Episode: 715
Title: HPR0715: Interview with StankDawg
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0715/hpr0715.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 01:26:43

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Hello everybody, my name is Ken Fallon and today we're having a special episode of Hacker
Public Radio. What's kind of odd about it is, if you go back and listen to episode one,
you'll hear this gentleman, Mr. Stankdog, on their talking about setting up Hacker Public
Radio. Now I don't know if a lot of you know this, but if you scroll down to the bottom
of the HPR page, you'll see in a small writing this project is brought to you by the Digital
Dog Pound and the Infra-Nomocone Computer Club. Also, on the about page of HPR, we go
into basically a summary of that first episode and what the show is all about. So, in the
last few months, I've realised that quite a lot of people don't know about good work
of binary revelations and that HPR is a daughter project of that server and that the HPR
server is actually paid for by Stank. So, you might have heard his voice and the outro
of every episode. So, with that, I'd like to introduce you to Stank. How are you doing
Stank? Everything okay? Oh, I'm hanging in there. So, do you hear of my sweet iced tea,
of course? Yes, as always. So, when are you bringing back Bin Red Radio? Oh, good, good,
legally, no time soon. Oh, by the way, I should go ahead and put up front that I'm going
to try my best to behave and use good, safe language, safe for work language. Yeah, well,
if not, we'll put a warning at the beginning of the show. I'll try to keep this safe for
work. Although, I would actually, I think you and I discussed recording, I think I
probably a separate episode to discuss some topics like that. So, we'll put that on the
back there. Yeah, the, we're recording this episode, I guess, and you can tell me, but
I guess because I posted a very, oh man, this is hard not using words. No, far ahead,
far ahead, don't worry about it. No, a very angry post on my blog the other day, because
I kind of frustrated that we're moving servers again, and it's just an enormous amount of
work to do that. It's just not nearly as easy as any, if you've never done it, it's not
easy. So, don't ever think or assume that there's nothing too such an event. It's, it's
maybe fundamentally easy, you think, but to get everything set up and configured and
tweaked exactly the way you need it is an enormous amount of work. And I know I've talked
in the past of how much work it is running the servers in general. And for the last year or
so, latter has been doing that job and doing it very well. And I kind of retired. I kind
of stepped away and people got tired of hearing my voice, I think. So, I kind of slipped
away into retirement. I had some, some events and personal life that caused me to kind of,
I guess, have my midlife crisis or whatever you want to call it. So, I just kind of pulled
away from everything. I didn't need the headache and the frankly, the complaints of people.
Oh, they don't like the radio show for this and they don't like the forms of that. But
nobody does anything. So, actually, if I can hijack the show for a moment, one thing I'd
like to say and get up front and I'm very, very sincere about this is, can I am so happy
with the work you've done with Hacker Public Radio and the time that you've put into it
because I do know how much work it is. I know how much time. And I know how much you
have to care. And that's a, that's the thing. A lot of people just don't care. So, I want
to publicly on the show, thank you for the work that you've done. I do not belittle it.
I know how much work it is. And if anybody else out there sends you complaints that they
don't like this and they don't like that, let them go do something themselves if they think
they can do it better. Otherwise, they're just running their mouth. So, I think you're doing
great job and I want everybody out there to hear me say that. I am very appreciative
what you don't want to hear. I need to, I need to stop you there because in actual fact,
there's lots of other people helping out as well. I'd like to thank Coach Crunchyren and
Pokey as well and all the other guys. There's been an immense amount of people who've come
out and are helping with HPR Zoke and droops. And I don't want to, yeah, I've started
naming people, but there are so many other people. And since I've started helping out,
the amount of support has been amazing. So, actually, my plan, and I've told you this
before, is to come on, set everything up and replace myself with a script. And, yeah,
possibly, you know, have another figurehead after a few six months, six months or so
a year of me doing this so that somebody else can come on board. Kind of like what you
did with Benrev when Black Ratchet came on and, you know, have somebody else, that's not
to say I intend to fall away or anything. But, you know, when you're doing this work, the
amount of actual podcast recording that I've done has gone down a lot. I actually want
to do podcasts. I absolutely know and I do. And yeah, I want to second that this show.
Actually, this is something I've always tried to do from day one with Benrev right into
HPR and all of our projects is I'm nothing. I am nobody. Literally, I like at this point,
I'm nothing but a financier. So, I just sit back and I pay to run the server, but I don't do the
work. You guys do the work. We have a cast of correspondence on HPR to focus specifically on this
project. It would not exist, succeed, be such a great show, such a great project, such a great
community service. If it weren't for all of them, whether they've recorded one episode, whether
they've recorded 50 episodes, whether they're admitting it, whether they're posting on the comments
or just listening to it. We appreciate each and every one of you and it's this giant digital
ecosystem. Boy, that's really a weird sounding thing. Yes. Of everybody coming together. And
I love it because that is what the binary revolution is all about. That's why we created it. That's
what we wanted to see. I'm very proud to see that. So... Can I just interrupt you and maybe
go back a little? We're up to episode three, seven hundred and five here in HPR, which together with
Tratech Radio brings us up to one thousand and five community-produced episodes. And I want you
to bring you back. If you could give us a quick five-minute summary of where we are,
how we got here, and why you pay for Hacker Public Radio out of your own pocket.
Wow. I will try to rain it into five minutes. Okay. Let me think. Where do I start? Well...
