort of mental health issue at play here. 
This is not just about he wants to keep committing cyber crimes. 
This is a mental health issue, and we have to wonder because we're not being given the information. 
We have to wonder what sort of mental health is in store for him. 
Something like he's going to be remanded to a hospital for life, that is terrifying. 
If they were to just have some sort of sentence that says, we're going to check him out, we're going to see what kind of mental health situation this is, we're going to act accordingly, that I think would have a different vibe than just we're going to put this kid in a hospital for life. 
I think this is definitely worth keeping an eye on. 
This is definitely worth continuing to try and see what's in store. 
As you said, these were videos of gameplay, the same sort of videos that Rockstar is releasing now to build up hype for the game. 
In response to the sentence being handed down to this kid, another individual from Lapsus, from the group, seems to have just recently leaked the entire source code of the previous game in the series, Grand Theft Auto V, as an act of protest and as a free Ariane move. 
It sure seems like all this material is up for the grabs. 
People are just downloading and distributing. 
I'm not trying to blame the quote-unquote victim here, because I question how much of a victim they actually are, but it sure seems like the security leaves a lot to be desired. 
The fact that this is a game, and there are so many dangerous precipices around trying to connect the fiction of a video game about crime to real world crime and harming people, there is a certain, I guess, bitter irony to the fact that Rockstar is bringing these charges and bringing the hammer down on this kid, so they could better sell their game about doing heists and crimes. 
Yeah, there's that too. 
The whole premise of Grand Theft Auto is stealing cars and beating up people and all kinds of horrible things, so I don't want to pass judgment based on that, but it is kind of ironic. 
Yeah, I think we should be cautious to immediately sympathize, because what are we really agreeing to? 
I mean, to even say that this is explicitly a mental health concern with no questions asked or just very little other more detail about it, it seems hilarious, because mental health, maintaining that at all? 
Think about the context, we are not living in some techno-utopia, and the idea that people will follow the rules, that it's a foregone conclusion, that they just want to get along with your systems, and because it's, oh darn, a legal line that is crossed. 
A lot of people don't care, especially criminals, and we need to really, I think, sober up about a society of people that are under stress with wielding these systems, profiting from them a lot, and a lot of people with skills like this don't necessarily fit in and don't want to. 
They don't want to fit in with this society. 
They don't want to fit in with the rules or the laws around how to use a type of chip or how to communicate across certain types of networks. 
They understand that it's really, there's so much emphasis on containing people and containing all of this that it's not going to yield less hacking, the harsher the penalty, I think, and that's my takeaway or where I would go with it. 
A lot of people don't want to follow this stuff anymore and just allow the media, the ad campaigns and stuff to infiltrate their lives. 
There's a cost, and if they can't get their security together and someone that has felt that doesn't want to really get along, doesn't feel they get along, but excels at this and explicitly doesn't really want to agree to impulse control around their skill, how can we really expect them to want to get along? 
I'm very, the more I think about this in a counterintuitive way, the more I'm like, I kind of question it. 
Go ahead, Rob. 
It is counterintuitive because due to the nature of what's going on and the way they do things there, we don't have a lot of information about this at all. 
We have very little information about what's actually going on, what factors are actually at play when the psychiatrist over there made this determination about this kid. 
A lot of what we're saying is just theorizing and that sort of thing, but yeah, we really don't have enough information, I think, to come to a fair judgment, but I would really like to believe that we don't live in a world where something like a life sentence in a hospital is something that would be handed down without a damn good reason. 
We can only hope. 
Okay. 
Well, we would definitely be following this story because it certainly is of interest to us as well as many of our listeners. 
Here's something else from Australia, which is fascinating to me, enlisting thousands of smart speakers in Australian homes to detect intimate partner violence could be an unprecedented opportunity to help victims. 
That's according to a study from this article from ABC, their broadcast network down there, but Monash University researchers found the potential solution was also loaded with ethical considerations and could put the onus of responsibility on victims, produce too many false positives and negatives, and remove pressure from the government to address the causes of domestic violence. 
Now this is pretty interesting because apparently they intend to use smart speaker technology to listen for things like screaming or signs of abuse, but that opens up a whole lot of other concerns. 
In fact, one of our listeners, Neil, writes into us, actually sent us this article, and he says, while the article is interesting enough and talks of ethics, et cetera, I find it passing strange that it completely misses the elephant in the room in that it is just assuming that it's acceptable that these smart speakers are just listening to everything and can send it to the mothership to be processed to see what is happening. 
Have we really become so blasé that no one cares at all about privacy in the home and are happy to share it all with the cloud? 
I would say many of us have. 
I know you guys have one of these devices, and yes, we do over here, and we use it for experiments and for fun and things like that, but I got to tell you, oftentimes it barges into the middle of a conversation. 
When we don't say the trigger word, it hears something, and sometimes it really injects itself and it's unwelcome. 
It's a wake word. 
Yeah. 
Yeah. 
It's a wake word. 
The word for this one is computer, and fortunately, I said that low enough where I can see it across the room. 
It didn't trigger. 
But if you're watching Star Trek or something, oh my God, every two minutes you have to tell it to shut up. 
Is there a command to tell it to ignore things for a period of time? 
I would hope so. 
But finishing this letter here, I personally don't want one of these devices. 
I did experiment with the open-source privacy-focused one called Mycroft, specifically the Raspberry Pi version known as Pycroft, but decided I didn't like it anyway. 
Thanks, Neil, for that insight. 
Any thoughts here? 
Rob? 
Yeah. 
I have a lot of thoughts about this. 
I mean, we have a smart speaker in our home, and the thing is, even if I believed that it was okay that it was listening on everything and sending it to the cloud and possibly flagging it for things like domestic violence, which I don't. 
I think that's all terrifying. 
We can't get this thing to play the right song when we tell it to play some music and it plays something completely different because it wasn't very good at interpreting what we were saying to it. 
And if you throw in things like listening for domestic violence, I mean, we watch a lot of television. 
I play Grand Theft Auto games, and it hears the wrong thing and decides to flag us for something that is actually not happening in reality. 
And that's kind of a scary concept, I think. 
The whole thing is terrifying, the whole idea that also, you should excuse me, that domestic violence sounds like one thing, that intimate partner violence sounds like one thing and only one thing, and that's the only thing it sounds like. 
This is a very, very dangerous moment, because if we're assuming that that's not the case, then it becomes listening for everything, transmitting everything. 
And then how do you decide who gets listened to and who doesn't? 
And not entirely dissimilarly, remember when we were talking about security cameras on the subway and who's going to be reviewing all of this material? 
When there's that much to look at, you're going to miss what's actually there because of all the extraneous noise. 
You know, Eastern Europe learned this lesson back in the 80s. 
I think we still have yet to learn it. 
And we're only a step or two away from people saying, you know what, just listen to everything all the time. 
We trust the authorities, and to be fair, do it to everybody. 
We're not that far from this, and there are people out there now who probably already want that. 
Alex, did you have something? 
I find this whole concept really appalling. 
I don't think it would ever fly in the United States. 
It would be too offensive to have, especially a listening device in your home, scouring the airwaves in your house, of all places, for some kind of criminal activity. 
It would be so offensive to the Fourth Amendment that I just don't see it as flying, unless you somehow consent to this as part of the terms of service or terms of use, et cetera. 
Or terms of probation or something like that. 
That's one possibility, too. 
The other issue here, and the article mentions this, is that there would be a bunch of false positives. 
What would happen if you're watching the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and there's a bunch of women screaming in the background or something, and that gets flagged as an indication of domestic violence? 
The police are called. 
Does that give the police, then, justification to come into your home? 
Is a detection on a smart speaker, then, equatable to something like probable cause? 
These are legal issues that I really hope we don't ever have to deal with, because the answer should be no. 
That's stupid. 
We shouldn't do that in the first place. 
Yeah. 
Couldn't agree more. 
Go ahead, Gayle. 
Now, I'm just thinking about other ways that, you know, other avenues in which privacy might even get more compromised, in which, you know, Rob's saying he plays Grand Theft Auto, which is great. 
I will admit it. 
I am a huge fan of Law & Order SVU. 
I watch SVU all the time. 
