Phone ringing. 
Thank you for listening to Off The Hook. 
Phone ringing now. 
And a very good evening to everybody. 
The program is Off The Hook. 
I'm sorry nobody answered the phone before. 
I really thought somebody was going to pick up. 
We went back in time and we were trying a thing. 
It didn't work. 
We'll figure it out. 
This is Emanuel. 
I'm here for this hour. 
Kyle's over there. 
Hi. 
How are you doing? 
Over in Skype land, we have, hang on, I know this. 
Rob, is that you, Rob? 
Good evening. 
It is indeed me. 
It's been such a long time since we've been on the air. 
That's why I'm having trouble recognizing. 
And whoa, is that Gila over there on the other side? 
Good evening. 
Hello. 
How are you doing? 
How are you doing? 
And that must be Alex, right? 
It is I. 
Okay. 
I got all the names right. 
Folks, we've been super busy. 
All kinds of things going on. 
Life keeps getting in the way. 
And there's no alternative. 
But we're glad to be back. 
We've got all your cards and letters and emails and things like that. 
And we have a lot to talk about. 
A lot, as always, in the world of high technology, low intelligence, and whatever else is out there. 
Can I start by complaining? 
I mean, I'm told I don't do that enough. 
And I need to get better at it. 
But I do have something to complain about. 
I've actually complained about this already on the social media network. 
So if you're a fan of those, you might already be familiar with this particular issue of mine. 
Okay with you guys? 
Go for it. 
Okay. 
There's this service out there on the television called Netflix. 
You may have heard about it. 
And there's a button on my remote on my television set that says Netflix. 
If I push that button, my television set goes to Netflix. 
Right? 
It's something that other people have, a button, a Netflix button that immediately takes you to a Netflix screen. 
And you log in or you're already logged in. 
And you can view Netflix fare. 
Well, a couple of weeks ago, I hit that button. 
And much to my surprise, I got a message on my television set saying, this device is no longer supported. 
To watch instantly, please see the list of supported devices on our website. 
I was fit to be tied. 
You know, here it is. 
I'm looking at a television set. 
And the screen on the TV is telling me that my television is no longer supported. 
Now, can you imagine if you turned on a television set in the past and you tuned to Channel 2 or something. 
And Channel 2 said, no, your TV is no good anymore. 
You have to go get a new TV in order to watch Channel 2. 
Why? 
There'd be riots in the street. 
There'd be insurrections. 
There'd be all kinds of things going on. 
People would not tolerate it. 
Yet today, for some reason, this is considered normal where a service that you pay for is basically unavailable to you if you don't continue to buy new hardware. 
So, I said some things about this on the Internet. 
And the response was not surprising. 
Not surprising. 
And the reason I say that is because no matter what, if you complain about something involving technology, there are always people who will stand up for the bad technology. 
Okay, let's read a couple of these. 
Your TV was never supported by Netflix. 
I just happened to have a Netflix client which worked for an earlier version of their service and hasn't been updated since because your TV vendor kept its firmware. 
Okay, how does that help me exactly? 
So, I'm supposed to be mad at my TV now instead of Netflix? 
I just want to watch a damn TV show and I have to jump through hoops. 
That's not right. 
The next response was life offline is great. 
Okay, great. 
I have to lecture now on not watching television after complaining about something that I spent a lot of money on no longer working. 
So, now you're telling me that, yeah, you're stupid to be watching TV. 
Why don't you go outside? 
First of all, it's two in the morning when I'm trying to do this, all right? 
And I'm not going to go outside. 
And then, okay, response number three. 
People still use Netflix? 
Oh, yeah, now I'm an old grandpa for like wanting to use Netflix. 
Yeah, I'm not cool anymore. 
I have yet to see a positive response, something that doesn't blame the end user. 
And yeah, I'm an end user at times. 
I'm proud to be an end user. 
Here's a suggestion. 
Why not just buy a NUC and you see or something and run it that way? 
Then you'd have the added benefit of having an actual computer connected to your TV. 
Maybe I don't want a computer connected to my TV. 
Maybe I just want a damn TV set. 
Maybe I just want to do things the way they're supposed to work. 
I have a Netflix button on my remote. 
That, to me, is an implied contract right there. 
I'm sure Alex, you'd stand next to me in court and swear to that. 
Having that on the remote is my promise to be able to watch Netflix by pushing that button instead of getting a scolding. 
Okay, if the TV is that old, my TV is less than 10 years old. 
You know what? 
I grew up in Queens. 
And in my entire life in Queens, we had the same TV set. 
It's huge, black and white. 
I think it was a Sylvania or something. 
And we would never think of getting another television set. 
It was the only one. 
Occasionally, it had to get fixed. 
That was a big deal. 
But, yeah, things are meant to last. 
And I like to hold on to things. 
I like to hold on to technology. 
I'm using a laptop right now. 
How old is this laptop, Kyle? 
How old do you say this one is? 
It's almost 10 or 12 years. 
I think it's 12 years. 
I think it's, yeah. 
It still works. 
It does everything I want to do. 
I'm not composing symphonies on it. 
Although I probably could if I had any musical talent. 
But people are too quick to throw out technology. 
And just follow the instructions all the time about upgrades and what becomes no longer relevant, no longer supported. 
So if your TV is that old, it's 1080p at most, so any streaming stick or device should work. 
Okay, fine. 
They're telling me to go use an iPhone or an iPad, which I don't have, and other services. 
Okay, great. 
You know, I can do all this. 
I know I can do all this. 
The point is I shouldn't have to do all this. 
It should still work. 
Why is my TV all of a sudden not supported? 
Because somebody made a programming decision someplace, and everybody is expected to follow it. 
Here's probably the most helpful response that I got out of all these responses, and there are many, many more. 
I'm skipping over. 
This is why I want a dumb TV. 
It's not an insult. 
It's a thing. 
A dumb TV. 
A TV should only be a display, maybe also a speaker, nothing else. 
Any smarts need to be in an attached device that can be replaced or upgraded if outdated. 
Amen to that. 
Yeah, absolutely. 
There are more. 
There are more. 
In the end, yeah, I figured it out. 
I didn't have to throw out my TV. 
I used a Roku device. 
But again, how many people out there instantly are able to do that, able to figure it out? 
They buy a TV, the salesman says, yes, you can get Netflix as a Netflix button, and all of a sudden your TV is outdated, you have to get a new TV, and a lot of people, I'll bet, do that. 
Any thoughts from out there in Skype land? 
Delia, I know you had your hand up first. 
I did. 
Well, first I was curious what a NUC was, but Rob walked me through that. 
But, no, it made me think about something. 
So there was a TV, bought it in 2015, and it has a cute little remote with the buttons on it. 
And this particular that I'm holding in my hand right now has a Netflix button, an Amazon button, a Vudu button, and an RDO button. 
And I'm curious now what would happen, because some of these services don't exist anymore. 
Don't press that button. 
Delia, don't press buttons of services that don't exist. 
That sounds like an old Roku. 
You'll void your warranty. 
The TV might even explode. 
It might even explode. 
We don't know. 
And then we have the newer, got some extra ones. 
And this one has an HBO Max button, and I wonder if you push the HBO Max button, will it tell you that's not my name anymore? 
That's right. 
It's called just Max now, isn't it? 
Right. 
So, you know, part of me wonders why we have these services on the buttons, and you can't just program your own buttons. 
There's a bunch of services here and here that we don't have, buttons that are just taking up space. 
Yeah, program your own buttons. 
I like that idea. 
Yeah, you should be able to, like, remap them to something that works or a workaround that you've devised. 
Mm-hmm. 
Alex, go ahead. 
You should look at the buttons and perhaps see them for what they are. 
They're essentially advertisements. 
They're advertising an online service, and they're utilizing space in your house to do so. 
So, I mean, I'm not a big fan of these buttons to begin with. 
I like Gila's idea of programmable buttons, or maybe, you know, something as crazy like, if I hold in the number one on the keypad, it'll open Netflix, and then you can program number two to open Max and number three to open Crossy Road. 
Like, that's not something I think that would be, you know, beyond the realm of technical possibility. 
But my question to you, Emmanuel, is, is the button itself not working only, or is it the case that you just can't access Netflix by navigating to the app and opening the app some other way? 
No, obviously, the button is working because it's generating the message on the screen. 
What they've done is they've simply changed the requirements so that, as some of these people said, your old TV is no longer supported. 
So, it just means get a new TV and stop holding on to old technology, which works fine in any way. 
But can you access Netflix by any other method outside the button? 
Oh, yes. 
Yeah, so what I wound up doing was using a Roku device and simply going to the Netflix app on that. 
It worked just fine. 
There's no reason for that to happen other than the fact that they can do it, and a lot of people will be mystified. 
Maybe you should just relabel. 
Maybe you should just relabel the button with, like, a label maker and just call it anger. 
And then whenever you get yourself angry, just push that button. 
We do have a label maker here. 
Kyle's the official labeler, and maybe we'll do that. 
But, again, you know, I like the idea of programmable buttons, you know, where you can make the button do different things. 
We don't have enough of that. 
Go ahead, Rob. 
So, the point someone made about just wanting to get a dumb TV is something I find very interesting nowadays because the way the TV business works now, the manufacturers basically get the - when you buy a television that is designated a television in the store, you'll find it comes with a bunch of apps preloaded on it, and that is because the price of the television is subsidized by companies like Netflix and Amazon Prime and Max and whatever else to put their apps on the device. 
So it's in front of your eyes right when you start up your new television. 
So those companies pay the TV manufacturer, and the TV manufacturer passes, I guess, some of the savings along. 
But also they want their own sort of rent-seeking behavior and your membership and things like Roku and so on and so on. 
