Dinomite.net

My roommate ordered some wiper blades that Amazon had on sale. He did a single order and yet the blades came in two boxes, each easily large enough to fit both blades, even though the boxes shipped from the same warehouse.

This is the synopsis of Off The Hook that aired on 23 April 2008. The show runs live on WBAI at 7pm on Wednesdays. Call in at 212.209.2900 or send letters to oth@2600.com. The show is also available as a high-quality podcast.

In the studio: Emmanuel, Mike, Redbird, Redhackt, Not Kevin, Lexicon, Mojo from California, Al & Zach from North Carolina
On the phone: Bernie S in Philadelphia

There wasn’t a show last week because the show was pre-empted and there isn’t one next week; WBAI is having a Report to the Listener show during OTH’s time slot so listen in to hear about running a radio station.

Bernie S relates a Supreme Court decision concerning a man who was stopped for a traffic violation, arrested and, as part of the arrest, searched. The crux of the issue is that the reason for which the man was stopped was not an arrest able offense, thereby making such detainment illegal. As such, the state appeals court ruled that the pursuant search was also illegal a stance which was overturned by the United States Supreme Court, making the evidence collected during such a search admissible in court. In the case of Virginia v. Moore, the inventory search performed after the illegal arrest found illegal drugs and the evidence was used to charge Moore with crimes pursuant to those findings.

Another case concerning searches performed by border patrol for people entering the United States. The ruling made by the Ninth Circuit court states that border patrol agents need no suspicion to search persons entering the country at a border control station. Though the authority to search sans-probable cause has always been in place for border agents, the question of whether search laptops was also legal had been in question. Though it is still legal to encrypt data and refuse to divulge the encryption key, the concern of law enforcement officers simply seizing the device as evidence and delaying its return for months or years is brought up.

Bernie S brought up a very interesting combination of the above mentioned decisions wherein a law enforcement officer can illegally arrest you, such as in Virginia v. Moore, they may then search you and subsequently charge crimes based upon what the search finds.

The Australian government is exploring the introduction of laws allowing employers to read all of their employee’s company email in order to prevent cyber terrorism. In the United States, this is already the case since the owner of the network and computers, the employer, is the de-facto owner of all data upon them.

A council in England has employed laws meant to fight terrorism to put families under surveillance in order to ferret out fraudulent school placement applications.

As reported by Jane’s Police Review, London’s metropolitan police department is planning to equip all of their officers with microchips that will track their presence.

Israel says that Facebook is a threat to national security because soldiers and government employees post pictures of potentially classified material and equipment. Redhackt commiserates the desire to post pictures of oneself with interesting military hardware.

This weeks data loss comes from a New York Presbyterrian hospital that lost 40,000 records of patient names and social security numbers. Unsurprisingly, a spokeswoman fr the hospital says that there is nothing to show that the information has been misused.

Lexicon talks of the Not Our Concern Network Operations Center that will be in place at The Last Hope which he summarizes as a coat check for servers. Just reserve a spot and you can hook your box up to a big tube for the duration of the con. The con will also host a radio station for its entire duration. Named Radio Statler after the previous name of the hotel, the radio station is seeking people to help run it during the con weekend. If you want to help out with the con, or know about it, check out HOPE.net.

This is the synopsis of Off The Hook that aired on 12 March 2008. The show runs live on WBAI at 7pm on Wednesdays. Call in at 212.209.2900 or send letters to oth@2600.com. The show is also available as a high-quality podcast.

In the studio: Emmanuel, Mike, Redbird, Not Kevin
On the phone: Bernie S in Philadelphia

Chinese hackers claim to have gained access to worldwide sites including the Pentagon and are purportedly funded by that state’s government.

A computer security analyst says that a major telecommunications carrier, perhaps Verizon Wireless, is in cahoots with the FBI after he was told not to enable any security on a circuit named “Quantico” by supervisors while performing a migration. Such a lack of security gives the aforementioned circuit unfettered access to the carrier’s entire network perhaps even uploading their own firmware to customers handsets. Not Kevin points out that with GSM phones it is much easier for users to prevent such tampering with their phones, since customers have a choice and can easily change their carrier by changing the SIM card. Bernie brings up the recent CALEA legislation that allows federal agencies to bypass the step of obtaining a warrant and providing it to the phone companies. Furthermore, there is no logging of such taps making it impossible to account for wiretapping actions.