So if our smart speaker heard something that it thought sounded like intimate partner violence, but they said, wait a second, let's cross-check this. 
Hey, YouTube TV, what was being watched in their home right now? 
Oh, it was SVU. 
This isn't a thing. 
Are they also, you know, so is it going to go from the smart speaker to whatever streaming services we have going to see where that sound might have been coming from? 
Well, I do know, and I've seen this happen, popular programs that air, it doesn't catch, even if the keyword is said, the trigger word is said, it skips over that because somehow it's registered that it knows this is part of a TV program. 
So it's not necessarily what streaming services do you subscribe to. 
It's kind of like the YouTube copyright check where it sees if something exists someplace else and is claimed by somebody else. 
I think something similar is happening here. 
Go ahead, Kyle. 
I just wanted to suggest also including that it was the technology that would be able potentially to distinguish between media that it already knows fingerprints or patterns of, but also what the relationship dynamic becomes, like how the nature of abuse, I think Gila pointed that out, and I think there's more there. 
Just thinking generally about this idea of, okay, well, once this device is placed there, then you're sort of indicating that this is watching for certain behaviors. 
So well, what other behaviors that it can't detect will happen around that as a result of this change, whether it's people purchasing it or it being introduced as a feature on things they already have in various households. 
But also, is it a good indicator, a good overt way of protecting the relationship? 
Is there protection actually occurring as a result of this or is it moving the behaviors around out of sight or earshot in this case? 
Go ahead, Rob. 
And Alex mentioned, will people accept something like this? 
And I think there's no worries that they wouldn't because, I mean, how popular are the ring doorbells right now? 
Despite how much we complain about them on this program, despite all the news stories that regularly happen where people's footage got used in the wrong way or something, people still love those things, despite what they're signing away their rights to when they install one. 
And assuming that this kind of thing gets handed off to automated AI type, what's the word I'm looking for? 
People who were checking it, you know, when you were a kid, did you ever have a science project where your teacher said, OK, go home and say lovely things to your dog, but in a mean voice? 
Oh, yeah. 
And then say mean things to your dog, but say them in a lovely voice and your dog won't be able to tell the difference between the two because the tone of voice is the issue. 
So if we're listening for decibel levels, if we're listening for tone and there are not like this is not going to work on so many levels, it is terrifying. 
And the if the invasions of privacy that are just already we've been spinning on this what three minutes, I can't even think about where this could actually go. 
Well, it's something that we're definitely going to be following. 
Kyle, last word on this. 
I would encourage people as a remedy. 
If you have the luxury of additional rooms, make a place where there isn't stuff listening and recording and filming. 
That's if you can find any space. 
Yeah, that's just like how people got around the cameras in London by committing the crimes just where they know the cameras. 
No, I'm not saying for crime. 
I'm saying for general privacy, not in this case. 
Privacy will be a crime. 
Mark my words. 
Oh, actually, you might you might be on to something. 
Listener Leratchew writes in apparently mirror newspapers have been hacking into Prince Harry's voicemail system. 
You hear about this? 
They were found libel, I believe. 
And listening to his messages, this is quite a while ago. 
In fact, it was a big scandal years ago as well. 
Except our listener writes, probably wouldn't have happened if he changed the pin. 
Piss poor security strikes again. 
Well, you know, that's not entirely true. 
I'm not sure if it's true in this case. 
But I do know that one of the ways that they were listening in and this this was revealed years ago, there is a service on many cell phone systems where let's say you have your own cell phone and you want to check your voicemail, do you want to enter your password every damn time? 
No, you're calling from your phone. 
Obviously it's you. 
So you just hit voicemail. 
It logs you in. 
Well, what they were doing was spoofing the caller ID to the voicemail system. 
Voicemail system was saying, oh, it's Prince Harry calling. 
Well, I don't need to ask for his password because it's obviously him. 
And that's what they were doing. 
It was really simple. 
I wouldn't even call it hacking. 
It's just basically evading something in really the poor security was with the phone companies. 
If that is the method they used, then that is something that definitely should be condemned. 
Why don't they ever pay the phone companies? 
I mean, really? 
I mean, pay for their they get scott free. 
The consumer is the victim and they are lawyered up. 
They have all the money and all the control over these systems. 
They put in antiquated measures. 
Yeah, it's like they didn't keep up with the security protocols. 
All right. 
I'm also told that this very same listener, LaRoccia, is the one who wrote a song or put together a song. 
Apparently, I was talking about the hacker group known as Gay Furry Hackers a couple of weeks ago, and that caused a big stir for some reason. 
And now there's a song that's circulating in the clubs. 
So we're going to be let's take a listen. 
And okay, you know what, I can handle this. 
No problem. 
Let's see what it sounds like from from one of our listeners. 
Gay Furry Hackers, Gay Furry Hackers, Gay Furry Hackers, Gay Furry Hackers, Gay Furry 


And welcome to everybody over on YouTube, where I think I am as well. 
Kyle, you're here on YouTube as well. 
Hello. 
And we have Rob Gila and Alex. 
Hello. 
Hello, hello. 
And we are definitely on YouTube. 
We are starting. 
Let's see. 
There we go. 
Okay, good, good. 
Yes. 
Well, everything's working just fine then. 
Are we loud? 
Are we too loud? 
Yeah, you know, we're either too loud, too low, or just not making any sense. 
But do the best we can. 
I think we're at a good volume over there. 
But, you know, let us know in the chat if we aren't. 
Yeah. 
Alex, I still can't believe you broke your foot. 
But thanks for being with us. 
It's great to know you're recovering. 
Yeah, thank you. 
And wish me luck tomorrow. 
It's going to be, you know, it's never pleasant. 
Now, can I ask, why are you in Pennsylvania and not in New York City, where some of the finest hospitals and doctors? 
I thought you were in Pennsylvania. 
Actually, I am in Pennsylvania. 
Yeah, but I'm not in my normal place. 
Because, actually, we found quite a good surgeon in Pennsylvania. 
And my sister-in-law is a doctor out here in Pennsylvania. 
She's an anesthesiologist. 
And so she was able to connect us with some of her colleagues and fit us in and get us in rather quickly. 
And this doctor, this is his bread and butter type of stuff. 
So, that's where we're going. 
You know, they're going to hopefully roll out the red carpet for me tomorrow. 
Or rather, hopefully the carpet isn't red when I'm coming back from it. 
Yeah. 
You know, that's the thing. 
But, yeah, this just really stinks. 
It's amazing how everything can change in quite literally the blink of an eye. 
That's true. 
That's without anyone else even being involved. 
It's just basically making a left turn. 
Yeah. 
What happened to the other golf cart? 
Did that ever reach you? 
The one that you were turning in front of? 
No, that other golf cart was just, you know, it was just coming down the road and probably, you know, saw two people fly out of our golf cart. 
And thought, wow, that was unusual. 
Well, but I will tell you, there are some interesting things that have come out of this, too. 
So, in speaking with the surgeon who was performing the first surgery on my leg and my foot, he asked me, you know, what do I do for a living and where do I live and whatnot? 
And I told him, you know, look, I'm a cybersecurity attorney. 
And he said, oh, well, I find that really, really interesting. 
And I said, okay. 
You know, why? 
And it turns out that the hospital that I was in had a massive ransomware event the year before. 
So, he had tons of questions for me about ransomware affecting hospitals and the threat actors and why is their customer service so good and all these good things. 
So, we wound up bonding quite a bit over that. 
And I've become friends with the surgeon who fixed my foot and put these rods through it the first time. 
You know, when I go back to Florida, I think we'll probably end up getting together. 
And so, we, you know, made a friend through a ransomware event of a hospital and a golf cart incident. 
So, that's kind of unusual. 
And then, interestingly enough, you know, we ended the show talking about hope. 
And one of the nurses that came into my room to help me when I was recovering, he asked me again, you know, what do you do in New York? 
He's a cybersecurity attorney and, you know, blah, blah, blah. 
And, you know, we wound up talking about hacking and things. 
And then, he started telling me that he's really interested in lockpicking and would try to go to these lockpicking conferences that were only open. 
Well, actually, we're not lockpicking conferences, but they were security conferences that were run only for people that were wholesalers of certain locks. 