So they want to keep making money off of you in any way they can. 
You can buy a dumb TV, but it's not called that. 
It's known as a commercial display. 
And if you start looking for those, you'll realize that they cost a lot more, like significant amounts of money more, than if you walked into a store to buy a television, even if they're the same size, even if they have the same brightness, sound, whatever, the same amount of inputs, because they charge you more to not have the pre-advertised garbage put in front of you. 
And that also gives the people who make the pre-advertised garbage, such as the Netflix app, power over how their software works with the device once you've got it up and running. 
I think there's also like a symbiotic return for those service providers because they then capture that subscribership, and that actually in turn motivates people to buy more hardware. 
If a TV fails, they're going to want their services back or get back onto those the way they did on the previous bit of hardware. 
So that relationship works back and forth to keep people buying hardware, whether it's just sort of like a mechanical failure in the power supply or in some component, or the entire software end of it becomes unwieldy for the manufacturer. 
And their cycles are much less than like even a year when they're introducing new TVs. 
And I also think like the way we're doing production now is incredibly high resolution with digital cinema and the affordability and the ability to make a lot of programming at that level of picture quality. 
And a lot of people have larger and larger resolution devices to consume that content on. 
And I think that also drives the manufacturer and the service providers away from supporting legacy operating systems that are connected to TVs that are HD, which itself is still a valid and really good looking format. 
But the sending of like very, very high resolution new programming to downconvert or otherwise provide versions that are of lower resolution or downconverted for those legacy TVs could become unwieldy and is also beyond like what the manufacturer is doing as far as the OS is concerned. 
The actual service provider has to compensate for doing sort of lower res copies of each of these new programs, which it takes a little bit of infrastructure to accommodate and sense that on these different things. 
I don't know if that makes sense to anyone. 
Go ahead, Rob. 
But in the meantime, there was a great post that went around Mastodon a few days ago where somebody posted a photo of an old portable radio and said this is something my father-in-law had. 
It was never opened. 
It was from 48 years ago, a GE radio in his garage. 
And no pairing, no logins, no setup. 
It just works. 
You can listen to us right now with a radio you bought 50 years ago. 
Well, not if it's an AM radio. 
It might be an AM radio only, so he should check that. 
Does he have a picture? 
It's FM. 
Not the case. 
Okay, not the case with television because that was the magic of television in days of old where you could turn on a TV set and it would just work. 
But now, you know, since we switched to digital, all those frequencies, all those old TVs no longer work without conversion and the signals aren't nearly as good. 
When I was a kid, I was able to pick up distant signals on hot summer days for some reason. 
And I picked up stations in Kentucky, as far away as Kansas at one point, from right here in New York. 
And there was a certain magic to that. 
You can still do that on AM radio. 
Despite the fact that the car manufacturers are trying to get rid of AM radio, you can still do that and experience that magic of hearing a distant place. 
But today, you're just surrounded by just what I call technological blindness where, yeah, something is cool, it's a good innovation, but you're giving up something else and not thinking about what you're really giving up when you do that. 
Go ahead, Gila. 
The thing that I was thinking about was in terms of the, I'm sorry, display terminal, right? 
I was thinking about the difference between being in the Windows and Microsoft ecosystem versus, you know, kind of rolling your own in that way. 
And what it would take now to create your own home ecosystem for a TV that you didn't immediately plug into the wall and download three apps and you're good to go. 
Like, I cannot imagine the kind of labor and setup it would take to have the kind of setup that we have on our home TV now without those automatic handholds. 
And I wonder what we're losing by having those plug-and-play systems ready to go without, it's not even a lack of curiosity that we have anymore, but a lack of necessity. 
You know, you can have 800 apps on your TV in a matter of moments without even thinking about it and not having to have an internet connection on your television necessarily. 
But as Manuel was just saying, because of the global system of over the air not being what it used to be, you know, what can we do for ourselves anymore? 
Where is that? 
The DIY ethos of television, man, where's it at? 
I think also something I'm thinking about is the analytics side, like what information they're trying to glean from these apps and that maybe newer, faster displays that can run more apps or the newer software have greater abilities for them to get sort of behavioral and other information about how you use different service providers that are on that embedded OS. 
It's all very, it's something that's just a moving target. 
It's just constantly new features and new services are being thrown at the consumers. 
I love new features and new services and things like that, but I also love simplicity. 
I want to be able, and I really should get an over the air antenna for digital TV because there are all kinds of hidden stations that you can find there. 
Unfortunately, you can't get long distance reception occasionally. 
It's either you get it or you don't, and the signal strength is less than it was in the past. 
But there is still a degree of magic there, and I urge people to explore as much as possible. 
And speaking of the magic of radio, that's what we broadcast on right now. 
That's why we want to continue broadcasting over FM radio, not just over the internet. 
Yeah, the internet is great, and that's how we reach the entire world, but radio is the true magic because right now, guarantee at some point, somebody in New York City is driving right now. 
Yeah, I'm talking to you, and you're hearing us, and you don't know who we are. 
You've never heard us before. 
You just tuned to 99.5 FM, and there are these voices talking on the radio about something that you're mildly interested in or maybe even more interested in. 
Well, that's the magic of radio, that you don't know who's out there, that you don't know how many people really are listening, that you don't know what lives you could be affecting, that you don't know what station you'll happen upon next if you just keep tuning the FM dial. 
When Kyle and I went to Texas not too long ago, we did that a lot. 
We tuned the dial a lot and heard all kinds of interesting radio stations, and I always suggest people do that rather than just listen to their mixtape or whatever. 
Listen to what's local, and here in New York City, WBAI, we're real local, and we've been local since 1960. 
I'm saying local, not loco. 
Since 1960. 
Yeah, people are laughing. 
The reason we stay on the air is because of listeners like you. 
Yeah, and all you have to do is call 212-209-2950 and pledge support, and you can be a part of this amazing family, a family that has existed now for over 60 years. 
Wow, that is something. 
A family of people coming and going, obviously, but it's magical programming. 
If you listen to what goes on over the airwaves here at WBAI, you will hear such a variety. 
You will hear things that inspire you. 
You will hear things that outrage you. 
You will hear things that you never thought of before. 
Right now, though, we're asking you to give a call to 212-209-2950 and pledge whatever you can to keep this noncommercial radio station going. 
Yeah, noncommercial. 
Maybe we didn't mention that. 
We're a noncommercial radio station, which means we can say things like, Boy, Netflix is terrible because they don't sponsor us because, you know, we can insult them. 
We can insult anybody, really, because we're not beholden to anyone but the listeners. 
Now, for a pledge of $150 or more, we'll send you a thank you gift of the Off the Hook Anthology, which consists of every program that we have done since 1988 up until the end of 2023 in MP3 format on a flash drive. 
That's for everybody who pledges $150 or more. 
It's called the Off the Hook Anthology. 
The most important thing, though, is to keep WBAI broadcasting for another 60 years and hopefully over an FM band that is not messed up by advances in technology that will make it hard or impossible for somebody to just turn on the radio and hear a voice they never heard before or turn on a radio and hear a voice they're expecting to hear. 
You know, that is something that I think we all grew up with. 
It's just that magic of radio, whether it's in our houses or whether it's in our cars. 
Increasingly now, what I read is that most people listen in their cars and most people in cars do listen to the radio at some point. 
I'm not sure how many people still have radios in their houses. 
Do any of you guys have a radio that you turn on occasionally and say, Oh, you know what? 
I'm going to listen to the radio tonight in my den. 
Does that still happen, Gila? 
I have a clock radio with a CD player in it. 
It's an absolute unit. 
I've been schlepping it around for 20 years. 
And it's fascinating. 
There have been times when I've checked us on the air from our bedroom. 
And no, it's amazing. 
I love tuning it. 
And occasionally when I hit the snooze button in the morning, I hit the tuning knob instead. 
And then the sound is off, which is great. 
So you use it every day. 
So the radio wakes you up every day. 
Yeah. 
And sometimes when the tuner is off, fuzz wakes me up every day, which is not a great start to the morning. 
Okay. 
All right. 
Wow. 
I forgot about clock radios. 
Yeah, that's still a thing. 
So I hope people do use radios in their homes more because some of my fondest memories are listening to, well, first AM radio because I didn't have an FM radio at first. 
And then FM and just exploring, knowing every station in the area, knowing a little bit about the history. 
Go ahead, Alex. 
I remember finding this station when I was out on Long Island and I would listen to the radio on a Walkman that was also a radio. 
But the cord for the headphones was acting as the antenna. 
So in order to get WBAI, I had to string the headphone cord up around my bedpost. 
I remember it being quite a production. 
But I got it in and I could listen to this particular show. 
This was the show that I wanted to find. 
And it felt like some kind of revelation. 
It felt like I was listening in on these wise gurus from the hacking community that were imparting knowledge to little old me over in Suffolk County. 
And it was pretty cool. 
It was really magical. 
And I think that we've got to encourage that type of thing again. 
I mean, this is just, I think, part and parcel of exploring and playing around with technology. 
And people forget that radio itself really is quite a dark art. 
This is why the Flipper Zero is banned in Canada. 
It allows you to play with radio frequencies. 
It's also why intelligence agencies continue to use shortwave radio to communicate with operatives in the field. 
I mean, radio is something that does not require any kind of acknowledgement of receipt of the information. 
That's really, I think, extraordinarily unique and special in today's era when everything is a log. 
When you consider it, when you listen online, you may feel anonymous, but there is a log of you somewhere. 
Whether the broadcasting entity is keeping track, they can see your IP address. 
They can see where you're coming from. 
They can count how many people are actually listening at any time. 
Can't do that on broadcast over the radio waves. 