If you are suspicious of the number of mobile phones that someone has, notify the London police at 0800789321 (PDF link).

MAKE Magazine has an article for a method of blinding surveillance cameras. It uses infrared LEDs to wash out the image by flooding the camera with infrared light that isn’t visible to the naked eye but is picked up by most CCDs.

Muni drivers in San Francisco have had trouble with hooligans turning off the buses via an unlocked panel that hides a switch controlling the power for the entire bus. Those on the show first heard about this vulnerability from Shapeshifter at least 4 years ago. Bernie notes that the reason for the switches is to allow the power to be cut in an emergency, necessitating easy access to the switch.

A listener writes in about a service, EarthCaller a browser-based VOIP service that works only with Internet Explorer. The listener brings magicJack mentioned on the program a while back that allows you to use a normal phone with VOIP via a Windows computer. According to Not Kevin the Personal Computer Show hosts have one of the devices and are unimpressed with its quality.

The same listener also advocates the use of the use of 800-call-411 rather than GOOG411 because the former service doesn’t mention whether or not they record the call. Emmanuel first calls GOOG411 attempting to get the number for WBAI but gets some other business on Wall Street that sounds like Dubai. The other service, 800-call-411 comes up with WBAI immediately without fuss, though it is unable to understand WBAI’s telephone number.

“P” writes in asking for Jim’s information:

Caton Park Nursing Home
Attn: Jim Vichench
1312 Caton Avenue, Rm. 312B
Brooklyn, New York 11226

Emmanuel says that a number of people have visited Jim and it has been well appreciated.

A Massachusetts listener brings up the cell phones for train conductors test that was mentioned on last weeks show applauding the fact that the municipality is at least testing the system. The listener notes that this is better than a program in his commonwealth that equipped snowplows with GPS enable cell phones that turned out to be a complete failure.

Someone writes in to mention the new Mac OS X “virus” Newton. The letter also mentions Windows XP Black Edition and notes that it is very likely filled with malware.

Those in the studio and a listener mention that they haven’t received their vouchers for digital to standard definition converter boxes.

An amateur radio operator who also acts as a weather spotter says that hams perform a valuable public service during times of emergency.

A caller asks about HD radio, specifically whether special antennas are needed. Not Kevin points out that all HD radios contain a decoder created by iBiquity who has a patent on the technology. He and Bernie both say that HD radio is of no higher quality and doesn’t stand for High Definition, unlike new television technologies.

A question about cell phone repeaters comes from a caller and Bernie says that such systems are available, though probably not economical.

This is the synopsis of Off The Hook that aired on 5 March 2008.

In the studio: Emmanuel, Mike, Redbird, Not Kevin On the phone: Bernie S in Philadelphia

Emmanuel credits last weeks record donations to the Lego kits that were given as premiums and promises many Legos at the HOPE conference this year. Pre-registration for the conference is open.

Mike brings up the case brought against Wikileaks by Bank Julius Baer that caused the California-based registrar that registered the domain wikileaks.com, Dynadot, to de-register the name. The Swiss bank with ties to the Cayman Islands has since dropped their suit against Wikileaks after the Streisand Effect brought more press to the issue than it would have gotten had they simply left Wikileaks alone.

Meanwhile, a British man running a travel agency specializing in trips to Cuba has had a number of his domain names, ciaocuba.com and bonjourcuba.com among others, de-registered because they were bought through an American registrar, eNom. The man was recently added to the Treasury department’s list of Specially Designated Nationals which consists of persons who deal with organizations and countries that the United States finds unsavory.

Emmanuel mentions a new law in New Jersey law which makes talking on cellphones and two-way radios illegal but has an exemption for amateur radio operators.

The German constitutional court has struck down a law allowing investigators to install spyware on suspects’ computers.

FBI director Robert Mueller has announced that a DOJ report will show that FBI investigators abused national security letters using them to obtain information from banks, telephone and internet providers under circumstances that did not warrant their use.