What's Radio Freak Americans start over? Okay. Well, okay. Slightly before Radio Freak America,
I was very good friends with a couple of what were DDP members at the time, which has also been
retired and broken up. But one of those was dual parallel. And dual was just such a great energetic
guy. And I loved him. And he was already doing a show called Radio Freak America at the time.
Long before me, long before I started Ben Rev Radio or any of that kind of stuff,
I helped out on a couple episodes, or I should say he allowed me to come on a couple episodes
of Radio Freak America. And I loved it right away. I knew that this was something that I enjoyed
listening to. And I wanted to try putting something out that was a little bit more... We had fun
on Radio Freak America, but what is kind of... dual made show notes. And the joke was always that I made
show novels. I was a little bit more structured. So I kind of started Ben Rev Radio only to be a
structured regular thing that you could depend on starting with certain processes, the show and
tell, the email, things like that. Whereas Radio Freak America was much more lighthearted and fun.
But the roots of HPR actually started back in Radio Freak America. And dual parallel and I had
the idea back then. And we were going to start a show. And unfortunately, because of we were doing
all the other things, we were never able to get it off the ground. However,
troops, my internet boyfriend, troops, he came along and just did it. And that's what I always
loved about troops. Troops will just do it. If he wants to do it, he's going to do it. So he is
reliable that way. And he came in and he did start it. We talked and talked and talked and never
did anything. Troops did it. So that's where it made the leap there. So when Troops started it,
he started it as Twattek Radio, which was a play on Twitter. And it was exactly the spirit of
community having people all communicate, the infonomican guys all communicating as well as
other people outside. And he called it a different name because I guess we thought that he thought
he might be stepping on some toes or whatever. And we kind of realized, well, wait a minute,
this is fantastic. This is exactly what we wanted. Why don't we actually name it the way we
originally intended it to be. And that's where it kind of came from. So it actually dates back to
probably the early 2000s, 2001, 2002, maybe somewhere around that range. So it's been alive in some
fashion or form since then. But Troops actually, to give him full credit, really started and actually
got it going. Now, like you said, I don't want to expend a list trying to name everybody and accidentally
excluding everybody, but him and Enigma and yourself, I think are three that have stood out to me that
really took on the load of administration with a whole lot of input, like you said, from a whole
lot of other people along the way. So there's not not to short anybody. It's been a lot of work from
a lot of people to make this regular podcast and how long can has HPR been going?
Since 2007, the second, the first episode was 31st December 2007.
And that that's four years. Yep. Okay, four years. Now, I don't think people really understand
what an epic accomplishment that is. I had been radio for four years once a week.
HPR is almost a daily show, almost every weekday. I know there's some, when we run out or there's
some days that we skip, we skip holidays, things like that. But for the most part, it is a,
let's call, I guess a nearly daily show, is that safe to say? Well, so week daily show every
week, Monday to Friday. That's the plan. That is an enormous accomplishment. So in those four
years, like you said, we're up in the 700s now. I'm not sure when this one specifically will be released,
but well over 700 episodes, well into 700 episodes. When you hear this, that is an amazing
accomplishment. And again, you know, one of my frustrations and that's what comes out in my blog post
sometimes, not the name I read some, is nobody appreciates that. And again, I appreciate it. So to
you and everybody, every single correspondent, thank you. I'd like to, I'd like to say a special
thank you to enigma actually, because I am only now beginning to see the amount of work that he
has put in over the years day in, day out, getting those shows out. 600 shows every day, getting
up in the morning and putting out those shows. It's an amazing amount. It's amazing, it's amazing
achievement. Yeah, absolutely. It's kind of funny that we actually just went out with them two,
three weekends ago and kind of commiserated and talked about how much, how much work it was into
that and how much you've taken the load off of him specifically. And definitely, I know I speak for
him when I say thanks to you and to everyone as well. I know it was a lot of work on him. So
glad to hear that recognition. Okay. Why are you paying for HPR? Because I believe in it,
because I support it and because it's, it epitomizes what I wanted to do with binary revolution.
You know, I don't know if the listeners to this show even realize that this has been rev
project, I guess, that it started where it did, like we talked about earlier and that it started off
with, again, troops, troops, one of my DDP guys, we had so many conversations. We worked together to
come up with some ideas, brainstorm solutions. How should we do this? What's the best way to do this?
Troops and a bunch of the Infonomicon guys did it, made it happen, got it out there and it's
just grown ever since. So binary revolution, which I think dates back to, when did we register
binrev.com? Like 2000, 99, 2000, 2001, somewhere along there. Yeah.
Started off as stamedog.com, which was my personal site. And I only started that site through
up some forums. And again, it was just forums with just me and a few friends. Again, like Duel
and Nick 84, I've known my gosh for years. And I've watched him just do amazing things from,
you know, a young age to, to where he is now. It's like watching, I don't know, it's kind of like
watching a child grow. I mean, he's a very accomplished programmer, a successful man now. And it's like,
I've watched people, kids, and I know I sound old saying this, that have come on to binrev it
in their midteens, early teens and learn and grow as people, as programmers, as hackers. Most
importantly, as people, you know, yeah, I'm a hacker. And yet we talk about hacking things and we
teach hacking and all that great stuff. But that's always secondary to people, be a good person. And
that's one of my frustrations, again, that comes out of the blog post is, you treat us and me
sometime, not you obviously can. But people sometimes treat us like we're not people, like we're
not humans. Like I am just here to finance this website for you and run it the exactly the way you
want it and do anything you ask me to do and make you happy and you just consume, consume, consume.