And I think that might drive some control freaks crazy because they can't charge people a certain ad rate based on hypothetical numbers, but it also adds to that magic we're talking about. 
And that's what we're asking you to help preserve because, yes, WBAI is online, but WBAI is also broadcasting off of a very tall building in Times Square to the tri-state area, and that alone is a miracle. 
Now, for pledges of $25 or more, you get to vote in the WBAI elections and Pacifica elections and all that fun stuff. 
You get to have a voice in decisions that are made, and that is something that I think is extremely important, and that's why we're asking for your support. 
Now, if you're hearing this at a time when you prefer to go to a website, instead of calling 212-209-2950, you can go to the website givetowbai.org, and on there there's everything you need to know about how to pledge and thank you gifts and all that kind of thing. 
It's all right there for you. 
Again, givetowbai.org, phone number 212-209-2950, and we want to thank our listeners who have really responded well to all of this over the past few weeks. 
Yes, there are a number of crises. 
There are always crises here of one sort or another, but we do keep the content coming out, and that is what is most important, and it's your support that makes that possible, and so many people have called in or gone to the website and pledged in the name of Off The Hook, and that just inspires us. 
It inspires us to keep going and keep doing the things we do. 
We have some letters you can write to us. 
We've got the email address at the end of the program. 
This is to Off The Hook. 
I'm a WBAI sustaining listener. 
Thank you very much. 
I've been listening to your show for several years, have learned a lot about technology in particular. 
For safety and security, I need to find a VPN provider that is lower cost yet effective at hiding or changing my IP address online so my activity is encrypted. 
Do you have a recent archive program where you list your VPN recommendations? 
Signed, Ms. 
Robinson. 
Well, Ms. 
Robinson, we're not going to recommend one company over another, and I don't really know anything about pricing, but the concept of a VPN allows you to watch Eurovision a couple of weeks ago by pretending I was in Denmark, seeing a four-hour competition without a single commercial, just like people in Denmark got to do. 
Things like that, that you're not allowed to do in your geographical area for no reason other than the fact that certain powerful people say you're not allowed to do that. 
That's what a VPN can do for you. 
A VPN can also mask your whereabouts if you're doing something sensitive, and that does not make you a criminal. 
That makes you smart. 
That makes you somebody who... 
Oh, wow, I just sounded like Trump for a second, didn't I? 
No, I didn't mean it like that. 
I mean, you know, tech savvy, knowing that you don't have to always come from your home address. 
You can manipulate the technology and come from a different address, and there are many reasons why you might want to do that. 
Now, there are all kinds of VPN companies out there. 
Again, I'm not going to list the companies, but if you do a search online, just search for VPN, you can do VPN cheap. 
I don't know who that is. 
That's not me. 
I don't think that's me because I closed the program that made that noise. 
Is it one of you guys? 
Alex, is it you? 
No? 
All right, we're going to track down that noise, whatever it is. 
Yeah, that's my thoughts on VPN. 
Go ahead, Rob. 
Yeah, one thing for anybody who is not familiar, just to really quickly give the CliffsNotes version of an explanation. 
A VPN is a service where instead of connecting directly to the things you look at over the internet, they will sit in between that connection as an intermediary. 
So everything you do gets bounced through this external server somewhere, and the operators of the sites and things that you visit will only see the address of that external server and not your own IP address. 
But one thing that I find very interesting is that the concept of VPNs, especially within the past few years, has become kind of mainstream to the point where there is a lot of help out there if you do some searches to not only find one, choose one, but also set it up, maintain it, and so on. 
There are ads for VPN companies on the subway now, and we're at that level of the general public kind of starting to understand how this is useful, how it can be an important part of your digital life. 
And I've seen on forums and things about things entirely non-technical, but somebody wants to accomplish something and realizes, oh, yeah, I just used a VPN. 
It's really out there, and it's really an interesting thing to read about, get into, if you're not into it already. 
Go ahead, Alex. 
One thing I would add to this, too, if you want to consider what the purpose is of the VPN that you intend to use, if you simply want to remain anonymous, there are a lot of VPNs out there that don't have logging, that advertise they don't have logging. 
I will tell you this. 
I think a lot of them have more logs than they let on, but at least you would want one that would be very privacy-conscious. 
On the other hand, if you want to use a VPN to get around censorship, let's say, or access a service from a geographical area that is otherwise geofenced, then you would want to make sure that you're looking for a VPN that would probably have something called a dedicated IP address in the country from which you want to appear that your traffic is originating. 
So, for instance, if I wanted to access, let's say, Netflix in Belgium, you would want to have a Belgian IP address, and a lot of services, a lot of VPN services will offer you a dedicated IP address in other countries where they have servers for relatively cheap, for really just a few dollars a month, and that becomes really handy if you want to access things like the BBC while you're not in the UK, and it can also unlock a whole bunch of programs for your existing services. 
So, for instance, if that Netflix button that Emmanuel was complaining about earlier in the program actually had worked, and he was connected to a VPN that made it appear as if his traffic was originating from London, he would get a lot of different selections on Netflix that aren't available in the United States. 
He would get to watch things like In the Loop and Peep Show, and you know what is also really weird, too, is it's weirdly hard to stream The Office, the American version of The Office, in the United States these days, but it seems like the entirety of it is streaming from the UK. 
So you get all these other different tips and tricks that you can do with VPNs as well. 
They're fun things to play with. 
Yeah, for a lot better than just looking at all the episodes of The Office. 
There are all kinds of things that you can do, and it's on Comedy Central all the time, Alex, so, yeah, it's not hard to find. 
For the folks, geofencing, that's basically what we're talking about. 
That's where you're restricted from doing something simply because you're in a particular place, correct? 
Yeah, if a site only wants people from a certain part of the world to be able to see it, wants people from another part of the world to not be able to see it, you can use a VPN to trick the site into thinking that you're in the part of the world they feel is okay. 
Now, people are going to ask this, so I might as well answer it now. 
What's the difference between what we're talking about and something like Tor? 
Tor is kind of a crapshoot because it is decentralized, more decentralized than a VPN, which is all one service that you're bouncing everything through, but Tor also, you can't really control where the other side of the connection comes out because it's random by its nature, and it's re-randomized every time you start it up, so you can't really go through Tor and say, I want to be coming from this part of the world or that part of the world in a dependable manner as easily as you can with a VPN. 
Also, Tor is not responsible for such things. 
Alex, you have something. 
Yeah, I think the other distinction is that Tor, known as the onion router, right? 
You think about the image of the onion. 
It has lots of layers. 
That's what onions are known for. 
We always talk about peeling back the layers of the onions, and when you're using the Tor router, your traffic is going to take lots of different stops. 
It's not going to just go through one other network and then pop out somewhere else. 
It's going to go, let's say, to, who knows, you know, Liberia, then into Bangkok, then it'll pop over to Istanbul, then it'll go back into St. 
Petersburg, then to Belgium, and then come out the other side in New York. 
I mean, who knows, right? 
But it's also, Tor is generally a lot slower than using a VPN for that reason. 
Yeah, and while VPN services might be optimized for things like watching high bandwidth video or, you know, playing data-intensive games or anything else that might take a large chunk of a connection, if you're doing that sort of thing over Tor, it tends to be seen as sort of abusing the network because people are trying to use it for smaller text-based things, and so it's not really encouraged to use Tor for that sort of purpose. 
Oh, I just wanted to reiterate, I mean, the thoughts Rob expressed were, like, spot-on as far as I was concerned, just as far as the acceptability, like the idea of ads for tunneling software in subway tunnels, it's pretty funny. 
But the VPN acronym, for those who don't know, is Virtual Private Network, is the definition of that term, and these service providers are using what is a protocol that you can develop and run your own system outside of all of these as well, which is worth mentioning. 
Perhaps a little bit more work is needed to build that yourself, but it is meant for all kinds of businesses and personal uses as a part of the IP protocol that we use all the time, and it has been established and used for quite some time, but it is much more geared towards creating a full network connection versus all of the layers in this. 
What I also know is termed a hidden service, so Tor requires special software that's looking for this particular domain, .onion addressing and the like, so there's distinctions, and yeah, a higher bandwidth traffic is a little bit harder, and it can be spotty because the network is decentralized and changing, it's sort of amorphous. 
Well, you can get more information on Tor by going to torproject.org, S-T-O-R, project.org. 
I should also point out that both with Tor and certain VPNs, sites like Google try and block them because they don't approve of us taking control of the technology. 
In fact, good luck trying to access YouTube using a Tor browser. 
It's almost impossible sometimes. 
That's the kind of opposition that we tend to run into when we try and change the technology a little bit. 
Go ahead, Kyle. 
Another thing I would mention is getting around geofencing is one use, but if your activities, if whatever it is you're doing online is disallowed, say, in one place, but you're testing some network elsewhere, VPNs are used for this as well, sort of jurisdictional hopping with whatever work you're doing versus where that work is originating from. 
That's all I want to say about that. 
We have another letter. 
That's right, we get multiple letters. 
Look how much time we spent on that one. 
Hey, I don't really know who else to discuss this with, but here goes. 
I can't tell you how many letters begin that way. 
I have a French cell subscription, and I'm using it roaming in Switzerland because it's so much cheaper than a Swiss plan. 
It's ridiculous, but that's another topic. 
Yeah, Switzerland is extremely expensive. 
So I have this number from my health insurance I can call to speak to a doctor, and I called it with my French line while roaming. 
Every time the call is answered, I get this recording of a random conversation between a few seemingly U.S. 
English speakers. 
It's always the same conversation. 
That is, when redialing the number, it starts off at the same point, plays the same audio, and it drops the call after a variable amount of time. 
If I call that same number with a Swiss cell line, then I get the right service, my health insurance's doctor, and not the random conversation. 