Pakistan has blocked access to YouTube because the video site posted a blasphemous video. After being told that routers were probably used to block the site the head of the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority said, “We are not hackers, why would we do such a thing?”

Digital television is coming in 2009. In order to use non-digital TVs with the new over-the-air digital signal a converter box must be used. Vouchers for the boxes can be obtained from dtv2009.gov. The group speculates that the changeover won’t go smoothly at all.

One out of 99 American adults is in prison, with a total of 1.6 million prisoners in the company. The United States leads the world in incarceration rates.

Phone calls - 212.209.2900 Letters - oth@2600.com

A listener who hosts a show on Radio Free Olympia, a pirate radio station in Washington writes in to praise Off The Hook.

A caller says that he saw NYPD vehicles using what are presumably automatic license plate scanners that resemble spotlights in their vehicles. He says that they drive slowly through neighborhoods, presumably to scan all the plates of parked cars. Bernie has an idea to print out the license plates of most wanted criminals and posting them where the police scan in order to slow down such automated scanning.

A caller asks about receiving digital television signals from Jersey. Despite having a large antenna in his attic, he is unable to receive the digital version of a channel that he receives fine in analog. Bernie notes that the UHF frequencies for digital TV are higher than those for analog and so the antenna might not be tuned properly.

This is the synopsis of Off The Hook that aired on 27 February 2008.

In the studio: Emmanuel, Mike, Redbird, Not Kevin, Lazlo
On the phone: Bernie S in Philadelphia, Bill Pollack from No Starch Press
Via Skype: Jon Erickson, author of Hacking: The Art of Exploitation

The last week of fundraising.

Emmanuel plays a clip from 30 November 1999 where Amy Goodman was covering the WTO protests in Seattle, which he cites as the beginning of the independent media movement on the internet. He relates a story of Shapeshifter, 2600’s layout artist, who was arrested in Philadelphia after police saw him talking on a cell phone and accused him of organizing the protests. Shapeshifter later won a suit against the city for wrongful arrest, since his using a telephone was the limit of their evidence.

Premiums for the hour:

• $25 - Off The Hook t-shirt
• $40 - DMCA coffee mugs; one white on black, one black on white; for coffee only
• $75 - No Starch Press books: [Forbidden Lego](http://nostarch.com/frameset.php?startat=flego) and [Hacking: The Art of Exploitation](http://nostarch.com/frameset.php?startat=flego)

This is the synopsis of Off The Hook that aired on 13 February 2008.

In the studio: Emmanuel, Mike, Not Kevin
On the phone: Bernie S from Philadelphia, Mitch Altman from California

Another week of fundraising.

RIM’s Blackberry service had another outage between 3:30pm and 6pm on Monday but the company claims that no data was lost.

Not Kevin’s Verizon Samsung phone went on the fritz and throwing it from a ten-story building didn’t fix it. Emmanuel reports that, upon trying to SMS Not Kevin after he obtained a new phone, receive a response stating that the phone was unreachable, even though it was on.

This week brought many news stories of persons crossing the United States border and having their computers more than thoroughly inspected or even seized by Department of Homeland Security or U.S. Customs and Border Patrol employees. The searches include confiscation of laptops and cellular phones, forcing users to divulge their passwords and in some cases wholesale copying of data of disks or SIM cards. Emmanuel advocates United States citizens refusing these searches. A number of blog posts on the web have suggested keeping a secondary account on your laptop with some fake data, in order to comply with the search request without actually divulging data. Bruce Schneier still recommends employing strong encryption techniques to protect your data. Bernie S proposes the use of tiny memory cards, such as MicroSD, for storing ones data and hiding it when crossing the border. The EFF is suing to stop the practice.

The Senate voted on a bill to give retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that participated in warrantles wiretapping. Noted votes are those of potential presidential candidates; John McCain voted YEA to grant immunity, Barack Obama voted NAY and Hillary Clinton was (strategically) not present for the vote. The bill passed with 61 YEA votes, including all Republicans and a number of Democrats.