And that's my only job and role here and I should shut up and do it. Well, no, I'm sorry. I am
pretty much a community or a guy I listen to all feedback positive and negative and I do listen
to it and I do step back sometimes ago, you know what? I did that wrong. I should do it this way.
They have a point they're right. But at the same time, there's a certain line that gets crossed
where people are just taking advantage of you and mistreating you. And that's one of the reasons
that I kind of step back and retire. And by, let me get this out there too, make no mistake
of me doing this episode of the show and I might try to squeeze in some more and slowly work my
way back in. But I am staying retired. I'm done. I'm not, I don't feel that I'm appreciated
personally and I don't think that a lot of people appreciate the work that you can or doing and
a lot of other people on here. I'm on here just tell people don't treat, can, don't treat,
enigma, don't treat the form administrators, don't treat ladder, don't treat these people.
Badly appreciate them. Let them know and thank them because you know what? They're going to retire
too or they're just going to outright quit. Right. I just want to make it clear here that
when you were talking about the site, you're talking about the binary revolution radio site because
my experience on HPR has been nothing but positive. I've knocked a one email criticism.
Yeah, absolutely. And I'm absolutely thrilled about that and I hope it continues.
Well, and that's what I say that it epitomizes what we were trying to do with HPR. Ben Rev
has a lot of positive people there too, but what happens is when the negativity comes on,
when people break rules, when people try to do illegal things, things, stuff like that,
we ban them. What is Ben Rev radio? What is Ben Rev all about? Why did you set it up?
Well, again, Ben Rev is you know, it started off as tankdog.com with just some friends and I
and thank you for raining me back in here. It started off as just a personal site for a place to
me to put some of my articles from 2600 up and other places so people could just read them online
for free because I do believe in that. So I put them up on the site and put up some forums
just to chat with friends and they just started to grow really fast. And despite what anybody says
in any other IRC channels or anywhere else you might hear, Ben Rev is and none of this. HPR,
one of the reasons I've also stayed attached is it's not me. I didn't do this. I don't take credit
for it. I'm not, this is done by all the people we mentioned earlier. They get full credit. So
none of this is about me or my ego or any of that kind of stuff. I am perfectly fine to stay in
the background, stay retired. I will finance it because I support it and believe in it. As long as I
can physically and financially do that. And I'm glad to do that. And I'm not complaining and I
don't want anybody to offer donations or anything. It's not like that at all. If I get to the point
where I cannot do that anymore, then I will solicit and say, Hey, it's going to die. If someone
wants to take it, I will gladly give it to them. It's not about me. It's bigger than me.
And that's called it binary revolution. Benrev.com binary revolution was about changing people's
minds and changing their attitudes and hacking. We used to be a community of loners, people who
are out there by themselves who used to contact. And I'm going back to, you know, I'll be 40 this
year. You know, I'm an old dog. We would communicate through BBSs and using 300-bod modems and
swapping text files and stuff like that. And there was actually a camaraderie there. Well, when the
internet and age came along, when the early days of the internet, AOL and those kind of things
started getting people on, they're starting to take up a negative turn in the hacking community
where instead of producing content, people started to gain credit by attacking other people
and taking that credit away from them. The way to get famous is to put down somebody else,
put down another hacker. That somehow made you cool and made you get some sort of credit or
whatever. You didn't actually have to do a thing, a darn thing. So I didn't like that. And I wanted
to try to turn that around. So that is why the name binary revolution was chosen. We brainstormed
for a long time in racks. I think actually, I think those racks and I both kind of hit on that one.
I think racks came up with the name binary revolution or digital revolution, something like that.
And we went with that because it spoke to exactly what we wanted to accomplish. We wanted a revolution
and hacking. We wanted it to 180 degrees and turn the opposite direction and instead of people
being negative towards each other, be positive, be helpful, be supportive. So that's what bin rev was
started from. And we moved the forums over there, started getting people working together on
projects and we started off with a great core group of people. They were all personal friends.
I'm not everybody we've talked about. Enigma, droops. I've met these guys several times. I am good
friends. If I go up to New York for work sometimes and I crash with not theory still to this day,
all the time, you know, we meet up at conferences. These are personal good friends of mine. People
you can count on people that actually do stuff. And I still have them to this day. The guys that we
started this show started to cite and everything with. I am still great friends with all of them
along with some other new ones that we found along the way. So that positivity and that
camaraderie is something that you just can't find anywhere else. And I wanted other people to be able
to do that and join that. And I think HPR proves that it works. Very much so.
On HPR we have the concept of hacker. And on the link to the main page we have
topics that are of interest hackers. And I've linked to the hacker hobbyist page on Wikipedia.
So I, from my own feeling about bin rev, if I go over to the forums, it's all kind of
matrix-y and dark and hacker-y looking in the sense of, I don't know, cracker type hacker.
What would you say to somebody who would say that you're promoting illegal activities over
there in bin rev? I would laugh at them because if you think that then you just couldn't be
further from the truth. I mean, if anything, that's the reason, you know, that's where a lot of
the criticism on me personally and the site comes from is that a lot of people think we are too
goody, too shoes, though we are too white hat. I've said all along, I'm gray hat. There are a lot
of things that I just don't agree with. I don't agree with all laws. I don't agree with all
the rules of the global interwebs. I don't support them. I obviously because I run the site
and it's in my name, I have to walk certain lines of legalities so I cannot allow certain things,
whether I agree with them or not. So, you know, like on the forum specifically, there are certain
things I can't allow. Even if I did like them or support them personally, I can't allow them.