I'm completely puzzled by this. 
I don't know anyone who is into freaking or knows anything about telephones or knows anything about telephone systems, but I thought you guys might be able to appreciate the weirdness of it and maybe even figure out what's going on. 
And who are these people on the recording? 
Where was it made? 
How long ago? 
Why am I hearing it? 
I have a video recording of it on speakerphone and the number I'm calling. 
It's rather large, so I'm not emailing it. 
I'd love to figure this out. 
Let me know if this is something you're curious to talk about more. 
From Pierre. 
Well, Pierre, the first thing I think you should do is make an audio recording of this, a video recording. 
There are sites where you can upload your video and turn it into audio if you don't have the software to do that yourself, and then send that to us so we can hear it. 
You say it's a random conversation, but then you say it's always the same conversation, so I'm a little confused. 
Is it always the same phrases being said? 
And what are those phrases? 
We can help figure out what this is and why it could be some kind of telephone company recording or something weird, or maybe it's a recording that's supposed to play from the phone company and somebody somehow wrote over it with something else. 
I don't know. 
It's a bizarre scenario, but it's certainly possible. 
This sounds very bizarre, but I'm curious. 
I'd like to know more. 
How about you guys? 
I am so curious about this. 
It has been a long time, and I'm an old phone freak, and it has been a very long time since I've been able to be presented with some sort of glitch in routing like this, and I've never heard of something like this happening just routing a call different ways depending on where it's coming from. 
I think we've all, those of us who lived in the 90s and further back, we all can remember crossed lines. 
We pick up the phone and all of a sudden you're talking to somebody you didn't call. 
Has anybody not experienced that in our group? 
We all have? 
I can't tell you. 
Yeah, we have. 
Okay. 
Well, it doesn't happen much anymore, if at all. 
I remember back, I grew up in what's known as the number five crossbar switch. 
There were periods of time, I don't know what caused this, maybe a well-informed listener out there can tell us, but sometimes you would pick up the phone and instead of a dial tone, you'd immediately get connected to somebody else. 
Now, when this happened, it happened a lot. 
In other words, it wouldn't happen for weeks and all of a sudden it would start happening almost every time you picked up the phone. 
It was so much fun that my friends and I would immediately contact each other saying, it's happening again. 
And when it was happening, we could get away with all kinds of mischief. 
I was at the Stony Brook campus and I would be constantly picking up the phone, being connected to people. 
I convinced people there was a curfew going on and that they were not to leave their dormitories. 
And they believed me and they spread the word. 
It wasn't hard to do this. 
But there's all kinds of other, you meet all sorts of people. 
One fun thing that we did was we talked to the person who had just picked up the phone on their end, asking them what they intended to do. 
Why did you just pick up your phone? 
And they said, well, I was going to call this person. 
I said, well, we have to make sure, we have to manually place phone calls now. 
That's required by law. 
Tell us the number you're calling and we'll let them know to expect your call. 
And that's exactly what we did. 
We would call them and say, you're going to get a call from this person. 
And they would be just as mystified as everybody else. 
All kinds of fun that you used to be able to have that I don't think people are having anymore. 
I'd love to hear about other adventures though, other things that people are having fun with with phone networks. 
Absolutely. 
And the more I think about this, the more I'm wondering if it is, if not itself, an error message at the phone company, at some phone company in between A and B, but maybe routing to where there should be some kind of error message and isn't anymore because not a lot of those aren't used anymore. 
Some just kind of weirdness along the way like that. 
Or they're just calling someone's weirdly set up answering machine. 
Well, I want to hear, I want to hear that recording. 
I really do. 
I definitely want to hear that. 
Hey, we have only a couple minutes left, but I wanted to read a crazy story because there's always crazy stories in the news. 
A photographer has sued a woman who posted an image of her grandmother's apartment that featured wallpaper that apparently he designed. 
Okay, what happened here was that the grandmother moved out of her apartment. 
She's no longer able to live there. 
She moved in with her granddaughter so that she could maintain the cost of caring for her grandmother. 
The granddaughter took over the apartment and rented it out as a vacation property. 
She advertised the apartment on a rental website and it included photos of the property on the listing. 
Eight years later, the granddaughter received a warning letter for copyright infringement from a Canadian company because she had posted an image of a room in her grandmother's apartment that featured this guy Bones photo-based wallpaper. 
Yeah, Stefan Bones, his photo was spotted listing photos for the apartment and according to a report by the German news publication Heiz.de, the photographer is now suing the granddaughter in Cologne Regional Court in Cologne, Germany. 
In the lawsuit, Bones alleges that while he may have authorized the printing of his photo on the wallpaper, he did not authorize the reproduction of the photo on the wall in the image posted by the landlady on the vacation property rental website. 
Oh my God. 
Have we all lost our damn minds? 
So somebody shows a picture of a room and this guy actually has the audacity to sue them for copyright infringement. 
He claims the making available of the photo of the wall is an infringement of copyright law. 
He's also alleging the grandmother infringed his moral rights because she did not find out that he was the photographer behind the wallpaper and did not credit him on the property rental website. 
You know what? 
I credit this guy with being a first... 
Well, I can't say that. 
Alex, you're our resident lawyer here. 
Stand up for your profession. 
This sounds really idiotic on so many ways and so many levels here. 
Emmanuel, is it the case that the woman who took the photo was actually sued or they just received some kind of cease and desist letter? 
It sounds like they just received a threatening letter. 
Well, my understanding is she was in Canada and this is all happening in Germany, but these days you send a letter like that to somebody it can scare them. 
Absolutely. 
It absolutely can and it's an abuse of I think the legal process for doing that too. 
I mean, there is this concept of de minimis non curat lex where the law doesn't care for trifles. 
You're not necessarily going to have damages I think from this type of infringement. 
The other thing about this is it seems like this might have been born out of some overly aggressive or zealous copyright protection third-party service. 
That's what it sounds like to me that maybe this photographer who originally owned the copyright to this particular wallpaper is using some third-party service to identify infringements online. 
We're going to have to continue this conversation over on YouTube in overtime. 
YouTube.com is channel 2600 to continue at 8 o'clock over there. 
Gila, did you have a closing thought on this? 
I did, but I'm going to save it for overtime. 
Okay. 
That's going to just about do it for us here tonight. 
I want to thank everybody for listening. 
You can write to us oth at 2600.com and please remember to support WBAI 212-209-2950 and give to WBAI.org. 
We'll be back here next week and on overtime YouTube.com slash channel 2600. 
We'll see you there. 
Good night. 
  and a good hello to everybody over on youtube as we uh have our first edition of overtime in a long time i think the last one we did was sometime in march well we've been doing a lot okay we've been really really busy traveling and things like that um kyle did you make it okay hi okay you're in the same room as me so yeah i imagine you did uh rob gila how are you guys doing you make it we are well and uh we sound good on youtube okay sounds sounds good and alex i see you as well but i am here only temporarily though i'm gonna i'll hang out for a few minutes say hello to some people and then uh and then i gotta jump unfortunately okay i understand um yeah you know we could do like a five-hour show with all the things that i have so many things to talk about and we wound up talking about a couple of them because we just get into these uh these conversations which are always fascinating but i did do a little bit more um the research on the um the story of the um the wallpaper guy uh from germany uh apparently this guy bohm b-o-h-m-e uh previously tried to sue the granddaughter in the courts in dusseldorf and stuttgart in germany uh but he was unsuccessful in his legal attempts there uh the regional court and higher regional court of dusseldorf ruled that bohm had implicitly granted a license by selling the wallpaper on the one hand and that his lawsuits were an abuse of rights on the other wow does that happen often alex when you file a lawsuit and then the judge says that your lawsuit is an abuse of rights because that that's gotta hurt yeah yeah no but it's very much in tune with the principle that i had mentioned before that you know this is this is essentially a trifle right you know there really aren't damages here this guy's being an idiot and he got called out for i hope he doesn't sue you for saying that no i well if he does i mean i guess it would be on the basis of defamation the the the defense to defamation is the truth so um i just have to prove that he's an idiot okay well that shouldn't take too long well i don't i don't mean to get myself into this by saying that um anyway so you might wonder if um if his lawsuit was uh seen as an abuse of of rights um how is he still suing well while other german courts have rejected his argument what he's doing now is is hoping for a victory when his copyright case is heard in cologne region court on june 27th he previously won a similar copyright case regarding an image with his photo based wallpaper at cologne regional court last year that lawsuit was also against a landlady of a vacation apartment now uh when it comes to copyright the cologne regional court says that a strict duty of care applies and that anyone who makes use of other people's photographs by publishing them on their website must ensure that this is done with the permission of the authorized person no no i'm sorry that's crap you're in your own damn house you're taking a picture of your of your wall how much more personal can you possibly get to say that's copyright infringement alex help me out here that this is insane right this is not where the legal world is going is it well i'm not an expert in german law but i would imagine that under german legal principles they would have very similar types of ideals that we would have with respect to copyright and this seems like it might come into the the or rather the principle of first sale might come into play here namely that when you buy that particular wallpaper even though it's comprised of other photos you have the right to do with that instance of those photos what you will you can deface them you can take pictures of them it's not as if the person would be distributing them uh or printing them for some kind of commercial purpose that i think would squarely violate the copyright rights of the original photographer of that particular work if they were replicating the work right a commercial purpose involving the work not a commercial purpose involving renting out the room and solely the work too i think that's what's really important here is that his work is not isolated by itself in the photographs it's part of their house as you mentioned emmanuel so it's just one of many items in the house everything that you create can have a copyright to it if you create source code you're even though you don't file for the in the u.s copyright office you automatically have a source you automatically have a copyright to that particular source code so long as it's unique and you created it so this whole idea of running around the world you know in forum shopping and looking for photographs with your copyrighted items in it if this is a legal principle that will stand on its own it will create absolute havoc and destroy our ability to to share and distribute images online it's just it would work to such absurdity that i think this guy that the case has to be dismissed rob gila you both have your hands up so fight amongst yourselves well this is what i was thinking at the end of our over the air show is are we sure this is really the guy and i'm not even joking do we know that this is actually what's his bucket bohm and it's not somebody pretending to be him who's just running around looking for his stuff or is bohm's career so sad now that he can't like he's only making a living off of suing people like the westboro baptist church are you attacking him or defending him i can't figure it out i'm not 100 sure myself but