Network neutrality has come up again as Barack Obama spoke about it in a podcast from two years ago. Obama advocated the continuation of net neutrality, a de-facto policy that has been in existence since the beginning of The Internet. The senator chastised cable and telephone companies for being against network neutrality and also spoke in support of increased competition in broadband access. Much like her failure to vote in the above-mentioned issue, Hillary Clinton has been conspicuously silent about net neutrality, despite her numerous speeches covering technology issues. John McCain is on the record against net neutrality instead leaving it to the market to decide; the problem with such a stance is the duopoly that most consumers are left with for high speed access. Mike Huckabee is in favor of net neutrality, explaining his position with an analogy involving trucks on a highway.

Premiums for the hour:

• $25 - Off The Hook t-shirt
• $40 - DMCA coffee mugs; one white on black, one black on white; for coffee only
• $50 - [TV B Gone](http://www.tvbgone.com/cfe_tvbg_main.php)
• $75 - 2600 zippered hoodie; “2600″ on front, “hacker” on back
• $250 - Super TV B Gone; 100 meter range

A clip from February 15th, 1995, the day Kevin Mitnick was captured, is played. Emmanuel discusses the situation surrounding Kevin at the time and his near-miss capture a few weeks prior. Phiber Optik made an appearance discussing Kevin Poulsen’s case.

Mitch relates a story of a TV crew following him around Paris, France as he walked around turning off TVs.

Emmanuel mentions the real-world protests of Scientology by “Anonymous”; in New York, more than 200 people were present. Another demonstration will take place on the 15th of March at Scientology sites throughout the world.

This is the synopsis of Off The Hook that aired on 6 February 2008.

It’s a fund raising week at WBAI, so Off The Hook is a little bit light on content, but they are big on giving you stuff for donating to the station. Be sure to tune in live next week because they often extend the fund raisers, so you might be able to pledge next week for different stuff. The premiums for this show are:

• $25 - Off The Hook t-shirt
• $40 - DMCA coffee mugs; one white on black, one black on white; for coffee only
• $75 - 2600 zippered hoodie; “2600″ on front, “hacker” on back
• $125 - Lifetime subscription to Off The Hook DVDs (nearly 1000 hours of OTH)

Bernie S clarifies the rules regarding promotion of business on public radio; though one is allowed to speak well of a business, you cannot compare it to other business.

Redbird mentions the Intelius database, a background check service, which will give you a persons date of birth before you have to pay.

The group discusses London’s expansion of their automated congestion charging to tally high polluting vehicles as well.

Emmanuel plays a clip from a November 1999 show and discussion of the upcoming Year 2000 Problem. Emmanuel laments people who think that 1999 is the last year of the century or that 2000 is the first year of the new millennium. Micro controllers that control municipal functions are brought up, in particular the PDP-11s (not micro controllers) that control the release of sewage into the East River according to lunar cycles, which influence tides.

In attendance: Emmanuel, Bernie S, Mike, Redbird and Not Kevin.

Bernie mentions that analog cell phone service (AMPS) will be shut off during the week of February 18th.

The entire crew makes note of their significant lack of sports knowledge in light of the upcoming Superbowl. Emmanuel shows a surprising amount of knowledge, though he condemns this knowledge wishing he could replace it with useful information in his head.

The show is on International Delete Your MySpace Account Day and Emmanuel points to it as evidence of the power of blogging and wonders whether. Redbird insists that Facebook is useful and MySpace is not, though he admits to possibly having a MySpace account. He also brings up the flaw in MySpace’s private pictures, which allowed pictures marked private to be viewed by anyone. Emmanuel longs for an antonymous version of Facebook where people create lists of enemies and Bernie says that someone named “Bell” had an online death-pool but was arrested and the site taken down.

The Last Hope will be July 18-20th and more information will be on the website.

Charter Communications accidentally deleted messages for 14,000 email accounts and claims the data is completely irrecoverable leaving all very surprised that Charter didn’t have backups for the data. Redbird is impressed that Charter didn’t simply blame the loss on hackers.

Also not caused by hackers is the Bermuda triangle of car problems around the Empire State building. Purportedly connected to cars with keyless entry, including Emmanuel’s Smart Car, a New York City towing company says that they have to move 10-15 cars in the neighborhood per day. Usually, they claim, towing the car a few blocks away solves the problem. Redbird notes that the radio transmitters on top of the building are powerful enough that they will interfere with all sorts of radio devices.