So a lot of people will accuse me or think that I'm taking a certain stance and it's like, no,
no, no, no, no, I'm just telling you you can't do it here. You can do it somewhere else and I
may do it somewhere else myself. It's not a goody, too shoes, things there. But the most part,
we do lean towards white hat hacking. We don't report, we don't support destruction of data,
we don't support, support defacing of sites, destruction, anything that brings a negative
connotation to hacking. We generally don't support that.
So, getting back the original name of hacking, somebody who's
who's improving, investigating, you know, sort of a positive sense of the word hacker.
Right. And, you know, the things I've been, I've said for years that people always repeat from
me is that, you know, it been rough specifically and I would say true real hacking is about
construction, not destruction. It's about producing and creating. It's not about taking and
tearing down and destroying. That's not hacking. Hacking is creativity, it's beauty, it's cleverness,
it's figuring out how to do things. It's a beautiful state of mind that so many people don't get.
And it's kind of, it kind of makes, it's a little bit emotional for me because when I see it,
it's a beautiful, beautiful thing. It really, truly is beautiful to see somebody who says,
what do you mean I can't do that? Watch me. That is the most beautiful thing you will ever see in
the world. Yes. And I wish more people appreciated that. That is what hacking is all about.
I think you're preaching to the converted here and not only me, but virtually everybody listening
to the show. I think we'll agree with you. I hope so. But if there's just one or two listening,
who don't get it, if it just wanted to hear it and understand the sincerity in my voice that I
really truly mean this and that this is what we support. If you want to learn how to write a virus
or other things like that, we're probably not the place for you. I don't think you're going to hear
an episode of HPR about here's how to take down the internet. Here's how to deface a site,
things like that. You might hear here's a common technique that people use. And hopefully,
you know, if I were doing an episode like that, and I'm not afraid to, if I teach something like
that or talk about that on the show, I'm immediately going to say here's how you stop it. Here's
how you defend it. I am all for the free flow of information, including the, I guess, negative
stuff like how to write a virus. I would not say we're not going to ever allow that on
been raver HPR any of this stuff. I would say we have to do it carefully to say you can be educated
on it, but make it crystal clear that the application of it, we don't support applications that
cause damage and destruction. If you want to do it on your own private network, you want to
learn it, do it so you can learn it and get that experience and that knowledge. God bless you. That's
all about hacking, but how you apply it, what you do with it, that's where you cross the lines.
And I will never ever support anybody who's doing anything destructive.
Okay. On HPR, we have a tiered to the rule of topics that are of interest attackers.
And under that umbrella, I have put a show out
for on how to quit smoking, for instance. Does that fall under the topic of what you intended when
you settled HPR? So much. Some of my favorite episodes were episodes about
friends or I mean, when we say hacking related, that could be anything from, I think when we first
brainstorm, I said, you know, I would be open to sure directly hacking topics, defining,
teaching, anything technology related is going to be a venture to hackers. Those are obvious ones.
Hey, do a movie review of something that has computers and hacking in it. I would consider
that related. It might make me want to go see a movie or look at some movie closer, even if it's
just a scene in a movie where somebody, I don't know, tries to red box or what's the famous,
there's a famous joke of, I think it was Jurassic Park where the little girl sits down at the
computer is like, oh, this is huge. I know you think. Yeah, it's like, I think that, I think you can
make an episode, even if it's five minutes long, and just make fun of that and bring that because,
you know what, I didn't even know about that until fairly recently, somebody told me, I'm like,
really, I don't, that was, that's horrible. So I, I would support the most liberal vague definition
of that, if it's adventurous, there was episodes on HBR of caffeine. There were some episodes on
on merging art and hacking and social engineering topics. Those are some of my favorite ones.
Yep, on two. Yeah, so, so to say what is hacking related and what can you do for HBR,
I would say almost anything. If you as a hacker are interested in it, TV show, movie review,
software review, an idea for a project, technology. I mean, it's anything in the world. What
else are hackers into? Music. Do some music reviews, CD reviews of stuff you think that hackers
might like to listen to while they're, you know, one thing I found with hackers is we listen to a
lot of music. A lot of music while we're on the computers all day, we like to distract ourselves.
Music is something that people could talk about on here. Get interviews with people, talk about
CDs that you think people would like. Not just, you know, I don't need anybody to remove
the latest Britney Spears or the latest, I don't know what's out there these days,
got Lady Gaga or whatever. Whatever the kids are listening to these days. Get off my lawn.
Right. If I can drag you back kicking and screaming to the point, well, I put out the call here
and this is especially for Zog. I would like all the listeners to anybody listening to the show
to send them one show a year at least. So at least ones show here. That's where we wouldn't have
no problem whatsoever filling our queue and there'd be a different, easily a different host every
single day. Fix will rotate and vary. You'll have one day, you'll have something real technical.
The next day, you'll have something funny and like-hearted. Next day, something creative.
I think variety is definitely the spice of life and it's definitely one of the things that
HPR is really good at and I'd like to see continue.
Okay. The bin rev website. What sort of resources are available over there to us as HPR users?
A lot. Actually, before I go there, just to reinforce something you just said to your challenge,
one episode a year. Wonderful. I put that challenge out to anybody listening right now.