yesterday we were talking about rob and i were talking about terry jacks you ever terry jacks terry jacks yeah he did um uh what was the song he did um seasons of the sun seasons in the sun right but you know the thing about terry jacks no okay this is 100 true terry jacks seasons the sun what 1970 we had joy we had fun we had seasons in the sun but the hills that we climb were just something in my mind seasons out of time whatever yeah it was it was a cool song it's an incredibly it's a pretty song it's incredibly depressing but terry jacks it was a big hit in like what 72 and he toured and did all that stuff until about 75 and then he just vanished and then a few years later some dude turned up and said hey i'm terry jacks and he started giving concerts and giving interviews and going on tour claiming he was terry jacks the world believed him because they didn't know any better and then he got sick of it turned himself in to the real terry jacks and everybody thought it was over but then a few years later he started doing it again and this time he was like getting hotel rooms and not paying for them and giving bad concerts and not showing up and the real terry jacks was like dude you're destroying my name i need you to stop again so i'm wondering if what's his face boom is really doing this or like it's a terry jack situation well this guy went to court and won so that's that takes a lot of balls if you're going to impersonate somebody and go to court in their name and win and then try it again i don't know but the terry i'm fascinated by the terry jack story now i got to look into that because uh boy how do you get away with that at all i mean how don't the don't the fans know that that's not the guy that sang the song i mean it was the 70s and the 80s it was about 10 years later he might have looked different but it had been about 10 years later and this was you know pre-internet so nobody knew wow okay yeah rob go ahead yeah i can i can only speak about this uh from the perspective of an artist i am an artist i have you know sold my work i have given away my work i i have work on walls that are not mine and sometimes i get uh i get a photo of my work on one of those walls and that makes me so freaking happy how is this guy angered or believes he's owed more by by uh somebody who purchased a bit of his work um i'm guessing didn't accept any outlandish terms of service before they got this wallpaper and used it and uh then wanted to show off their pretty room but well it doesn't matter it doesn't matter if if somebody purchased your art legitimately if they stole your art if they you know uh did something they copied it themselves and they put it on the wall and they took a picture of it that's not the crime the crime is the stealing part of it that's that's what you get them for but not for taking a picture of something in somebody's house i don't care if it's a mona lisa or whatever it's it's it's your house or you know a building outside there are people who try to say this building is protected it's a landmark you can't take can't take a picture of it that's ridiculous of course you can i'm sorry for interrupting go ahead no there if if you take a picture from my point of view where i'm sitting right now at my computer desk there are posters on the wall that i didn't design but i bought there's artwork on the wall from artists i like that i either bought or was given there are some there are little figurines sculpted there are action figures there's desk toys all this stuff comic books you know stuff that i did not create but that if i take a picture of my room that's a picture of my room that is not hurting the commercial value of any of the junk i happen to be surrounded by wow uh kyle do you have something i think i think it's a reach for sure like the the thing that she's doing commercially is in the realm of a space to rent and the the photograph she took is of decor that i think as was mentioned here all great points by the way the the is an assemblage of multiple aspects of the space and the physical property itself so that's the commercial cell of which this wall covering is apart and i think that that's pretty that's a pretty good argument it's not that she is selling copies of wallpaper that has this man's art so i think that would be a competitive like violation of his his product like you're competing with intellectual property that is simply that is essentially his uh work which anybody would would view that way and i think that that's probably like the the healthiest view i i understand the competitiveness being someone that's uh uh involved in the visual arts and and um takes photos myself you know the the temptation is there to be so guarded and there are like alex said firms that will broker and otherwise manage the licensing of your art and chase down with well-resourced legal teams and departments um i even applied for a position one time i didn't really realize what it was at the time oh wow but um yeah there's jobs people's people's entire tasks and probably what we've seen more of now because that was many years ago is is the automation of it yeah where these letters just appear so we've covered this on our cover of um all things but there's so many people that are being affected by the the automated nature of this well you're talking about splotch gate where we got uh a letter because uh random paint splotches were identified by some computer as part of some piece of art and even the people running the company that sent that agreed it was ridiculous and and immediately withdrew it as soon as we started complaining about it but i should point out that did not happen because of the cover that went out to newsstands it happened when the cover showed up on our store on on the internet and some computer came out and and yeah crawled and and and found it that way and and just it became just another job in its its tasks and we're we're buying into that world of uh litigiousness if that's the right word that uh just define our existence um you know it's it's absurd to me that somebody has to live in fear if they're making a documentary and somebody drives by and you hear a snippet of a song that's playing through their stereo as they drive by and they've got to go and and edit that out that's insane what what exactly are you protecting you think somebody is going to go out there and say hey here's a song i'm going to grab four seconds of it and wait for another car to come by 10 seconds later in the song and eventually i'll piece it together and i'll get this 99 cent song for free i mean what what is the logic it makes absolutely no sense but what it does is it cripples creativity makes us all paranoid looking over our shoulders look we're on youtube right now there's a there's an image of the 2600 van right there and that that image of the 2600 van is a van that's made to look like a phone company van of old now imagine the phone company was was still around using that emblem those colors they could say you guys aren't allowed to do that you guys aren't allowed to probably a have a van that has that uh that paint job but also you can't take a picture of that and display it on the internet i mean i think we'd all be be seeing red to actually you know be confronted with some idiocy like that but that it's it's it's becoming the norm more and more where an image or a sound or even a thought is is is copyrighted and protected go ahead rob i think i think a good analogy would be if ford who made the van in the first place decided to actually it was dodge it was a dodge dodge okay yeah so so dodge who manufactured the van in the first place and owned the design to that van um then sued you for publishing a photo of it even though you bought it you know because it's a van and it happened to be happens to be that shape and as it happens ford did sue us for a different reason well uh worth worth also noting it doesn't get to these levels of absurd of absurdity if there's not a legal market for these sort of situations and i think this story is a symptom of a sort of intellectual property um market that may be a bit flawed right now and copyright as well um but the gain by pursuing one particular van like the the legal cost and even for their um their corporation which is probably you know has ample resources right to come after that the gain to go after our van or an individual like just hosting an image of an apartment is it's fraught so like a corporation i don't think it's a lot more than the cost of actually pursuing it uh the cost to to do it is is a lot more than what would be too gained to uh collect from that uh person that that you are grieving or you're seeking a legal grievance if the cost comes down but i think that's what's happening the cost is coming down well with things are automated yeah yeah yeah so and that's there that may be a part of what is flawed in in this copyright system because we're we're not living in a world where what we we come from uh a time when this didn't exist these things are emerging and i think our experience with that is like you we're tempted and i i heard that a lot in the conversation like the exclamation of what world do we live in where where we would want this well the the people pursuing these kinds of things see a value in it if they can cast a wide enough or a large enough net um by using the tools and um information that is available of this day so we're that's kind of what we're up against so you can't you have to kind of calibrate your expectations and i think that's why people that are growing up with this might not really see the implication because it's sort of invisible or we we kind of accept it and self-censor along the way or or don't um want to react to it i think what you just said is is meaningful in the way that uh we come from a different time i think we need to preface a lot of conversations with we're from a different century because we are go ahead gila well okay now i have another theory as to why this is happening do we think that wallpaper guy um is trying to rent out his own vacation apartment so he's trying to get other people to take down their listings he's trying to bully people out of putting up this image to get them out of the marketplace yeah twisting yourself into a pretzel defending him i mean you think it's because well he wants he wants to rent out a bed and breakfast and this is somehow preventing him from doing that because people might be confused and see his image on a different wall you know what's no it's right he's trying to knock out the competition right i think this guy well that's the american way she he's escalating okay here's the escalation if i was this person i want to get a call i wanted to call us i would take i would take the picture that's on the website use a wallpaper print on demand service to make like a pattern with that picture then recover the walls with her photo of the old room with his photo on it so that it's like a pattern in the new space then take a photo of the room with her new wall covering that is a pattern of all the other older pictures that were on the website and then argue that it's her own work that is now the wall cover i want to see a photo of people urinating on it i really do that's that's what i think about this it's it's it's that um upsetting but the funny thing is i i read this story from um where'd i get this from petapixel.com and you see the story there kyle you guys see the story of a a chair against the wallpaper that's not even the wallpaper for some reason they didn't put the image in the front of the story right that doesn't look like a photo no it shows the stock image for some reason they didn't dare put the actual wallpaper in the story until you uh go a couple of pages in and then it just looks like a bunch of stones on top of each other it's like stacked rock uh stacked rocks and what he took a picture of stacked rocks how about the person who stacked the rocks don't they have some say in this because somebody did that yeah that doesn't look natural that looks like a very large wall and it's just a texture wow oh my god alice you look like mr robot he suddenly appeared in a hoodie and uh wasn't expecting that do we even know that's alice yeah it's a little cold here are you in uh are you in pennsylvania i'm in pennsylvania tomorrow there was massive thunderstorms and lightning and the uh temperature has dropped considerably you know um we got hit by lightning last week um and um it's funny because the um the cable tv went out and the cable company said no you you don't have an outage even though everybody in the neighborhood was out they refused to believe it and um i had to sit through 10 minutes of talking to an automated response system that would say um uh what what is what is the problem you can only answer a certain way i said cable is out uh we suggest that you reboot your cable system do that by unplugging it there's no way i can't say representative a screaming representative at the top of my lungs wasn't doing anything they said not unplug it now i will wait six minutes while it boots back up and like i did that already you moron now i have to wait you know six minutes before i can even get to a human and by the way the human didn't believe me either i had to convince them that there actually was an outage and two hours later on the outage map i was so happy i saw a little dot show up that was the outage i reported and uh sure enough they figured it out and eventually