And they would talk about, you know, the new generation of, you know, whatever locks were coming out from Yale and other places and whatnot. 
And he couldn't get into these conferences because he didn't have, you know, the right company set up. 
So, he was thinking about setting up some kind of LLC so he could go to these conferences. 
And so, I suggested to him that he should really just come to hope. 
Right. 
That he loves this. 
He loves kind of learning esoteric knowledge. 
He taught me some really interesting magic and card tricks. 
And we talked a lot about lockpicking while I was recovering in the room. 
They just never know who's going to, you know, who's going to pop in and the friends you're going to meet along the way. 
And I have no doubt in my mind that we'll see this guy at Hope this year. 
Well, most everybody that you encounter has curiosity, has interest in many of the things we talk about. 
And, you know, I find that so many of them feel that they're incapable of learning, that I'll never understand that stuff. 
And that's just so wrong because, you know, what you have to realize is that everybody that you perceive to be an expert isn't an expert in a lot of things. 
Like that surgeon doesn't know how to do various technological things, is asking you for advice. 
Whereas you might feel that I'm not an expert. 
I just do what I do. 
And this guy who's a surgeon, he's the real expert. 
Everybody has this feeling that they're not, you know, the expert everyone thinks they are in their particular field. 
But we all know something about something and a lot of things we don't know that we only learn by talking to other people. 
And that's kind of what the hacking world is. 
You know, it's sharing knowledge of various things that, you know, we know something about, comparing information, learning things constantly. 
Yeah, you know, being open with it, sharing it, and I think, you know, not being afraid to ask these questions. 
And this innate natural curiosity of, I think, that we all have in us is something that is really fostered in our community. 
And I think we really need to hold on to that. 
And so I really do hope that, you know, who knows, maybe we'll see both my surgeon and one of my nurses at Hope this year. 
I think that would be rather cool. 
The funny thing is, we were thinking about getting golf carts at the campus to get around. 
But I don't think we're going to do that. 
I don't think that's a good idea. 
Yeah, that's the last thing we need is you hot-dogging it around campus and scaring all the kids. 
Yeah. 
Yeah. 
Well, you know, my son will be there, too. 
So, you know, watch out. 
Okay, well, let's not let him drive anything this time. 
He's 10. 
He doesn't need that extra weight on his conscience. 
Yeah, sure. 
Okay, so there's an interesting story we didn't get to on the radio show, but maybe we can talk a little bit about it here. 
It's about the app Bumble, which some of you might have heard about. 
Bumble? 
That's a good name for an app? 
It's not what you do when you screw something up. 
You bumble and, okay, whatever. 
It's a dating app called Bumble. 
And apparently it's being used to catch January 6th rioters. 
Boy, that's something. 
I bet they didn't see that when they started their company. 
About three years ago, a young professional in the nation's capital was sitting in her apartment after the January 6th attack and saw that the FBI was looking for help identifying the rioters who stormed the U.S. 
Capitol. 
So she opened up the Bumble dating app, changed her political views to conservative, and got to swiping. 
She reached out to several Donald Trump supporters, who the app showed were in the Washington area, hoping to elicit confessions from those who had flooded into the city because they believed his lies about the 2020 presidential election. 
And recently, one of the Bumble users, she turned into the FBI, pleaded guilty to assaulting law enforcement officers with chemical spray and a metal whip. 
Now, basically, yeah, all she had to do was ask them more information. 
They wanted to regurgitate a lot of these ideas to somebody. 
It seemed like I was a willing participant, she said. 
It definitely didn't take a lot of arm twisting to get them to start talking about it. 
Basically, me being like, wow, so cool. 
Then what? 
What else? 
Was pretty much all it took. 
One of my friends was like, you basically got all these confessions just being like, ha ha, then what? 
Yeah, and that says these are not the brightest bulbs in the bunch. 
Basically, she stumbled upon one profile. 
We're going to call this, I guess by his last name, Taki. 
Started asking him questions, found he was very willing to brag to a woman he'd just met virtually. 
NBC News viewed screenshots of messages that Taki and the woman exchanged in the app. 
She asked, were you knew all the action? 
He said, yes, from the very beginning. 
He sent along a selfie he took shortly after he was pepper sprayed. 
A point of pride in anyone's adulthood, I guess. 
In the days after the attack, she continued chatting with him, falsely telling him that she couldn't video chat because she was at a beer garden with friends. 
She tried to gather more intel, asking him whether he planned to come back for Joe Biden's inauguration. 
He said, maybe depending on what happens with election, Biden still isn't in office and there is too much criminal stuff to come out. 
There are many, many patriots ready and willing to head back depending on what happens. 
It's just, you know, I have somewhat mixed feelings about this because the whole thing about just using apps to turn people in for criminal activity, it kind of, you know, sends a chill up my spine. 
Because, yeah, this is justified, but how about when it's not justified? 
How about when it's simply questioning the government or something fairly innocuous like that, which many regimes would use an app like this to get a list of names of people who are basically saying things that they shouldn't be saying. 
But, again, in this case, yeah, I mean, it's a great way to catch people who really don't put much thought into anything, apparently. 
It's funny. 
It's definitely amusing to read something like this. 
But, again, be careful. 
Who are you talking to? 
Especially if you don't know who they are. 
Especially if it's just something, you know, artificial intelligence could easily be programmed to do this. 
Go ahead, Gila. 
So I think I have a unique take on this being the only person in our little crew right here who has used the dating apps as a female presenting person. 
And I think that's the thing about Bumble that enabled this to work quite as well as it did. 
Because the hook for Bumble is that women have to send the first message. 
So I think the makeup of the app itself lent itself very well to this kind of personal sting, which also, yeah, if you're just going to open up about this kind of thing to somebody who just messaged you five minutes ago, yeah, if you're not going to be careful with your data, your data is going to be careful with you. 
And, no, I love this story. 
I have loved this story since it started. 
There has been a movement of people kind of trying to osint out the people who were caught in pictures from January 6th. 
And, no, I think this kind of initiative is fantastic. 
And also, dating apps are a cesspool. 
And any positivity that can come out of it, whether it be a marriage or an arrest of this kind, I think is good. 
Just compared a marriage to an arrest. 
Okay, yeah. 
No, I'm just saying positive. 
No, it's positive. 
What do you need to compare? 
Wow. 
I'd love to hear comments from the people who were caught, though. 
It's like, wow, she fooled me. 
She didn't tell the truth. 
She's a criminal, too. 
I don't know. 
I would just kind of like to hear that perspective just to complete the picture. 
But what you said about the woman having to correspond first, yeah, that's interesting. 
But they don't know it's actually a woman. 
It could be anybody. 
You know, it could be a cop. 
It could be, you know, it could be barred. 
We don't know. 
Go ahead, Rob. 
Yeah, it's true. 
Yeah, I mean, this just shows the power of, you know, a form of social engineering, which is something that the hacker world has known about since time immemorial. 
And, yeah, if you can use that as a tool for, you know, what you perceive as good, and in this case, like this person did, yeah, that's great. 
And I like to see people using their social engineering powers for something constructive. 
And if you're trying to keep your information to yourself, then, you know, you've got to be aware of the various kinds of social engineers that are out there and the ways in which they could convince you to, say, spill your guts about something terrible you've just done. 
The other thing, though, that really concerns me is protecting your identity if you're engaged in something like this. 
Meaning if you're out looking for people who have participated in these actions and you're trying to catch them, if you're not careful, your identity could become known to them and their cohorts. 
And your life could be in danger as a result of that. 
So it's really important to not go into this without knowing, A, the risks, and B, the methods of keeping your identity secure. 
And many, many people don't do this. 
So it's extremely important to do your research. 
Absolutely. 
The person who did this has managed to remain anonymous. 
And, you know, great for her because that, you know, you could very easily become enemy number one to a bunch of very bad people with stuff like this. 
And there have been journalists and such who had kind of embedded themselves in, you know, fascist groups and things like that and later reported on it. 
And their info is out there. 
And that's not good for them. 
Well, I mean, if you're a reporter, you're not turning. 
You shouldn't be turning people in no matter what. 
You're a reporter. 