One episode. You don't have to put in- this is the other great thing about HPR that it was
from the get-go that we said the only way this was succeed and the only thing that the reason
that this will be special is that it's not a regular show like RFA was, like bin rev was. It's not
a rigid format like bin rev was. We always had the same opening. We always had an email section. We
always- you don't have that with HPR. So do not feel restricted or bound. We also had strict
bit rates and recording. You can record however you want to. You can record on an old cassette recorder.
I think that would be cool to say, hey, we're recording on old-fashioned risk cassette record.
That's fine. MP3 players, Skype, anything. We don't have any restrictions, any boundaries.
Topics are pretty vague, pretty liberal into what we allow and what we talk. If you have a question,
contact any of us and we'll kind of point in the right direction or give you advice or whatever.
I mean, that's hackerpublicradio.org.
Admin at hackerpublicradio.org and we'll point in the right direction, but really,
you can pretty much feel safe to just about record anything you want and send it in.
Do want to hear. You might find that you like it and want to do more and that's great. If you don't,
we appreciate the one. Yeah, absolutely. Pit anybody and everybody listening. And you know what,
I'm going to try to practice what I preach. Good night. You've already put in your show for the year.
I love this. Actually, my fiance has been very supportive and actually kind of has been pushing
me to get back into it. She knows how much I like it and there's less than this small show,
so she's very supportive of that. So I might try to try to find some time to start doing more of that.
Good stuff. And there's also an old image on the time. If it's a, I've come across things where
something's been bugging me for weeks. I never had the time to figure it out. I sit down and get
a half an hour and boom. It's a two minute two liner. Pick up the phone, dial the call in numbers
and say, this is how I fix this problem. Let's be bugging me for two weeks. This is it. Hang up the
phone. If it's a 30 second piece of information that gives somebody a good tip, send that in.
Yeah. You know, it's like blogs like every blog doesn't have to be five pages long or whatever.
Sometimes a couple sentences is the most helpful thing. Yeah. That's why we don't have a limit.
If it's a five minute show, great. If it's a five hour, well, on about five hour.
I think we got up to three and a half hours once. Yeah. After that seven plus hour final
of Vintra radio. I don't know what that one was kind of like. Is this over yet? I listen to it.
I'll listen to every single minute of that. That was only worth listening to. Maybe if you
missed all the other episodes, it kind of summarized a bunch of them. But anyway,
now it was a great way to bring Vintra up to an end. It was. I thought so.
I don't know if you've heard the old soldier episode by Lost and Bronx on H Pure.
It was the one that prompted me to, you know, to say to help, you know, just to jump into the
free and help out with H Pure. And you know, it's you either do it or you don't. And if you're
going to stop it, go out with a bang and my God was that a bang. Yeah. Exactly. That was that was
actually what I figured. I mean, I know a lot of people probably didn't listen to it and make it
through it. But, you know, it is what it is. And it's over and done with the past of the past.
Now as far as back to your question and hands, I'm getting better. I'm getting better. Back to the
question and hand of the resources that have been revved that are available. Actually, Ken and I have
been talking and working lately on some options for the site since we are moving servers. And
can you did talk about this on the other episode right? Yeah, but you might want to explain what
happened as well. Just give some people a background. Well, as much as I'm willing to talk about,
yeah, the bottom line is that the hosting company we were using,
changed some policies and we are because of that forced to quickly try to find new hosting.
So I've done that. I reached out and again, that's a lot of work to try to go out there.
Our hosting was costing 522. I should say is costing me 522 dollars a month.
And I'm paying for that. Now I offset that. Yeah, about a year, about a couple of years. Now,
what the hosting hosting company we had that we're switching from was giving me a substantial
discount off of that. So I was coming out of pocket for about 100 and something 125 somewhere
around that. So that's what I had been paying for the past few years. And that I can handle no
problem since they changed their policies. Now I'm paying the full amount of 522 dollars.
That's not as easy to justify. And before please don't send in an offer, I appreciate it,
but we've already got it worked out. So before you go telling us or offering, we're good. Thank you.
But we need some power and we need this space for the show. We need bandwidth. We can't do shared
hosting. We have outgrown. I started off using shared hosting. I moved up to a dedicated server that
I split with some friends at the time, moved up to a bigger shared dedicated server that I had half
of, moved up to a low end dedicate. We have jumped over the years and grown and grown tremendously
to where we at now. We need power. So we have to have a dedicated server with a lot of resources.
So that costs money. The other thing that costs a lot of money is as part of my retirement.
And what led to my retirement was I was spending all my time being a system administrator,
constantly fending off attacks, constantly updating software, constantly trying to do all that while
at the same time, working on projects, reorganizing, adding new features, et cetera, et cetera.
It just became too much work and not fun anymore. I couldn't do shows. I haven't written. I wrote
an article in 2016, maybe a year ago now, and you're in a half now, maybe. Before that, it had been
about four or five years, three or four years since I've written one. I'm not able to write stuff,
I'm not able to record shows, et cetera, because I was spending all my time doing this stuff. And then,
like I said, then people talk trash and kick you and insult you. You kind of say, forget it.