fixed it but boy what what they put you through these days it's just unreal what happened to the days we could call somebody and say hey it's a problem you might want to look into it yeah those are gone those are those those days are gone but you know while we're on the subject of personal appearances i wonder if that lightning strike had anything to do with the lack of facial hair of both you and kyle these days i just noticed you guys are looking pretty clean shaven well you don't know what we look like normally because what you see usually and people don't see this you see uh you know how when when you pull off a job and you replace the tape in the in the surveillance cameras with old footage so that people are fooled it's a filter yeah that's what you've been seeing this is a film is that right it is yeah yeah yeah yeah it's it's amazing i felt i felt like i was like i'm like i'm looking back in time here or something i was wondering why i just felt a certain amount of disquietude during this whole show well we're not going to discuss your face yeah because yeah well i've got a face for radio well you said it not me um but we have a phone for radio let's give out the phone number because we haven't heard from our listeners in forever uh 802-321-4225 hey i remember the phone number after all this time 802-321-HACK if anybody is out there and wants to call us and say hi or have a question or a comment and gila you have a question or a comment go ahead i do but it's not mine so uh first of all it's we're like 20 minutes in and i have not said hello and welcome back to the 39 people who are with us on youtube right now um super glad to have you all here we have a comment um ray coon says why does emmanuel still have cable tv there are so many alternatives oh my god here we go again here we go again it's the whole the whole grandpa thing is i what do you still have cable tv respond yeah you know what i still have all kinds of things i have a non-electric razor too we have token ring boy i judging for what kind of technology i should have whatever i want to be able to have and if i'm paying for it you know uh it's it should work and if i'm not paying for it it should work too because you know people never used to uh pay for tv i'm from a different century i know these things i'm gonna push the rdo button just to see what happens the what button i'm doing it oh don't okay you know what are it's i don't even i don't even know if this existed when checking connection it's gonna be a dialogue what happened oh okay unfortunately is she okay okay so this uh this pulled up a uh i guess an app store entry for the app which is not on the tv and uh with an apology that says unfortunately i can't look and talk at the same time uh it says unfortunately rdo has shut down and is no longer available on your roku device we're sad to see them go but we have more than 100 other streaming music services for you just go to streaming channels on your home screen and select the music category but that's the whole reason you got roku in the first place everything is ruined now and that's also the only thing one of the biggest buttons on this remote now does yeah what about the button what now it's just wasted real estate on your remote i don't you know what alex was saying before about this being an advertisement in your house you know we should start billing them for advertising in our homes when we had no say in that i agree yeah you want to be litigious we can do that too do we have a phone call they're certainly billing the advertisers for the opportunity to advertise to us yeah we can litige we can litige with the best of them kyle do we have a call yo no say yes i don't know what that means is that yes or no we have a call you literally said yes and no at the same time good evening you're on off the hook overtime go ahead hola it's johnny fusion hey how you doing johnny fusion from west coast right yeah bay area bay area cool what's what's what's on your mind hola hey how's it going everyone long time so i was thinking about the insidious use of copyright and you mentioned the example of filming a documentary and a car goes by with you know playing music um something that was starting to happen in la that the lapd was doing was they would when they were having interactions with the public they would get on their phones and start playing disney music because when people were videoing them they figured disney's the most litigious company out there when it comes to copyright yeah i heard that i heard that story i heard that story it was really both infuriating and clever at the same time right i mean yeah but that's what i thought of was one of the most insidious uses of using these copyright bots against the people you know because it's the first amendment right to film in public and especially people that are public employees like the police and to keep them accountable and it was a way of trying to skip accountability accountability yeah that's um how did that turn out do you know i think it was like a fad and disney like because like like these videos would be posted to youtube but disney had just started giving them a pass on the copyright wow okay that's something or it was rule fair use or something like that you know it shouldn't have to get to that stage though it shouldn't have to you know go into the courts or be dependent on a huge corporation to grant permission you know it's just if you're recording something in in normal life you should be able to do that like you always have been yeah i mean the famous case was uh like it was like a little girl's birthday party and a prince song comes on and prince had them take down the video because prince doesn't want any of his music on youtube or he did when he was alive it's on youtube now because his state says yeah sure why not but when prince was alive he didn't want any of his music on youtube okay yeah i mean you know there are there are um limitations to the control you can have over certain things and i certainly think that somebody could say i don't want my music to appear on amazon i don't want music to appear excuse me on youtube and you know they can they can take that down but if something is playing in the background that's that's not that's not a duplication of your work it's just something in the background like you know a sunset or something and if you're alive on this planet that could happen to you you could wind you can't get the permission of everybody in a crowd scene to have their faces displayed i know there are people who think you have to and they go and they blur out faces of all the people they couldn't get clearance from but for god's sake you know that that famous photo of i think it was um um coney island in the 1940s 1950s where the beach is just crowded with all these people can you imagine if they had to go around every single person and ask for permission you would not have that photo and it's it's it's it's magic well yeah the the part of that that you have to realize is it's it's public spaces that is totally legal and if you're in public you do not have the ability to protect yourself in the way that you would on private property or under the policies of of uh your own residence and and and the expectations there um so i think like coney island is a public space as public as any no yeah i don't think it's like private property public on the boardwalk so if you're photographing there even if if it's commercial i think you don't necessarily need people's permission especially like you're talking about for a crowd scene you can you may have like policies especially for a feature length film or a production of that scale but if you're doing uh uh something independently uh that would be like that would be something i think that um you you may not have to adhere to the same policies that they have in place where um like a large film that's doing location shooting would have to post things at the very least so that public entering an area where filming is in progress has at least the um awareness that they could be captured on film and and the expectation is that they relinquish their rights in that moment um but i think like you say if it's in public you you just by default don't have those rights now let's say though that on the street i'm walking down coney island and but this time i'm recording and somebody's playing a prince song and prince is still alive and he doesn't want his music anywhere i don't think he has a say at that point i really don't because it's being played in public and uh you know i'm not there recording his music i'm there recording the beach and all the people around and his music just happens to be in the background and i don't think you can control what people record or share when it's in a public space i i just don't think that's right just like you know i don't think you have to blur out license plates i know uh google street view does that i don't think that's necessary i think if it's there it's there if you see people they're there as well i know there's reasons to not want to have people there and that's fine but legally i don't think it's it's something that should be required yeah i i think you're right it maybe i'm i'm even granting too much when i'm talking about different scales of like production because the means to do a lot of this is so pervasive like any telephone can begin recording video and i don't know i'm the more i realize like the more i like i'm thinking about the scenario you're talking about it is a new work and i there there should be protection for what natural sound there is um youtube may have their own policy or their own strictures because they feel it's a liability to their model because they're distributing so much content with an ad model um but someone producing something on their own or even a small production or student or documentary or just a private individual they're bumping up against that on the distribution side but to produce it i think you do have any right and especially in public spaces to create what is new content and it isn't that original prince recording it is an entire scene visually um uh in time with that as one element of the natural sound so yeah i mean it's these claims like to have the idea that the estate or that an artist would go after an independent or even a feature length production um it does change when you get into like uh box office sales and all of that because they have to clear things and do all this sort of due diligence at that level but to distribute and and so these issues with like uh youtube and online services they're small examples of what those um productions go through it's just it's mostly done in the cheapest way possible with with like threatening automation or just bands on your accounts on whatever platform it is i find it interesting natural sound should be natural but on youtube you can find pretty much any song you're looking for that's posted either by record companies or or just somebody where it doesn't get taken down it's just there and that's fine you know it's um it proves that it's not that big a deal to have the music out there johnny i'd let you have one more point then we're going to move on to another phone call go ahead yeah oh there is something though uh in europe in the eu under gdpr your photograph your face is considered identifiable information and is protected under the gdpr so it's a little bit stricter in europe for for people to publish people's faces yeah i mean it i'm curious what you would define publish and i mean to publish isn't necessarily to identify them or reveal more about them um however the mere act of publishing could widely distribute a something that could make it portable enough for others to use things to identify that individual so therein is a liability in you distributing more of someone's face like that so we don't have that here and you know you you do not you do not have like your face and as i've said in the past voice there's zero expectation of that being protected and i think this is an example of why we need more why we need to hash out some kind of privacy i don't know framework or policy goal to um think about greater protections in that way while not poisoning the um creative marketplace of ideas and and uh new content that's emerging john johnny was uh good hearing from you you've given us a lot to think about i hope you uh keep writing articles and um hear from you again soon okay i'll get to work all right take care and our phone number eight zero two three two one four two two five for those people who that rang fast boy didn't think it was possible you just hung up the phone a second ago um okay well i guess the line is going to be engaged for a moment or two are you ready and good evening you're on off the overtime go ahead yeah frame and you're calling rebel portugal you're in portugal before we get to that i just want to point out that you weren't number one this time you're number two you were the second caller and you're losing a touch well i haven't slept in like almost two days oh that must be why well although because i wanted there was i wanted to take an airbus 380 which i've never taken i think it's like this biggest plane but bigger than the 740 i always wanted to take it so i had to go to germany like munich germany new york city yeah their doors don't pop out but i think one of them caught fire the other day airbus 380 i'm pretty sure yeah i think so but regardless i'm sure yours