Now, if people can use what you've reported to nail somebody, great. 
But it shouldn't be you doing it, John Markoff. 
Well, I mean, it's just the example that comes to mind. 
But it really, you have to know when not to cross the line. 
And there's roles for everybody. 
And certainly reporting is very important. 
Here's another story, though, before we take some calls. 
This is about Rite Aid and facial recognition. 
You guys hear about this? 
It's a pharmacy chain Rite Aid misused facial recognition technology in a way that subjected shoppers to unfair searches and humiliation. 
That's according to a report by the Federal Trade Commission. 
And it's part of a landmark settlement that could raise questions about the technology's use in stores, airports, and other venues nationwide. 
Now, federal regulators said Rite Aid activated the face scanning technology, which uses artificial intelligence to attempt to identify people captured by surveillance cameras in hundreds of stores. 
And this is between 2012 and 2020. 
And they were doing this in hopes of cracking down on shoplifters and other problematic customers. 
In the chain's reckless failure to adopt safeguards, coupled with the technology's long history of inaccurate matches and racial biases, this ultimately led store employees to falsely accused shoppers of theft, leading to embarrassment, harassment, and other harm in front of their family members, coworkers, and friends, according to the FTC. 
In one case, a Rite Aid employee searched an 11-year-old girl because of a false facial recognition match, leaving her so distraught that her mother missed work. 
And another employee called the police on a black customer after the technology mistook her for the actual target, a white woman with blonde hair. 
You know, this software is not ready. 
It's not ready to be used. 
It's just, I don't know what the issue is, but it's clearly doing some very, very bad things. 
Now, Rite Aid said in a statement that it used facial recognition in only a limited number of stores and that it had ended the pilot program more than three years ago. 
As part of a settlement, the company agreed not to use the technology for five years, to delete the face images it had collected, and to update the FTC annually on its compliance. 
Yeah, Rite Aid system scanned the faces of entering customers. 
I mean, was any of us aware of this? 
If you went into a Rite Aid, your face was scanned? 
I had no idea. 
They looked for matches in a large database of suspected and confirmed shoplifters. 
I'd like to see that database. 
When the system detected a match, it would flag store employees to closely watch the shopper, but the database included low-resolution images taken from grainy surveillance cameras and cell phones, undermining the quality of the matches. 
Those improper matches would then motivate employees to trail customers around the store or call police, even if they had seen no crime taking place. 
Rite Aid did not tell customers it was using the technology, and it instructed employees not to reveal its use to consumers. 
The FTC said Rite Aid contracted with two companies to help create its database of persons of interest, which included tens of thousands of images. 
Those firms were not identified. 
I think they should be, and I think we should know about this. 
You know, I think we should—this is the Rite Aid case. 
Okay, Rite Aid's not allowed to use this for five years. 
Who is allowed to use this right now, and who is using it right now? 
You know, if there's some method of scanning your face, is it just as simple as a security camera at the door? 
I mean, is there a way to know if they are using this, collecting it, saving it, sharing it? 
These are things that customers have the right to know. 
And it's yet another reason why people are going to stay away from brick-and-mortar stores. 
Yeah, I think this is going to kill retail, and retail is itself, I think, reeling from the specter of e-commerce and just how much shopping and commodity accumulation people do online now instead of going to these places. 
And you make products inaccessible, treat people with hostility as though they're all prisoners or they have to be scanned and tracked while they're in the store. 
That, with the relentless feedbacks and surveys and spam email, I mean, it is—the most undesirable thing to do is to have to end up in one of these places. 
And I think it makes society a more tense and less functional place as a result. 
People can't get products that they need. 
But, you know, all we hear in mass media is how people are stealing and how things have to be locked up because people are stealing. 
And what are we going to do? 
It's out of control. 
That's all blaming—that's political excuses, in my opinion, and it's blaming people and society and political parties that you disagree with. 
There's zero responsibility taken by the giant retailers that have been doing a brisk business putting smaller retailers out of business. 
Gila, then Alex. 
I think the other piece, for me at least, Kyle, to kind of piggyback on that, is it's also—it's a drugstore. 
It is a drugstore. 
This is a place where you go to get the most embarrassing shit you need to pick up. 
That's true. 
And this isn't a grocery store. 
This isn't a clothing store. 
This is where you go when your body's not working right. 
This is where you go when you have pain or you're sick or, I don't know, you have to prep for a colonoscopy. 
There are a lot of things—you are very vulnerable at the drugstore in a way that you're not at literally any other retail place, which makes this all the scarier. 
And also, we just have a comment from a listener who says, Rite Aid has never been right. 
First, they did this on employees, hostility toward workers and customers. 
This chain has always been known as such. 
Thank you, Antonio, for that comment. 
You know, I was in a CVS not too long ago, and I noticed—in the city, I noticed all the items that were locked up. 
And I just wanted to buy shampoo, and my shampoo was locked up. 
But then there was another brand of shampoo next to it that wasn't locked up. 
And I'm wondering, what is it that makes this shampoo lockable and the other one not? 
I bought the one that wasn't locked up because I didn't want to ask some guy to come from the other side of the store just to unlock something where I take, you know, a brand of shampoo. 
It's just—it's really inconvenient. 
It's—it doesn't seem to make much sense. 
Alex, go ahead. 
You know, I think quite reasonably Rite Aid could be facing private lawsuits as a result of the use of—or rather the misuse of this technology. 
Because if it led to people being detained in the store falsely and held there for some period of time, that's false imprisonment right there. 
So I would imagine that, you know, that these private lawsuits are going to be stacking up for Rite Aid at some point. 
That's not going to be a good look for them. 
And through that discovery process in those private lawsuits, we might be able to learn a lot more about how they set this up, why they did it, where they did it, and what kind of databases they were using. 
So—but it just seems like such a bad idea from the outset. 
But you—you asked also at the outset of this, Emmanuel, who else is doing this? 
Is CVS doing this? 
Is Duane Reed doing this? 
Well, we don't really know. 
They don't necessarily have to give you any kind of notice that they're doing this type of thing. 
We don't have any laws that state that if facial recognition is going to be in use in a store, then there has to be some kind of notice outside the store that they're going to be using it so that you can choose whether or not you want to have your face scanned and processed by a machine. 
Some cities may have local ordinances about this. 
I think San Francisco and a couple of other rather progressive cities have started to regulate the use of this technology, but it's very few and far between. 
It's certainly not the norm. 
And you think about what was going on in New York with Madison Square Garden. 
Right. 
Madison Square Garden was totally abusing this and blocking all the lawyers that were involved in any law firm that had ever initiated a lawsuit against Madison Square Garden. 
They're just essentially banning all of the lawyers. 
You could work like I do at a 700 lawyer firm and everybody is banned from entering Madison Square Garden. 
So, I mean, that's a big problem. 
I know the attorney general of the state of New York was looking into that, but I don't think we've heard very much about it lately. 
Yeah, that's something that I can't believe they've gotten away with that. 
Because, you know, he talked about people who have bought tickets to concerts and sporting events being ejected from the arena because they work for a law firm that might have been involved with something involving one of the companies or assets of Madison Square Garden. 
That's insane. 
That is abuse. 
And how they got away with that is behind me. 
It's hard enough. 
It's hard enough to be a lawyer. 
Go ahead, Rob. 
We don't need to make it any worse. 
Absolutely. 
I mean, it's routine for when a place has video surveillance for there to be a sticker or something on the door. 
You know, these premises are under video surveillance. 
You're being recorded and so on and so on. 
But there are no provisions for people to be informed that facial recognition technology, all these experimental technologies that don't work very well, that are proved not to work very well, are being used on you. 
And you may suffer consequences as a result. 
And you mentioned the shoplifting thing. 
We spoke at length on this program some time ago about a report by the National Retail Federation about unprecedented levels of shoplifting everywhere and stores like using that to do things like in CVS locking all the products in the little plastic jail and so on. 
And the interesting twist to that story was that on December 4th, it came out that they basically made that up. 
They made the statistic up in their report about the unprecedented levels of shoplifting that were going to drive everyone bankrupt. 
It was just it was just something they invented. 
And the media jumped on it. 
The politicians jumped on it. 
