Off The Hook - 13 February 2008

Feb 14, 2008

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:

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.