was fine but oh yeah well so you're in portugal and you haven't slept for two nights you know they they have a lot of fun in that country the partying never stops so don't expect to get any sleep for the next week or so well i'm not gonna i'm only gonna be here for a couple of days and then i'm going to italy ireland and then london okay well one of those is a city and none of them are connected well except ireland and well london yeah um how are you are you taking trains are you flying all the way no i'm well i'm flying to uh italy and then i'm gonna no i'm going yeah flying and then i'm gonna go from a new flight up ireland and then take a ferry to london i mean to england and then take a train to london okay well at least you take a train at some point uh and i imagine you might be going through wales while when you cross over on the ferry right i guess i mean i haven't booked i haven't planned it out yet but i well when you look at the map make sure to see if you're in wales and if you do wind up in wales spend some time there yeah i do plan on something okay my question to you is oh i've registered for hope so i'm going to be at the hope conference in july july cool um yeah my question to you you know telnet right like if i was today is this the way telnet works is that if i was at let's say uh harvard and you were at stony brook and let's say you came to visit me at harvard and you wanted to log on to your stony brook account did you tell that the login well yes that is true uh if it was 1990 uh i don't think anybody uses telnet anymore everyone uses no no they don't use it anymore no because but that's the way it used to work if if uh the mainframe in the mainframe in uh the mainframe in let's say stony brook is the d the old univac yeah i know i know did that no not the old univac but let's say it's 1988 or 90 or 91 and stony brook used a deck mainframe and uh princeton used the ibm i don't think they had a deck they might have had a vax but i i know they had a univac and gila do you have some information on this no i have a different question from a listener but i said i would ask it when rebel yeah let's let rebel get through uh yeah this talk let's let's we'll get through his otherwise uh you know he hasn't slept in two days oh yes okay okay so if uh like let's say you had two different terminal uh systems you could you log on to your system like uh you if you were in uh princeton you could log on to the system at uh stony brook right well that was the idea the idea was to be able to connect and you know what was cool and what you can't do anymore you used to be able to run a talk window and that way that worked is you would type talk followed by the account at the school address so uh you know it would be sunysb.edu or something uh and even predated uh actual internet addresses like that uh but what would happen was your your screen would split in half you'd be on the top and the person you're talking to would be on the bottom and you could both type at the same time and have a little conversation there in the wind in the window that command still exists on on many unix systems but it's been disabled pretty much everywhere because of security reasons but i think it was one of the coolest things about being on the early days of the internet because you could talk to people all around the world and there weren't other ways of doing that at the time now can systems disable telnet like if uh stony brook didn't want anybody to tell that to them they could disable i'm pretty sure it's it's disabled everywhere i don't i don't know of anything i can tell that too no i'm saying back then i'm saying oh back then maybe alex you have something go ahead yeah you could always disable telnet it operated on port 23 as opposed and and then telnet mostly became really deprecated when ssh took off the problem with telnet was that everything happened in clear text right so you could sniff out if you were packet sniffing on a network you could sniff out people's passwords as they entered them on the remote system to which they were telnetting but there are still some places to which you can telnet a manual which are are kind of cool and in fact i think telnet is mostly used these days as i understand it to operate telnet-based bbses okay yeah that's true that's true so they do still uh use that that particular service occasionally and you know uh kyle just pointed this out to me and it's important to point out there telnet is not telnet uh telnet is a service that was run uh by gte at one point and it was a packet-based switch network back in the 80s uh so yeah a lot of people got confused by that but telnet telnet two different things but yeah telnet is uh um uh still a command that that that works if you want to connect to uh to something yeah oh yeah it used to be um a way to get to management stuff on on different hardware um okay to check or otherwise um set something up like on a switch or something or various things will use that um and and um you can still launch it in some in some operating systems you know what i like about telnet that i don't like about ssh ssh pretty much is the replacement for telnet you could type telnet hit return and get a telnet prompt and then you would type o for open followed by a space and the address and if somebody um also logged into your system who types the w command to see who else is on the system it shows what you're running when you did that it would show that you were running telnet as opposed to if you did it all on the command line you could type telnet space followed by the address you were going to and then if that person ran w to see who was on the system they would see you running telnet and also see what you're connecting to ssh its replacement it's that uses encryption you can't hit ssh and hit return and get an ssh prompt you have to type the whole thing so therefore you're giving away that information to anybody who types w to see who's on the system and i don't know why they never had just an ssh prompt because that would have been another layer of security i'm sure there's there's something i'm missing but uh um um gila is this concerning rebel or is this question it's a question for rebel question for rebel okay rebel get ready for a question all right rebel the question in the chat is rebel is quite the traveler what european country do you like the most oh uh amsterdam that's not a country for god's sake you went there you got to know it's not a country it's a city man don't piss me off like this come on you know better um i can't get through to people i can't get through to people at all go ahead we'll just talk about telnet remember in the 80s when like when you go to an airline terminal and they you know you give them your credit card and they swipe your credit card um you know the computer journals that were hooked up to amazing how did they verify the credit cards did they use a telnet type of a system where they tell not telnet but a similar type of system where they log into the credit cards well i mean i there used to be all sorts of ways of um of verifying uh credit card numbers and also um um just assuming the credit card was correct there's an algorithm or basically um uh i i think the way the system works is you add up all the numbers and they have to add up to a certain um um uh number that's a check sum i believe of the last digit i don't know this is so long ago that that i remember uh this particular formula uh and and we printed it back in old issues of 2600 um there was some kind of calculation you could do or a computer could do to say if this is a valid uh format for a credit card like you know we know that visa begins with four mastercard begins with five uh but this went beyond that this took the whole number and if it added up to a certain amount or was divisible by a certain amount then it was at least it passed that test but there was no guarantee it wasn't being used fraudulently then there were also these um books that came out every month and these books were filled with uh with credit card numbers that i think were were fraudulent so when you made a purchase oftentimes the merchant would consult that book and see if the number was on there that's a very crude system but back then credit card fraud was nowhere near what it is now so they didn't really have to have it updated to the moment but that was that was the best they could do another way of verifying and this this was probably the most fun uh a merchant would make a phone call to um a credit card company uh and if you ever overheard the phone call it was really uh amazing it was pretty comical uh they would start the person would pick up on the other end they wouldn't say hello or anything they would just read off their merchant number to verify that they had the right to call in the first place uh the uh the person on the other end would say okay then they would read the credit card number and then the merchant the person on the other end of the phone uh if the credit card number was valid would give them a confirmation code so the whole conversation was basically two people exchanging numbers back and forth and that was how a lot of credit card verification worked back then okay now this is the way the computer terminals in the airports worked back in the early 90s late 80s early 90s where instead of them calling and the computer's not making a phone call but it's basically calling that the visa company or american are you talking about for the airline automatic yeah you're talking about what the airline would have done yeah yeah they probably um began uh well because of their their um the amount the volume of of authorizations that they would have to be doing they probably linked in their uh business systems totally uh that was probably some of some of the earliest sort of retail uh models that required um just a higher level of integration with the uh the merchant service provider most definitely gala did you have something else i didn't say that uh c kermit is the same thing that he's talking about with telnet but it also has ssh baked in and i do still have a question for you guys which we'll get to when rebels off the phone okay uh rebel well one more question or a point from you then we're going to move on do you remember police call like back in the 80s um before the bill system breakup like you would pick up the phone and uh dial the local operator and make a local call you tell a police call and you give her any four digits and say that that was a badge number and they put calls through i never heard of that i know uh you you always would talk about privilege calls that would make the operator do the work that most people would do on their own for you uh and uh they would they would just uh dial numbers at your command i never heard of a police call like that what was what was the intent of that well how did the tfp system verify the calling cards when people entered them back then it's like i'm not talking at all um i don't know i don't know rebel it's been a joy as always uh always good to hear your voice and maybe you don't hear mine but um thanks for uh calling and enjoy portugal and and the rest of europe countries and cities that you wind up in hopefully be able to tell the difference that'd be nice um okay is our phone line clear okay 802-321-4225-802-321-HACK gila go ahead with your question okay the question is how was the van acquired and does it was it bought from the phone company is the van still somewhere and my question not from the listener is do we call it the dodgy van because of who made it okay i'm just going to ignore that last one uh but i will say that um the van was was obtained legitimately at a phone company auction uh where um basically um all the all these old phone company trucks and cars were being auctioned i think it was um i want to say westbury long island nassau county um basically we went there the day before to look at all the um uh the vans that were out there every single one of them had all the paint scraped off so it didn't look like much and um we got to climb inside and see you know what what certain uh vans had and and and uh what certain vans didn't have somewhere in good condition somewhere in bad condition this particular van was the one we chose for a couple of reasons first it didn't have very many miles on it i think it was around 80 000 which really wasn't that much for a phone company van that had been used for a number of years um this was by the way in 1993 that we did this and um we um saw a number of vans that were similar in particular there was a van right next to this one that was extremely similar the only difference was the one that we took an interest in was manual transmission and the other one was automatic we use that to our advantage because nobody wanted to drive manual transmission especially in a van that had no power steering and no air conditioning and uh you know it was it was it was a workout absolutely but it's a workout that people who drive vehicles enjoy right kyle we we like driving manual yeah it's actually in in pretty good shape and uh we've we've um noted various places where there is some metal work that needs to be done long term yeah they all had that they all had but uh it's um it's stored safely and um will be in action i think this summer oh yeah you'll see it at hope for sure of course that's the last hope it'll be at this hope so yeah the the shifting is great though like it we've we've dialed that