Everyone's talking about the retail epidemic, the shoplifting epidemic. 
And, you know, there was nothing to it, but it was used as an excuse for a lot of crappy stuff, including things like this. 
And somehow it got blamed on Democrats for some reason. 
Absolutely. 
And so, you know, people are people are being punished for being normal consumers who just want to go to the store to buy something. 
And, you know, no one's no one's coming out ahead in this. 
I don't think. 
I also think it's interesting that Rite Aid filed for bankruptcy a couple of months ago. 
And someone, another listener did point out that Walgreens, excuse me, Rite Aid has gone bankrupt, is closing stores and taking down with it a much loved smaller Seattle chain called Bartels that they bought just before going belly up. 
Yeah, it's and there's been some discussion in the chat. 
That Walgreens tried to buy Rite Aid and it wasn't allowed to go through, but they bought some of the stores. 
And there was a moment in our neighborhood where there was a Dwayne Reed, a Walgreens and a Rite Aid all within like 15 steps of each other. 
And then two of them and they're all closed now. 
Well, didn't Walgreens buy Dwayne Reed? 
Walgreens did. 
Walgreens did buy Dwayne Reed. 
Oh, and there was a CVS on the other side of the street. 
The only one that's still open is the CVS. 
Wow. 
Go ahead, Kyle. 
I was just going to point out that a lot of the surveillance systems now, I mean, they can be existing systems that are installed, but people running these systems may be trying new, I guess you would call them modules or plugins or ways of enhancing existing systems. 
So they might be sending feeds of the surveillance systems in various stores to other systems that evaluate them and analyze them with some of the newer technologies that we've talked about. 
And that is something that they may be trialing. 
But it's funny how, in this case, it was shrouded in secrecy what was essentially a bad product or something that had really bad input and it was running live images against them to give this sense, this false sense of trust that made overbearing employees sort of victimize customers who really, as Gila said, just want to get stuff and get out. 
Right. 
And, you know, I think people have the right to know, are you in that database? 
Has your picture been taken and falsely labeled or even truthfully labeled as somebody who caused trouble somewhere? 
People need to be able to find out these things. 
And I think the newness and the trial period that may be going on with some of these cases, depending on if it's a digital system and if they're investing in this kind of stuff, they may try one thing one year and then tear it down. 
You know, it's being added on to feeds from cameras, I suspect, that may already exist. 
So how do you know if the sticker, if it's one third party thing that's scanning stuff one week and then it switches another week, they're not going to tell you anyway. 
They don't want to. 
They're not forthright about it. 
In the example of putting a sticker outside the store that there is active surveillance going on, maybe there's an additional sticker that needs to be that is clarifying that it's up to a certain standard of machine evaluation or something. 
So that people know that there are additional enhancements to it, that if you step in here, you could be subjected to things that will include being targeted in false ways in some of the worst cases. 
One of the reasons why I believe that we're going to be just embracing more and more privacy intrusions, such as having a personal assistant listening to everything and reporting everything that we say and do. 
Look at how surveillance cameras have become such a part of our lives. 
And years ago on this very program, you know, we would basically tell people, hey, there's a surveillance camera on this street. 
You know, it was a big deal. 
I remember talking about going to a casino. 
I think it was in Atlantic City. 
And I was flabbergasted by the fact that, you know, if I took an escalator, as soon as one surveillance camera disappeared, another one would appear watching me. 
So I was always on camera. 
It was such an unusual thing back then. 
Now it's unusual if you're not on camera. 
And we're all good with that. 
We're all accepting this. 
In fact, people want more surveillance cameras. 
So, you know, you have to wonder where is this going to go in the years ahead as we're told that things are more and more dangerous and we need more and more protection and we can't possibly do it ourselves. 
We're just going to give it all up. 
Or at least some people will. 
Gila? 
And there's so much that we already do give up. 
When Roe v. 
Wade was overturned and people were starting to talk about not using period tracker apps and the same thing, you know, I shop at CVS a lot. 
There's a CVS across the street from our house. 
We're there all the time. 
The staff know us. 
They love us. 
They come unlock things for us before we ask. 
But using that CVS card, they know. 
I can go back into my CVS account and see my receipts from five years ago. 
They know everything I've purchased in however long. 
And I realize I'm giving them that. 
They know this. 
And, you know, I get coupons and it's nice. 
But at the same time, yes, I'm voluntarily giving away that piece of my privacy in a way that I don't think about enough. 
How do they know your name? 
I told them. 
Why? 
Because I wanted the coupons. 
I'm a sucker for coupons, Emanuel. 
It's terrible. 
Because you wanted the coupons. 
And that's where it begins. 
I'm a sucker for a loyalty program. 
It's terrible. 
Well, you know, here are some facts. 
You can have a credit card and you can have a different name on your credit card. 
You can ask for a credit card for your spouse, for your child, for your associate. 
As long as you're responsible for the bill, you can get a credit card in any name you want. 
You use that credit card and that's the person that they're tracking, not you. 
Oh, they'll get your face. 
Yeah. 
Unless you wear a paper bag when you walk in the store. 
But there are ways of fighting back. 
They're getting harder. 
They're, you know, making it harder for you to do things like this. 
But it can at least not make it so easy. 
You know? 
But at the same time, if you're using a drugstore, say you have your prescriptions through there. 
You need your info through there to do that. 
That's different. 
Yes. 
And then they know you. 
That is why I think medical stuff in particular is of greater concern. 
And it should be on the institutions, the medical and other retailers involved in pharmacy, like specifically people's health information, to protect it to a greater degree. 
Mm-hmm. 
Because it's so sensitive and has to be associated to the correct person in ways credit cards don't necessarily have to be. 
Hey, we should give out the phone number. 
We haven't done that yet. 
Yeah, I'm ready. 
802-321-4225 is our phone number. 
802-321-HACK if you have something to share. 
Go ahead, Gila. 
Just to point out, we did get a comment from a listener just now who says, As Emmanuel knows, unless it's a legal matter, there's no reason to give a legal name. 
Yeah, I guess that makes sense. 
And I hope you heard those air quotes. 
Well, I saw the air quotes, but I don't think anybody heard them. 
Well, listeners, I'm hoping you heard the air quotes. 
Well, the expression you're giving me, Kyle, tells me that it's rebel calling. 
Let's just get it over with, okay? 
Let's just rip the Band-Aid off. 
And hey, Rebel, what's up? 
Hi, you knew that it was me. 
Hold on. 
Let me make sure that my volume is up. 
We can sense it in the air. 
I think everybody can at this point. 
Just so you know, Rebel, we bought one of those devices that you put on your phone line that cuts off the phone after five minutes. 
We have no control over it. 
It just instantly cuts the line. 
Like when Bernie S. and Phiber was in jail? 
You know what? 
It's something that we got at a garage sale at a prison that didn't need the telecommunications equipment anymore. 
And yes, after five minutes, it'll cut off the phone call. 
So yes, you have four minutes and 25 seconds. 
Okay. 
I'd like to talk about radios. 
But before I do, I just want to mention that these drugstores and students claim that they're losing money. 
Then why are they donating to the, you know, veterans organizations and, you know, wounded warriors and, you know, this restaurant change donated $100,000 to, you know, veterans and warriors. 
But then they complain when people walk out of their restaurant without paying. 
Wait, what? 
They donate money to a charity and you're saying they shouldn't complain when people rip them off? 
Right. 
Because they, I mean, they shouldn't complain. 
Why shouldn't they complain about that? 
Well, they have money to go donate, they'll give away the charity, just like a Walgreens or CBS. 
So, okay, hold on a second. 
So if I see you on the street and I rob you of what's in your pocket, you shouldn't complain if you have an equal amount of that money back home. 
That's your logic. 
No, that, that, that's not, no. 
Well, what's the difference? 
You're saying it's okay to rip off an establishment if they, if they have a donor jar in the front? 
Am I not getting this? 
I know. 
Okay. 
The drugstore chain says complaining that people are, you know, shoplifting from them. 
Yes. 
Like, you know, that, you know, they're losing money and everything, but then they are going and give back to, you know, food for the hungry or for veterans or whatever. 
Well, they're still getting ripped off. 