A woman was awarded nearly the maximum sentence for her crime after making light of her victim’s death on a prison phone. Bernie said that when he was a guest in Federal prison all calls were recorded and there are no provisions for private calls, even with one’s attorney.

Bernie brings up Qwest’s refusal to participate in the NSA’s warrant-less wiretaps over the past few years but mentions that they lost numerous Federal contracts because of this decision.

Estonia and Russia are in a conflict over the movement of a World War 2 memorial in Estonia. Apparently the Russia government was not involved in attacks against Estonian government and business websites rather it was a young Estonian angered by his government’s decision on the memorial.

The group discusses Anonymous’ Project Chanology whose attacks have been successful in bringing attention to the cult of Scientology. Bernie relates a story from when he worked as an offset printer. The owner of the business for which he worked was a Scientologist who tried to convert Bernie who was fired from the job after not joining the crazies.

Though Google changed their algorithm to reduce the incidence of Google Bombs, if you search for “dangerous cult” the first hit is the website of The Church of Scientology. In other news, the cast of Off The Hook is often equipped with blank expressions.

Jim is still recovering and is now in a nursing home. His address is:

Caton Park Nursing Home
Attn: Jim Vichench
1312 Caton Avenue, Rm. 312B
Brooklyn, New York 11226

Bernie says that Jim can now read again but still has trouble writing.

A listener wrote in to say that he saw a robots.txt which made mention of significant fines and lawsuits for people using automated methods of grabbing websites. The consensus is that one couldn’t get sued for using wget, but given the zone transfer decision made recently, care should be used when using automated tools to grab websites.

Apparently OTH has a bunch of 80+ year old listeners.

The Data Loss of the Week award goes to GE Money, the credit card processing company used by JC Penny department stores, who lost information on 650,000 customers including social security numbers for 150,000 of those. The information was on a backup tape that was stored in a warehouse of Iron Mountain and went missing last October. Of course, the company reported that there was no reason to suspect the data was stolen nor used fraudulently. Mike mentions that, like most lost data incidents, a year of free credit monitoring will probably be given to the victims. Emmanuel wonders whether those given the credit monitoring service will be automatically billed for it after the year is up. Bernie S. uses a service after TD Ameritrade lost his information 3 months ago. He said that they did not take any billing information, so wouldn’t be able to charge him without his knowledge and likens it to the Do Not Call List, which is often abused by unscrupulous telemarketers. The Identity Theft Resource Center says that there was a 6 fold increase in the number of compromised records last year, a total of 125 million in 2007.

Emmanuel goes on a long tirade about his Verizon land-line phone bill, complaining about the charge for “Verizon Freedom Essentials,” which includes call-waiting ID, and anonymous call rejection, which is free. The big complaint is something marked as “discounted telecommunications service” which, though it sounds like a good and normal thing, is actually the name of a company, that charged him for directory assistance at a rate of $8.50 per instance. In order to get the charge removed, Emmanuel says the best tactic is to claim that the line is connected to a fax machine and that there is no way he could have made a call. A tangential discussion about the exorbitant cost and low quality of directory assistance leads Bernie to divulge his method of getting good advice for an area he knows little about: he simply calls a random number in the NPA and prefix that he is looking for information about. With a bit of social engineering, most people will recommend a business that suits your needs.

A North Dakota judge decided that performing a zone transfer is illegal if you don’t obtain authorization first. Bernie likens it to what he was arrested for, possessing equipment for the modification of telecommunications instruments for the unauthorized access to telecommunications services. His appeal was based upon the fact that the law didn’t specify who would give authorization for such modifications. Though a similar case, Mike clarifies that performing a zone transfer, getting all of the host in a domain, is trivial, requiring no special equipment and only common software. Furthermore, DNS servers can be easily setup to deny zone transfer requests. The same judge also said that compiling ‘whois’ lookups without permission from Network Solutions is also illegal.

The head of the European Union’s privacy regulators declared that IP addresses should be treated as personal information. Though Google and others maintain that an IP address only identifies a computer, the EU commissioner said that because most people use the same computers repeatedly, it was still personal information.