in we had some help but let me get back to the auction because um uh the reason we chose manual was because you know knowing how to drive manual first of all is a great thing and that's that's something else you know uh the people um uh disdain manual because they want the car to do everything for them and i say learn how to drive manual because you have so much more control over the vehicle and you'll be able to feel problems a lot easier and you know it's another example of how old technology is being um rejected in favor of the technology that does it all for you also the the cost of ownership like an automatic transmission has its own uh implications as far as maintenance the kinds of fluids you need to deal with and it's it requires a different level of mechanical know-how and cost right to buy a brand new or replacement of that you know the convenience i think over time would have perhaps um you know showed its its uh the the difference whereas you know getting um a manual transmission rebuilt or serviced or um just the the sort of simplicity of it i think makes it unique and we had to get it we had to get a new clutch at one point i do know that so that was that was pricey yeah yeah but the familiarity with it you don't need to be a specialist in automatic transmissions is what i'm saying and it's funny because after getting the new clutch they moved reverse reverse used to be uh you shift to the right and down that was reverse now you shift to the left and up and the funny thing is when i got the van back from the mechanic they didn't tell me that and so the first time i'm trying to go into reverse i'm like where did it go i can't get into reverse no matter what and i had to call them to find out what they did uh so then that's when i learned but getting back to the auction um yeah so uh the van next to us that was pretty similar but but um uh automatic uh that went for thousands of dollars and people really got into a bidding war about that our van the next one nobody else wanted it and we got it for for about 900 bucks it was it was a steal and something i have never regretted that van is a is a real trooper engine is is in great shape and um it's seen a lot it's seen a lot and made a lot of people happy and then of course the next part of this was getting it painted back into the colors that were scraped off and getting the the vinyl put on just the right way funny thing is you know um we had we had uh the colors the stripes that were identical to new york telephone trucks and they'd wave at us when we passed by you know thinking we were one of them and uh it was just you know everyone thought hey that's the phone company because from the front there were no logos just the stripes so it definitely looked like that and um um then after a couple of years new york telephone ceased to exist and just got uh uh drawn into 9x and they had different stripes they didn't have the same stripes so so all of a sudden we had the only van with those stripes it was pretty awesome that uh uh that that was the case and somehow we we won this battle although to this day uh phone company guys still wave at the fan i don't know if they've been working that long and they they recognize it was just something that's ingrained in our dna but it still has that that feel to it yeah and it's it's recognizable right it's that um familiarity and uh it's it probably um yeah it probably needs a a wash but other than that it's yeah we'll get it nice and shiny and and uh polish it you know show off a little it's it's um such a a useful vehicle and uh still proves its use yeah we've moved many people's homes in that van equipment phone booths uh-huh we had club mate day with the van soda yeah magazines we drove it to dayton at least one no we drove it a few times to dayton it's been ohio for the hamvention my god yeah it's it's a very interesting uh model the inline engine it's not a v um it's it's got some unique quirks there's probably some interior stuff that needs some rehab and we have a ladder that that goes on it we don't usually put the ladder on it um but yes we usually put megaphones on it instead and we have um we have an amber light that we're going to debut i believe at some point i hope that answers all the questions about the van do we have another phone call yes someone's on the line they've been waiting call yes someone's on the line they've been waiting i'm sorry about that good evening you're on off the hook overtime go ahead yes i have some comments and about things you said on the air i go ahead would like to get a television for privacy and security reasons that i use not connected to the internet okay fair enough yes so that means that none of these things would apply as long as it cooperates with that well i mean you can you can get an over-the-air television set that will just receive the digital signals uh as they are now uh using the right kind of antenna and all that um rob you were mentioning how expensive the um the actual non-smart monitors are these days do you have any recommendations here um no particular recommendations but um the the commercial displays that you would get and you would get that if you were like had a business and you wanted tv screens but you didn't want all the smart tv nonsense on them and like if you go into a restaurant and their menu is on a screen or whatever that's the sort of thing i'm talking about but um there is also the option which uh may be a hassle to do but uh that is to get just any tv off the shelf take it home start it up and just never put it on the internet yeah we still have that ability um and the tv will complain you'll switch it on and it'll go hey what's your wi-fi uh password and if you just don't enter it it'll probably keep asking you but uh and you may have to say no every time but uh you know it is you do have the ability to just never put it on the damn net in the first place and therefore it can't transmit anything to you but it also can't transmit transmit anything from you and you could just hook a tv up to some sort of other device that will be showing you um you know whatever digital stuff you want to watch or you could receive over the air digital signals if you have the right antenna how often will it ask for my wi-fi password depends on the brand i bet um yeah i i think that's i think that's about it it it uh depending on the brand it could be often it could be just once it could be anywhere in between um and there is unfortunately no way to no way to know go ahead i want to find out before i buy it whether it will yeah yeah that's um you know what for that um that's something the internet can help you with if you if you ask around and and make that clear and ignore the people that say why do you want to do this and this is stupid uh just say this is what i want can anyone help me i'm sure on reddit or something you'll find someone who's done the same thing and can recommend something because there are lots of people that that want what you want go ahead rob um another option you might have would be if you're going to go into a store rather than ordering online if you're going to just walk into a shop where they have tvs on display and ask the uh person there to show you like can you tell me what would happen if we start this one up but don't put it online they might be willing to take one of their tvs and and take it offline and show you what happens you know what what actually might be kind of interesting on this what do prisons do because prisons sure don't want wi-fi uh connecting to their tv sets and uh you know they have tv sets i guess maybe they they have those expensive ones or something like that but that might be a place to to look i was also going to suggest uh using projector i don't know if people still use projectors at all or if that's uh dis um not satisfactory as far as viewing quality but if you're just trying to get information from a source that that's a possible way to go as well i still have my grandmother's old tv set from the 1980s or early 1980s and it still works it never has broken once uh of course i haven't used it in the last uh a couple of decades uh but i imagine there's a conversion that you can um you can apply that will allow it to receive tv signals am i am i incorrect on that i haven't tried i haven't tried i'm sorry you can get a box for over the air signal right yeah so i mean technical oh wow it's it's in this room kyle i didn't realize what kyle has just turned on the tv set which apparently what has been sitting here the whole time and i did not know that wow yeah it's it's here it's why is it here we need it's plugged into a sony vcr um i don't have a lot of storage i gotta build some shelves okay yeah that's right you can plug a vcr into it that'll still work and um you can get uh converters as was mentioned i believe that will take sort of um widescreen like 16 by 9 aspect ratio stuff and we'll squeeze it there's lots of different products available to do that uh we've we've done that um we've also hooked up like um the dv camera which was the original freedom downtime camera that's right and we've projected that through the vcr and out of this tv and and through other um monitors like uh smaller monitors this is why you don't throw out old hardware you can always have fun with it you can play with this stuff and um and it may like make it retrofit it with some of um the tools and devices that we have now and repurpose it in in fun ways did we help with your question that was that was uh you i think you helped with some of the things you said by the way about freedom downtime on the wbi website when you click off the hook on the schedule it says that you recently directed freedom downtime i guess that's an old description that's the only thing i can think of because that was a while ago that was uh at least uh what uh 20 uh no more than that 25 years ago wow about vpns which you also talked about um there's a warning on efs.org there's a an article about a vulnerability of vpns if you use them in unfamiliar networks that does anyone want to talk about the security possible security risk to the user of vpns no i will say it's it's uh one tool that you can use uh amidst and and it can be a part of a combination of things that you use but yeah buyer beware for some of these services and um be uh be on your toes and of course don't set unrealistic expectations of something that is uh sold to you especially if it's free um and yeah the the way the ways and the the kinds of networks that you use this on and for what purposes could leave some gaps in in what your expectations might be again go online uh see what's recommended see what has a good track record so it's been around for a while and make a decision based on that uh we're going to move on thanks uh vpns have a vulnerable something called tunnel vision and an attack big you can do done in the article and and um you used to be able to just if you wanted to be as if you were in a different geographical location you just used to be able to just find a proxy server somewhere that you connect to or through right yeah that's gotten harder that's that's that's for sure yeah all right yeah and uh like i said it's not foolproofs and there are there are um attacks and it is because it is used for so many different purposes it is it is something that is desirable for uh gleaning informations about about how it's used or what kind of information is traversing it thanks uh thanks we're gonna move on take care okay thanks and we're gonna take one more phone call because uh we're tired and uh we've been at this for a while 802-321-4225-802-321-HACK be that last phone call and um we will um um conclude after that um yeah uh hope conference coming up uh we uh have received all of the speaker entries and wow we have some great speaker entries and we're looking forward to um publishing the rest of the schedule a good part of uh the the talks are already announced um i think we're about halfway through at this point so there'll be a lot more showing up there we have cory doctorow coming we have all kinds of um of amazing people speaking and that's not all we're having uh workshops we're having villages we're having all kinds of fun at st john's university july 12th through 14th all the information is on hope.net and i think we have another phone call coming in this will be the last phone call of the night good evening you're on all of the hook overtime yes go ahead you're on please turn down your device yeah i just did yeah i just wanted to ask a quick general question uh where do i get information on the uh upcoming hope conference is there a website or something uh it's funny because i just said that i guess you were calling at the time yes the website is hope.net h-o-p-e.net and that should tell you everything you need to know okay okay okay that's all i need to know thank you okay well that was an easy phone call and uh that means we're going to get out of here a little bit earlier so thank you everybody for calling in for listening of course you can write to us oth at 2600.com um plan ahead 2600 meetings are not this friday but the one afterwards right rob absolutely and uh also keep showing your support for wbai at give to wbai.org yes and uh pledge for that uh uh that um uh off the hook thing uh the the uh collection every show we've ever done on a flash drive it's pretty pretty interesting anthology anthology that's the word i was searching for thanks for listening everyone good night