I mean, how are they not getting ripped? 
You can still be generous and be ripped off. 
Right? 
Well, but if they're going bankrupt, then maybe they shouldn't be so generous. 
Well, that's, I'm sure that's good advice that they'll, they'll take under advisement, but you know, it's a lot more complicated than that. 
Alex, did you have something to say about this? 
Well, I did just two things in it. 
And these are parting words of mine too, because I do have to go to bed here and have a really, really early morning. 
But I think Rubble might be onto something. 
I hate to admit it in that one of the things that always bothered me about these stores, you know, these giant corporations that ask you if you want to make a donation to something or another at the, at the point of checkout, well, they're in a much better position to donate than anybody generally who's at the checkout line, right? 
So do you want to round up to the next dollar and make a donation? 
Do you want to donate to this? 
Do you want to donate to that? 
Well, you know, if they were matching the donation, I would think about it, right? 
But why should I have to make some donation at the point of sale right there? 
If they're so concerned about this particular cause, they're the ones that should be making the donation without having to solicit your own customers for it. 
It's something that always really annoyed me about these massive corporations, especially drugstores, asking for these donations when they themselves are the ones that should be making the donation. 
Wow, Alex, I've never heard this side of you. 
I bet you don't even tip them. 
Ah, no, they tip your cashier, right? 
No, tip your pharmacist. 
Otherwise, you might get the wrong drug. 
Well, you know, there are, as I found out the other day, you know, some good reasons, I think, to be tipping your pharmacist. 
But in any event, Rebel, it was lovely to hear your voice. 
I'm going to peel off, guys, and get to sleep. 
But it was lovely to see you all. 
I hope that we're on the air next week. 
Yeah, it'd be nice. 
But maybe listeners can help add to the chorus of people that want us on the air more. 
Because, you know, it's hard to reconnect after, if we're only on every couple of weeks, and we miss so many stories. 
Yeah. 
Well, if not next week, then the week thereafter, for sure. 
Yeah. 
But I'll hopefully see you all soon. 
Yes. 
Well, good luck with the operation tomorrow. 
It won't be live-streamed, I take it. 
No, it won't be live-streamed. 
Yes, thankfully. 
You can record it. 
But I'll update everybody. 
And thanks, everyone, for your kind wishes and good words. 
Thank you very much. 
All right. 
Be well. 
Have a good night, everyone. 
Thank you. 
Bye. 
All right, Rebel, you're down to about two minutes left. 
Yes, go ahead. 
I'd like to talk about radios, like how things, like, I'm going next week to Arizona and California and all that. 
I know my friend's father in California, ham radio operator. 
How did the repeaters work? 
Like, my relative of mine used to work for the New York City Police Department. 
He was a police officer. 
So I asked him how the radios work, how does one police officer contact another or contact the police person. 
He didn't know. 
I mean, he just knew that he pressed the button and, you know. 
So do you know how, like, when, I guess when they let go of the button after they finish speaking, there's a tone like a dee-doot when you hear, like, police radios, even transit radios. 
Is that the repeater doing that? 
That's some way of addressing the path that it's going to take to get to the appropriate place, whether it be the dispatcher or out to other people listening. 
So those tones matter, which, by the way, are going to be encrypted soon, so we won't be able to even hear those. 
But it's pretty basic, you know, using handheld radios to communicate to a central source, which boosts the signal so that it can be heard over a much wider range. 
Now, if you tune into a repeater on ham radio, you have to tune into a different frequency to listen to, like, police or fire or emergency services. 
Is it just different frequencies or something? 
Yeah, everything has a different frequency, obviously. 
So are they going to be at the HOPE conference this year? 
Is there going to be a thing about the radio? 
I would imagine so. 
You know, we definitely have a strong ham radio contingent, and I look forward to, you know, seeing what they can put together. 
Certainly, it's space to do something really cool. 
Yeah. 
I'll bring my portable CD radio and, you know. 
All right. 
Look out, everybody. 
Okay. 
That'll be fun. 
That'll be fun. 
You know, that doesn't use your computer. 
Okay. 
And antennas, and, you know, it's really complicated on how antennas work and, you know. 
I'm sure we'll have workshops on all of this, and you can learn quite a bit. 
So, anyone interested in this, broadcasting, ham radio, whatnot, HOPE conference is definitely going to be a place to be. 
I wish Bernie S. would call on. 
Oh, maybe he will. 
Bernie S. knows all about this. 
He does. 
And there are many people out there that know a ton. 
And we look forward to hearing from all of them. 
Final words, Rebel, because your time is pretty much up. 
Okay. 
All right. 
So, I'll be in Arizona next week. 
Okay. 
I'll go to the 2600 meeting in Phoenix. 
That sounds like fun. 
Let us know how it is. 
And if we're on the air, definitely call in. 
Yeah, of course. 
And then I'll be in California the week after. 
Okay. 
All right. 
Everybody in California, you heard that, so you can't say we didn't tell you. 
All right. 
Let's see. 
So, I guess. 
That means you're going to have a rental car. 
He's going to have a rental car. 
It's probably going to be one of those. 
Yeah, I'm going to have a rental car. 
A simple rental car this time. 
A simple one. 
No Cadillacs. 
No Cadillacs. 
No sports car. 
No, you know, technology. 
Didn't he have a Tesla last time? 
Yeah. 
And if we're not on air next week, we cannot help him find a place to charge it. 
So, don't get an electric car, Rebel. 
We can't help you. 
Yeah. 
You know, I do. 
And, you know, with E-Ther, you just, you know, look on the app and stuff. 
But it's just, you know, the Nissan Leafs and the Chevy, they're a lot more user-friendly than the Teslas. 
Okay. 
Well, these are important things to share with people. 
Or a Suzuki, you know. 
Or a bicycle. 
How about that? 
Or an Isuzu. 
Well, I have an electric bicycle. 
Let's tool around the Southwest with that. 
That would be kind of cool. 
Yeah. 
How am I going to get it there? 
All right. 
Well, safe travels. 
No golf carts. 
Safe travels, Rebel. 
Yeah. 
Steer clear of those. 
Yeah. 
And keep in touch. 
Have a good New Year. 
Yeah. 
Yes. 
Happy New Year. 
Happy New Year. 
I forgot about that. 
Yeah. 
Go ahead, Gail. 
I do have a couple comments from the chat that harken back to the discussion about credit cards, legal names, things like that. 
A friend with a non-legal Facebook name was required to submit proof. 
I reminded them Facebook isn't the government. 
You don't owe them anything. 
No. 
One doctor driver's license photo later. 
Wait. 
Whoa, whoa, whoa. 
Hold on. 
You have to show Facebook ID to get a name on... 
I don't understand this. 
Um, I believe there was a time they were trying to keep people on legal names and you had to submit photo proof, if I'm not mistaken. 
Yeah. 
If they thought your name was fake. 
If they thought your name was fake. 
Yeah, but your name can be fake. 
I mean, okay, back when it was just for universities, Facebook was just for college students at one point. 
Yeah, you had to prove you were a college student or affiliated with the university. 
But past that, they should not be asking for proof of any kind of identity, fake name or non-fake name. 
Um, I am correct, by the way, this listener just clarified in the chat. 
Thank you very much. 
I appreciate it. 
Um, and someone else points out that you can get a credit card in any name you want. 
And also, if you don't want to give someone your or a merchant, your real credit card number, you can get a temporary one and give it to them, which is true. 
I actually got a, um, a temporary credit card number that started with a nine. 
Which I thought was crazy. 
They'll know that's a weird credit card if you do that. 
But, but I think there's other ones that, that begin with fives and fours and, you know, the usual MasterCard visa thing. 
Uh, and, uh, but they only, they only work for a particular amount of time. 
You know, just limited debit cards, things like that. 
There are ways. 
There's always ways. 
All right. 
We have another phone call. 
And, uh, good evening. 
You're on off the cover time. 
Go ahead. 
Hi. 
Uh, you were talking about, uh, some places have, uh, laws for notices. 
I believe New York City's one of them. 
I read some article and they were talking about the stores that had it. 
And there was a store like that around my area. 
So, I went out and checked to see. 