Yeah. So I am in this for the fun of it. And when it becomes stops being fun anymore, then
you know, and people stop caring, then I'm going to stop caring. So I still care right now. And
I'm in the process, we do have a new hosting company that we're working with. We're trying to
move servers over. So I am back involved in that. I am back doing this. This admin stuff, which I don't
like, but one of the things that we were doing is we assisted on fully managed hosting, which is
another reason why that's such a high price. I can find cheaper hosting, but I need management services
because I can't do the job. I'm not a system administrator. I fumble through for years and years,
but enough is enough. I can't do it well. I did it good enough. We only got hacked once a couple
years ago. And that's because we were told we were a bunch of white hat sellouts. So and got
attacked by some black hat group, but that's fine. That's what they do. We were back up and
working within 24 to 48 hours later, recovered everything because again, I as administrator, I had
backups and had a bunch of people that helped us, including Lattera, Nick 84, a bunch of others.
So I need to turn that over to someone else. So with this new hosting company, we're going to have
somebody dedicated to us who's going to be the person to maintain to keep things updated. And
that's going to help tremendously. We also have that with the existing host, but we still,
unfortunately, had to do a lot of work ourselves. So our new hosting, which we'll talk more about
that, probably on an upcoming show. Actually, I'm going to have, I'm going to do an interview
I've already scheduled with the person who's doing our management, who's actually a fellow hacker,
as it turns out. And I should give, I should pause for a second and give shout outs to my good
friend, MC Frontalot, who helped us with the hosting as well. For some of you who may or may not
know that we host MC Frontalot's website, Frontalot.com. If you don't know who that is, go check out the
site. He's the one who actually found the contact. He breached out to his resources and put me in touch.
So thanks to him for that. And he and I are probably going to do an episode sometime soon as well.
Anyway, sorry, I rambled the we're moving servers and I got a couple of them moved over as we're
recording this now each day. I try to move as many overs as I can, but there's timing issues and
there are system issues. We're moving from a dedicated server to a private cloud cloud computing,
which we're going to do an episode on that as well soon. Another episode, I should say. We have
our own private cloud now and we can run everything in virtual machines. That's going to help us be
much more organized, much more secure and much more efficient. And it's also going to allow us to
bring up new sites and make changes much faster because we can just blow out a new virtual machine.
Cloud technology is a wonderful, wonderful thing. If anybody thinks that somebody told me one time
that cloud technology was this evil thing, then people was stealing jobs and taking away. And I don't
understand that for the slightest least bit. It's just another technology and it still leaves
people to maintain and set them in and all that. I don't get that at all. It's just another new
technology. In our case, it's going to work wonderfully, I think. Yeah. And you're going to be doing
some episodes on that. On the specs of the servers and all that stuff. I hope to be.
If you don't, I'll be I'll be sending you gentle reminders like it is. It's just non-committal
to like and get. So you heard it here, folks. HPR will be moving and kind of back on topic. I'm
sorry. You and I talked about maybe changing the content management system, trying to make sure
that we give all the features that we want and have talked about and we'll go into that another
time. But it looks like we do have an understanding. We're going to be moving over to the server.
And let me also put everyone at ease in case you have any concerns that no matter what,
worst case scenario. If I completely blow a fuse and say, I quit, I never want to do this again.
If the hosting completely falls apart, if what everything is backed up, I will make sure that
it's transferred over to the appropriate people. And I know and Ken, I'm going to put you on
the spot, worst case scenario. I'm going to make sure at least Ken gets the HPR backups of everything
so that he can take it and put it on another hosting somewhere and keep HPR alive.
Regardless of BenRab, regardless of me, regardless of Stankdog and any of that stuff.
I'm also going to try to do the same with BenRab and all the other sites that we have. Let somebody
else take them over if they want. I did this about a year ago with some of our other smaller sites,
past them off to people. Ken, I will hand it over to you if you will. On the ring.
Well, let's get the server moved and hopefully we'll get you reinvigorated back
out of retirement, at least recording shows on HPR. Hopefully yes, but worst case,
somebody will keep HPR going. Cool. And just to give I'm looking here at some of the log files and
I don't know how much we can trust them, but the average data transfer per day on HPR is 11.3 gigabytes.
Cool. Giving a total of 13.88 terabytes since it was set up.
That's another thing to the drives the cost of the box up is back when we first came out with
even back in BenRab radio, we were getting in our heyday or whatever you want to call it.
We were getting over 20,000 downloads of the show each week. And it hacked TV at the time,
which of course video is much larger files. So we had to switch to an unmetered server many years ago.
So the price jumped up because of that a long time ago. So again, another reason we've had to grow.
So once again, when I negotiate and work out contracts and stuff with the new hosting companies,
that's one of the things from the ground up. I mean, I can throw some specs out if you guys
really want to hear them. I mean, we're going to a server now that again, it's a private cloud.
And we can allocate the resources however we want. But right now we're going to throw and this
is overkill. We don't need all of this. Let me preface that. We don't need all of this yet.
Yes. But it's nice to have it and it gives us flexibility to add new features and add new sites and
come up with new projects. But we are going to be on a dedicated cloud, private cloud that's
going to have up to eight gigs of memory available. Excuse me, actually, is it eight or sixteen?