The Church of Scientology was DDOSed by “Anonymous” last week orchestrated as Project Chanology as a coordinated attack against Scientology. This is in response to a recent video of Tom Cruise which the Church of Scientology forced YouTube to take down. Gawker still has the video up, a good example of the Streisand Effect, which goes unmentioned on the show.

Time Warner has announced that it will start using usage-based billing, which Emmanuel likens as, “people who use the internet more will pay more and people who use it less will pay the same.” Bernie notes that Time Warner and Comcast both kick people off of their “unlimited” services if they cross a certain threshold of usage surmising that they don’t publish the limit because it would conflict with the advertising of the service as unlimited.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commision approved cyber-security standards to protect electrical utilities from attacks by hackers. A group representing electricity generators, the Edison Electric Institute recommended the standards, “following growing concerns about the security of utilities.” A senior CIA analyst, Tom Donahue, is quoted as saying, “hackers literally turned out the lights in multiple cities after breaking into electrical utilities and demanding extortion payments before disrupting the power.” He refused to elaborate about where, when or how long the outages lasted only that they were outside the United States. A video from last year, the Aurora Generator Test, blew this out of proportion last year showing simulated hackers causing a generator to explode.

A cocaine vaccine was announced; Emmanuel and notkevin up the Orwellian implications such as parents giving it to their children which is an admission that their children might try cocaine in the future.

Sprextel and T-Mobile were denied hearing of a case by the supreme court dealing with an 11th circuit decision that would force them to add taxes into the pricing of their plan, rather than listing them separately.

Cellphones were used to steal merchandise at a WalMart on Long Island.

FBI wiretaps were halted after the bureau failed to pay bills on their lines. Bernie brings up the incredible cost of wiretaps, stating that a single wiretap can cost more than $10,000 which all comes out of taxpayers pockets.

Untraceable, a soon to be released action film about internet snuff films, seems to advocate against net-neutrality.

A listener calls asking for a recommendation of an MP3 player that will also tune AM stereo and Bernie recommends the Pogo RadioYourWay.

Redbird responds to a listener’s question about anti-virus for smart phones, saying that it’s really not necessary.

The Off The Hook site takes a while to post synopsis of the episodes and once they are posted, the overviews aren’t very detailed. I’m going to start taking some notes as I listen to the show and putting them here, for the good of all internet denizens who may find this via Google.

Emmanuel noted that the theme was missing, so he was playing it from a recording of the show that he downloaded last week. Mitch Altman, who was returning from the Chaos Communication Congress and is the creator of the TV-B-Gone, was on again; he and Emmanuel discussed Gizmodo’s use of the device at CES.

Emmanuel noted a new program in California that will allow utilities to control home thermostats via radio signals as a method for reducing peak energy usage so as to mitigate rolling blackouts. Not Kevin wonders how long it will take until someone finds a way to control the temperature of their neighbor’s house.

A kid in Lodz, Poland created a remote control to control the trams in the town. Not Kevin and Mitch discuss whether the remote that the kid created was really like a TV remote employing infrared as was reported. Emmanuel compares it to a chrome box and Bernie points out that infrared isn’t a very robust method, susceptible to weather conditions that could hamper its operation.

Wisconsin contracted out a mailing to EDS who printed social security numbers on the outside of envelopes. Bernie notes that the government officials always preach their concern for citizen’s privacy and guesses correctly that all those affected will receive a free year of credit monitoring, only to be automatically enrolled in such a service for a significant charge at the end of said year.

The TSA took down a horribly insecure website intended to allow people to remove themselves from the no-fly list. The contract for the site was awarded to Desyne Web Services by a TSA employee who previously worked for the firm.

Boeing’s new 787 aircraft, which will have internet access available, is going to be thoroughly check to ensure that the internet link is in no way connected to the plane’s avionics. Bernie mentions Boeing’s ill-fated Connexion service.

Bernie talks about a new hacker space, The Hacktory, which he is helping to put together as an extension of the Philadelphia Make group. Mitch talks about visiting Bootlab in Berlin, TMP LABS in Paris and c-base as well as DC401 in Providence and NoiseBridge. Emmanuel brings up past hacker spaces L0pht and New Hack City that eventually failed and questions whether these new ones will last.