They did, in fact, have a little notice saying that they had this. 
And if you wear a hood and you walk in there and you just look in the opposite direction from the security camera, you could avoid having your face taken by that security camera at the entrance. 
Yeah, but everybody in the store is not going to be looking at you because you're going to be scaring them. 
Scaring them? 
Well, you know, walking in, not making eye contact, wearing a hood over your face. 
I don't know. 
It just might, it might give people assumptions that you're up to something. 
Well, I wear a hoodie in cold weather. 
I don't think that's particularly sinister. 
And it's just the security camera that's at the, um, uh, you know, that little tiny bit of a room before you get into the store proper. 
That's the one you see, though. 
How many more are there? 
They don't have to disclose where they are. 
Well, I asked them, is that the one? 
And they said yes. 
I called them up on the phone about it. 
So. 
Well, they might not tell the truth. 
I don't know. 
I'm just more cynical about this. 
Yeah, they might not tell the truth. 
This is true. 
You can wear a disguise. 
Yeah, you can do that. 
I'm for this. 
I think if you feel like a place is overbearing with it, you should be able to dress how you want to. 
Some places do try to enforce face covering banks specifically for obvious reasons. 
But I think you're more power to you. 
If you identify a place as consistently filming you and you don't want to be filmed, just don't look at it. 
Yeah, I phoned them and I expressed my dislike of this process. 
So, you know, I did my bit for expressing the public point of view. 
Get rid of this stuff. 
Yeah, I mean, if we were able to survive 20 years ago without this, why suddenly do we need it now? 
What's the difference? 
What changed? 
And if they get loads and loads and loads and loads and loads of information about everyone, it's too much to be processed. 
Oh, and I remember once I was visiting some other city and I needed to get a straw hat to protect myself from the sun. 
And so I was with some other people and they let me use their loyalty card to get a discount for the hat I was buying. 
So my hat purchase went on their loyalty card to help throw off the profile that the store is using on them because it was actually somebody else's purchase that went on to their card. 
That's how it starts. 
It's one small thing, but now they think that this person has a hat when they don't. 
So the data is tarnished. 
Again, this is like Bruce Lee, like be water. 
You can be noise, you know, and the more of this you do. 
I felt like loyalty card things are great. 
You know, people should be trading and mixing them around to throw them off. 
And I don't know how that would work ideally. 
But if you have a neighbor and you both shop at the same place, you know, you could easily do that. 
And there's no harm in it. 
And you're not obligated to give that system they're making up any kind of accurate information. 
You can use it how you please. 
Yeah, and if you share it with your neighbors, all of a sudden you have this person that's going around buying a whole lot of stuff all the time, all over the place. 
You'll be getting coupons. 
You'll be getting all kinds of things that... 
Well, somebody will be. 
...you wouldn't ordinarily buy and discounts maybe on things that you do appreciate. 
Well, they just ask me for my phone number. 
I don't have to even give them my card, but I give them my real phone number. 
But do they call you or do they just keep that on record? 
No, they don't. 
So you give them a fake number. 
You give them a number that's always busy or it's disconnected or something. 
No, my phone number is connected with my loyalty card for the discount and such. 
But I wanted to mention what gets me. 
All these different places, whether it's for prescriptions or medical things or all sorts of innocuous stuff, they're always, before they will answer the slightest question, they will ask me for my name, address, phone number, zip code, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 
I have to go through endless identification questions, security questions, so that they can protect my privacy. 
And it drives me bonkers. 
Yeah, yeah. 
That is something. 
I had a similar experience not too long ago where I got this emailed doctor's bill. 
And, you know, it was a very innocuous name. 
It was a name I did not recognize at all, actually, because it wasn't the same name as the doctor. 
It was whatever company or whatever. 
And I didn't know if it was real. 
And they didn't send me a paper bill, even though that's the only way I pay bills if I get a paper bill. 
So basically, they gave me a link to go to. 
And I went to the link to see if there was anything there that might identify further. 
It wanted more private information from me, which I refused to give it, because how do I know this isn't some kind of a scam? 
So I said, I'm not going to pay this until they do something else. 
Fortunately for my health insurance, I was able to see a breakdown of things that they had accepted and denied and what I was responsible for. 
And I was able to match the figure they were asking for with the figure from the health insurance. 
I was able to figure out who it was, but not with any help from them. 
And I just wonder how many times something like that happens. 
What bugs me also is they will ask me for my date of birth, and I won't give that out over the phone. 
Or they'll ask me for my social security number, which is only supposed to be used for social security purposes. 
That's right. 
Not as a universal identification, and I won't give it. 
And it's like no shoes, no shirt, no service. 
If I won't give out my birth date and or my social security card, they won't deal with me. 
And I'm cut off from getting proper service. 
Yeah, it's a true tragedy, I think, for the consumer with a lot of these security measures, however they're introduced. 
And a lot of them wacky and third party and not actually the core business of the place you're bringing your business to. 
But they're opportunistic companies, and they're taking advantage of the concerns that retailers have. 
And the measures specifically around identity protection and stuff, they are becoming overbearing. 
It is creating this world where we're constantly verifying and constantly checking, and it may not actually be making us as safe as we think it is. 
Because just to what you said, because the very fact that you're constantly recounting it and being prompted for this information, the more they're using it and depending on it to bolster whatever scheme for protecting data this week, it just makes more aggravation. 
And the fact that they can't find something consistently, the dynamic nature of it, it further disillusions consumers who now have to learn a new scheme or a new way of doing it. 
And it is really, really disruptive to the feel of these transactions. 
And it's important commerce, but if you make it such a torturous experience, you're driving people away from it. 
And there's loss to that loss of business in that. 
All these entities that you wind up giving your private information to, one of them is going to screw up and get a data breach, and then your private info is exposed thanks to them, not thanks to you. 
So be careful who you give your information to, and I think you're doing a good job of that. 
If I ask, what's the cost of this service, they won't just tell me. 
They have to find my account first and ask me all this identification information just to give me not private information about their company. 
Right, right. 
Well, you can always say you're a new person or something and start over. 
I have a question for you. 
So I tried getting this RFID-proof wallet holder thing. 
Okay. 
You put your passport in, and your passport information chip can't be scanned through it. 
Do these things work? 
How do I know if this thing is... 
Look at reviews of the product and see if people have used it and if it works. 
There are good ones, there are bad ones, but they can be very effective. 
Uh-huh. 
They're good. 
They're good to use if you find a reputable one. 
The sleeves are becoming something that are included when you're issued some of these RFID cards, because the people issuing those cards know that you're going to be walking around with something that could be energized and read, at a distance even, with higher-powered readers. 
So, to that end, yeah, if you find sleeves and you have a lot of these cards, definitely do what you can to protect one, at least the ones that are most vital and exposed. 
In other words, we'll be, you know, moving over payment terminals and stuff. 
All right, we're going to move on. 
Thanks for your call, and have a happy new year. 
Same to you. 
All right. 
Bye. 
Take care. 
And I think we have time for one more call. 
802-321-4225. 
Maybe two, if they're short. 
We'll see. 
802-321-4225 is our telephone number. 
I didn't have anything else to say. 
I just wanted to get the phone number out. 
Well, there's the phone. 
Okay, go ahead. 
Just a really quick mention of a project I saw some time ago that the caller reminded me of, which was the Camera Shy Hoodie, which is a hoodie with high-powered infrared LEDs sewn into it to block your face from being seen by cameras, because all they see is a bright light, because they can see infrared light. 
That's the idea. 
So look up the Camera Shy Hoodie project there. 
You can find instructions on how to make your own. 
Oh, that's great. 
That's great. 
Yeah, I mean, if you can make more and more footage on surveillance systems, just have glowing beings of light moving around, you're doing good in the world, I think. 
That's the goal. 
Okay, we have a call? 
Yes, there is someone on the line. 
Okay, good evening. 
You're on Off the Go with Time. 
Go ahead. 
Yeah, hi. 
I had a question about the logistics of ticket sales for Hope. 
I got locked out on this last ticket opportunity, and I didn't get a chance to get a ticket. 
Many people are in the same boat, so don't feel alone there. 
It will open up again. 
No, not alone. 