At least eight gigs of memory dedicated to it. We're going to have, I think, three or four quad core
processors. So we're going to have up to, I think, actually, I think it's four. I think it's up to 16
cores. Processor cores available to us so we can shave those off and make sure that if a site is
running slower, sluggish, we can kind of modify that to give it a little bit more power,
a little bit more memory, et cetera, et cetera. Unmetered bandwidth on a 100 megabit switch this
time. We've always been throttled at a 10. So we should have plenty of bandwidth. Actually,
we take a look at it's alive. There is a limit. There is a meter on there. However,
the company is being very, very nice and very working with us very closely that if we get close
to it, we'll just increase it as needed and tweak it. So it, for all intents and purposes, it's
some, it is going to be unlimited bandwidth. So, and if we do need more resources, if we do
outgrow that, I have no idea how we could possibly use all of those resources. But if we do, we can
just add them all to the cloud and a quick, quick bounce to the server, quick little reboot,
we should, it should all be right back up and running with all the resources and we can reallocate
them as necessary. So again, that's the benefit of cloud computing. Okay. So I'm, what else is,
what else is over on bin rev that we could start using? Maybe forums and
right. So we see channel. We're going to a new content management system. It looks like with HPR,
as we move servers, we're going to kind of kill two birds of one stone. And when we do that,
I think one of the things that we really should offset over to bin rev is bin rev is most known
for its forums. And some people only know it for its forums, especially since the radio shows
going down. So what some of the listeners may not know is that every time something gets posted on
hackerpublicradio.org, we, we take that feed and immediately start a thread over on bin rev
radio. Now it's mostly just to announce it for the people in the forums to let them know what the
episodes about. And if they want to download it, they can click through and go to download it. Well,
I think that there's a lot of communication, a lot of people who want to follow up and actually
have discussions on that topic. So I would encourage people to go over to the forums. There is a
hacker-minus forum in there that you can go into and post. And there will be one thread, at least one
thread, for each episode to get posted. So right now, I'm looking at, as we record this, as episode
705 was put up, my first Linux box, if you want to discuss that one, the one before that disaster
protocol annoyed, we post that up there every day, the spider automatically grabs that. So if you
want to follow up on that, I think that would be a better place. You've got a lot more people there
who might give you some feedback, a lot more audience that might want to participate in that,
as well as all the obvious HDR audience and listeners. So that's one resource that I think is
really probably not used to the full advantage. It's actually what Ben or Eb is most known for.
So I would say that's for certain, for sure, something people should go over their news.
We also have a calendar that's built into the forums as well that I wish people used more.
We can use that maybe to schedule special HDR events. Like I know,
can don't you guys have HDR round tables every so often? Yeah, we do.
Those are always great. And I think that's a special episode, a special event that would be
worthy of putting in the calendar to let people know. Yes, there are daily shows and you know,
not to insult anybody, but let's be frank, summer, hit and miss summer. If you're not interested
in the topic, you might not want to listen to, but there are also big events that everybody I think
would benefit from and probably should participate. So I would love to see people using the calendar.
Yeah. And if you go over to binrev.com, that's b-i-n-r-e-v.com. Again, some listeners may not know
the site and the relationship. Across the top, it's pretty easy to navigate. I think we put a lot of time
into thinking it through and getting it organized. You'll just click on the calendar and you can go
in there and add things to avoid spam. It will have to be approved by a moderator, but we're trying to
be better about and be quick about approving those type of things. And your gallery is all.
There is a gallery. I think a lot of times radio does not do justice. It's why we started
hack TV was because we realized some stuff you can't explain on the radio verbally. You have to
have video or pictures with it. So we do have a gallery that is a separate thing that I also pay
for. When I talked about earlier funding, I only talked about the server costs. I also pay for
software licensing on for some of these things. There's sure there's great open-source stuff and
we do support it and use it as much as possible. But a lot of times, there's better software out
there and I'm not afraid or unwilling to pay for that. So our forums are powered by an vision and
I think they just have a superior product. So I pay for that integrated calendar, integrated blogs
as well. If you're any registered user, you can come over and create and run your own blog from
there. I would love the hacker for the hacker public radio correspondence to come over. They
can start their own blog where they can maybe get some follow up information about the episode
they've posted or just blog in general. So that's another resource that's available. The gallery.
Again, you can upload photos to that. There's pretty liberal and pretty easy to upload photos
and limits or not are very friendly. So you can upload a bunch of photos and schematics,
things like that for episodes that you use. And then again, to tie it all together, go back to
that forum thread and hacker media and point and link to those. You can post them in-stream.
It's all integrated very nicely to make that easy. You know, actually one other resource that's
available, we have binrev.com of course, but we also have binrev.net. binrev.net is our IRC
server. So if you want to connect to IRC.binrev.net, you will find it's pretty active. There's quite a few
people in there. Maybe a lot of people idling in any course of day, but you can join pound binrev,
which is the main channel on that IRC server, but there is also a dedicated pound HPR for hacker
public radio. So you will sometimes see the HPR hosts in there. I pretty much am in there
quite a bit of the time I'm idling, but if you send me a message, I will roll over to it eventually.
It's in my office on a different machine. I'll roll over and probably reply. If not right away,
I'll eventually reply. So if you want to send me a message, I'm on there all the time. So
IRC.binrev.net. You know, everybody is welcome to use that. We'll even create some more
channels if you guys want to use it more. So that resource isn't available as well as the other
things we kind of talked about. And just a couple other little things on there. There's a link
section. So if you have any interesting links, you can post them there. That's kind of common place.
There's a download section. And that's where I am still in the process. Unfortunately,
I've never finished a misplaced a few episodes of binrev radio. But all the old episodes of RFA,
Radio Freak America, binrev radio, some extra stuff, some like exclusive things that we never
made available or are in there now. So you might want to go check that out. And we may eventually
have to roll some of the old HPR episodes over there just to get them a little bit more organized.