It will open up again in early January. 
I think the 10th is the date we're talking about, which is two weeks from today, and you should have a better shot then. 
Okay, just moving forward, though, will it be, every time you do it, will it be like just a few hundred on sale, and they'll sell out in like five minutes? 
I mean, do I have a shot? 
It's going to be a bigger batch this time. 
I don't think it's been decided how many at a time. 
It depends on a number of factors. 
We don't want to, obviously, have too many people. 
We want to have enough people to cover expenses, obviously, but it should be a much better shot for you in January, in my opinion. 
Part of it is also we're standing it up, and we want to make sure it's working the right way, and everybody's getting what they expect, so we don't want to start out with too large a batch. 
So definitely stick around with us, or stay tuned. 
Yeah, there's going to be a lot more information released on the site in the next couple of weeks, so we'll be able to, because we're opening up speaker submissions as well as workshop submissions and all kinds of other projects, so it's just, we have our hands full with all sorts of other things, but... 
Will it still be the same price, $200? 
I mean, I didn't mean to mention it, but will it still be the same price as we get closer? 
The price in December was the lowest price, so it will be slightly higher than that, and that's another thing that we haven't decided on yet, exactly how much higher it has to be. 
It won't be significantly higher, but it won't be as low. 
Okay, but will it, if I can't get it in January, as we get closer to the conference, will it be, will the price go up as you get closer, or do you expect to be able to keep it? 
I can't answer that, because we don't know what's going to happen between now and then. 
It's possible, but it's not definite. 
Okay. 
It is something we wanted to remain competitive and basically keep the price as low as we possibly can, but we do want people to look forward to those announcements and get in as quickly as they can. 
Right, we've had a lot of interest and a lot of feedback. 
Can I just ask, what was your experience? 
Did you try at the appointed time, or did you try after the appointed time? 
No, no, I tried at the time, and I think I just missed it. 
I mean, it's just, you know, obviously, it's very hot. 
It's like Taylor Swift. 
I mean... 
Well, I don't know about that, but... 
It's really popular. 
That's nice to hear. 
Well, the system has got... 
No, I mean, it is. 
It's become better functioning as far as... 
Yeah, we did not get any complaints about people who had tickets in their cart, and then the tickets disappeared when they were checking out, because we had a lot of complaints about that in previous years. 
And this time, I think Shopify fixed that, so that if you got them in your cart, you were able to keep them in your cart as long as you checked out. 
No, actually, I did get something. 
I did have something in the cart, and then I clicked, and it did disappear. 
Really? 
Okay. 
That was my experience. 
That's the first I've heard of that, then. 
That's the first time I've heard that. 
Yeah, yeah. 
So I don't know what happened, but... 
So you said, would it be... 
So it'll be on hope.net, the announcement. 
Yeah. 
You'll have the date and the time. 
There's going to be a lot of information added. 
That's what I was told. 
I'm not exactly sure if that was the date. 
It might even be on the website, but there'll be more specific info. 
Yes. 
Okay. 
Well, I'm not working now, so I'm hoping that I can get it soon, because if I can't get it this time, you know, I have to watch my disposable income, because it's not working, so I'm hoping that it's not significantly raised if I can't get it. 
No, like I said, it's not going to be a significant increase, but it won't be as low as in December. 
Okay. 
Do you have all the speakers lined up, or you still have some open? 
We haven't opened the speaker submission part yet, so no, we have no speakers yet. 
Basically... 
Oh, okay. 
Yeah, the December thing is for people that are, you know, who want to buy tickets without knowing anything about what's going to happen, because it hasn't actually been organized yet, but that's what we're starting right now. 
In fact, that's what we're working feverishly around the clock on, and you'll get more and more information as the weeks and months go by. 
Oh, okay. 
Well, I don't know if it's feasible or not, but just for keynote speakers, it would be great if you could get, like, Stuart Brand or Stacey Horne. 
You know, I don't know if they're available, but I think it would be, they'd be cool to have. 
Yeah, definitely. 
I agree. 
I agree. 
Howard Reingold or Kevin Kelly from Wired. 
Yeah, a lot of West Coast people I hear there. 
Yeah, yeah. 
Well, Stacey Horne did Echo. 
Echo in New York City. 
That's right, yes. 
Yeah, yeah, yeah. 
Well, I hope you get some interesting people. 
Oh, we will. 
We will. 
We always do, and it's going to be fun. 
All right. 
Well, I'll try harder. 
I mean, I'll try to, I'll just keep my fingers crossed and hope that I get it. 
You'll get in. 
Every faith that you'll get in. 
I do. 
Kyle, did you have one? 
Yeah, we appreciate your interest and hope to see you there, and you can get involved as well if you have ideas or want to be a part of the organization. 
At all and volunteering, but please spread the word. 
Okay. 
We're getting all of that together right now, and we want to make sure everybody knows when things are happening. 
Yeah. 
Okay. 
And I did send an email about that request about possibly trying to record the workshops. 
I know you said logistically that might be very hard. 
We did see that. 
Yeah. 
So, we are working on that. 
So, we need to coordinate all kinds of AV challenges and things like that. 
So, always looking for volunteers to help and various other projects. 
There's so many things going on. 
Well, that guy Jolly from the Internet Society, will he be working with you? 
Oh, I sure hope so. 
Jolly McPhee? 
Yeah, he's awesome. 
Okay. 
All right. 
Well, have a happy new year, and like I said, I'll keep my fingers crossed that I get a ticket. 
Okay. 
We will, too. 
Thanks. 
Bye. 
Well, I guess that's going to be it for tonight, right? 
That was a great call. 
Thanks for calling in, everyone, and listening, and all the interest. 
Yeah, putting up with us. 
Absolutely. 
And in case we're not on next week, I will remind folks that 2600 meetings, the first one of 2024, will be happening Friday of next week. 
Not this week, but Friday of next week. 
And you'll want to check that out. 
I actually heard from an attendee of the one here in New York City that they are going to give a tutorial on chainmail, building your own chainmail. 
So, I'll put some information about that up on the New York City 2600 site soon. 
We have tutorials now? 
It used to be just a lot of people gathering in a food court. 
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. 
It is, but somebody's going to bring some stuff and bring a demonstration, put a demonstration together. 
What is happening to society that we're making chainmail? 
I mean, you're not talking about correspondence at all, and I know it. 
If you want some chainmail, you know, do you want to go buy some chainmail at the local chainmail store, or do you want to know how to make your own, just in case you're curious? 
You know, if you have a new cast iron skillet, and you want to make a chainmail thing to clean it. 
Oh, yeah. 
I don't know why it's called that, but boy, that's confused a lot of people over the last couple of decades. 
Chainmail? 
Yeah. 
People think they're getting chainmail, and they actually are getting, you know, whatever. 
I don't want to get into it. 
So, you can make like a little scrubber. 
That's good. 
I was thinking like something to go swimming with sharks. 
I think that has to be titanium. 
Okay. 
Well, you know what? 
We're going to try and not break any limbs this New Year's. 
Hopefully, Alex will take that advice as well, and we'll gather again either next week or in two weeks. 
Sometime in the New Year. 
Yes. 
And thank you to everybody who joined us tonight on YouTube, 45 people right now, which is amazing. 
And this has been, I think, a 2023 innovation for us, and it's been great. 
So, I hope this is something we continue into the New Year. 
That's right. 
This is the last show of 2023. 
Last one. 
Last show of 2023. 
Wow. 
All right. 
Well, this year coming up, it's going to be a doozy. 
I can just tell you that. 
You know what? 
Oh, my God. 
I just realized we forgot to do what we were going to do on the show tonight. 
We totally forgot. 
We were going to talk about the things that we wanted for the next year and things that we remember from 2023. 
And we had so much material that we totally didn't even get to that. 
Maybe next time. 
How about that? 
Because I'm sure as hell not doing it now. 
So, yeah, whether it's next week or the week after, it will be our New Year show, I think, and we can do our thing then. 
It's Alice's fault. 
He broke his leg, and that threw me off. 
Yeah. 
That'll teach him. 
What a story. 
All right, folks. 
Have a good night. 
We'll see you in the new year. 
OTH at 2600.com. 
Good night.