Because 700 episodes are starting to take up some space. Yeah.
Just speaking about that, we, one of the requests has been to have a speaks and an org feed.
And I'm just wondering what the new server would that be? Something that we're going to be able to do?
I would imagine yes, however. And this is probably something you and I got to work out the details
offline. But it's something we've wanted to do from day one. It's something I wanted to do even back
on binrev. And there's a one very simple reason that I never did it. I love org. I love open
sources. None of that. The reality is more people will be able to listen to the message,
to listen to the radio shows if it's an MP3 format. That's the only reason. It's sad. I wish
iPods and all these other devices out there were much easier to play them. And maybe these days
they have become so. I think that a lot of them are. But at the time then, and even still now,
if we went all goingly, most people unfortunately will not be able to listen to it. And that is
counterproductive. Well, I'm not suggesting going all goingly because my view on MP3 formats coming
from Europe where thankfully we still don't have patents, although we have to be ever watchful on.
My view is that if we hear in Europe were to not use MP3 formats on our free and open source
desktops, we will be admitting that such a thing as patents on software and the idea of
having a patent on MP3 is in fact something that we agree with. So by switching to an MP3,
or an AUG only show, we will be supporting that here in Europe and that's something I don't want
to do because I don't think the patents on MP3 are valid. And there's free and open and when I say
free, I mean the four freedoms versions of the decoders for the MP3 format. So they adhere to all the
free software versions of that. I'm just because you in the states of a backward idea of what
you can patent. I don't see why the rest of the world should suffer.
Yeah, we have backwards ideas on a lot of things here, but we do a lot of things right too.
Yes, you do. Yes, you do. That was a tongue-in-cheek here. Don't you want to take me to this?
No, I actually agree with you. We do a lot of things backwards sometimes and I certainly don't agree.
Like I said earlier, that's why it falls under gray hat. There's a lot of stuff that I just don't
agree with. So you know what? Everybody, I let everybody make their own personal decisions on how they
fall on that kind of stuff. I'll certainly share my opinions just like you just did and that's wonderful
and let people take that information and do what they will. But yeah, no, I wasn't. I knew that you
weren't saying all goingly at all. That's the main reason we didn't do all goingly or why we haven't
buckled under the pressure to go all back and bin rev days. And the secondary reason after that,
that was the primary. The secondary one was simply 705 episodes,
this space times two. So to have an augfeed in addition, which is what you're referring to there,
you're talking about, you're talking about doubling the this space of gigabytes upon gigabytes upon
terabytes of storage. Now we're going to look into that and we're going to try to make that happen
now that we have some more resources. This space is generally very cheap, but we're just trying to
liberate some right now as that is what we're trying to do. If we can liberate the
this space, we definitely have the support. And I don't know, Ken, what your feelings are,
would you want to do that going forward? Or do you want to retroactively go back?
Well, what we already have is textfiles.com have mirrored all the shows for us up until I think
600 and something. So we could point even the old shows or the old MP3 shows over there and then
just kind of have a rolling window that, you know, from this episode forward, all formats are
available on HPR Live, you know, for the last six months or whatever. And then if you want the rest,
the feed would point automatically to, you know, the off site location archive.org go wherever.
Right. And you know, this is this is actually some insight for the listeners. This is kind of what
you and I go through and and we do have these brainstorms and conversations behind the scene to see
what should we do? What's the best way to go? Do we offset them? Do we just allocate more
this space? We're going to see what we can come up with and certainly listen and look forward to
look on HPR for an announcement in the future on what we end up deciding to go with or how we end up
going with it. I encourage everybody again to join the mail list on HPR where I will throw
these questions and, you know, get feedback and as far as I'm concerned, I'm not taking the
decision by myself of just a HPR host like everybody else. The question will be far out of and,
you know, if you take the time to email back or you're the only one who emails back with an answer,
then you are representative of the HPR community and that's where we're going to go.
Which already rules even if majority is only one? Well, if only one person is interested in
replying, it's a democracy type thing. Exactly. And that's why we encourage people to get involved,
participate, record episodes, post comments, you know, if you want to sit back and not do anything,
don't complain. Don't tell me I'm doing a terrible job. Don't tell Ken that you don't like what
he's done with this and that. No, shut up. Put up or shut up as the saying goes. No, I actually
just screwed here. Well, you get you get more of this and maybe I'll be further down the line,
but I think if somebody even, you know, takes the time to sit down and writes an email complaining
about something and they've got a vital point for them. Sure, but yeah. No, then that, yeah, negative
feedback is fine as long as it's constructive, productive. If it has something to it like a suggestion
or anything, but sending an email going, HPR sucks, you guys are a bunch of white hat sellouts.
That doesn't do me any good. You suck, shut up. Keep that to yourself. I don't care to hear that.
I don't need it. Buzz off. I'm trying my best to not go into a rant and start cussing right now,
but I get a lot of that. I'm glad you don't. Good, because you should actually just have,
you know, gather all those together and have the text to speech dude read it out and submit it as a
shield. Actually, that might sound really funny to have the text to speech reading some of that.
Well, since I've retired, I don't get as much of it. So that's another reason I just want to stay
the hell out of it. Yeah, but that means they've won. No, I don't know if that's I'm still I'm staying
out of it publicly. Let's say it that way. I'm still like, as you know, I've been involved behind
the scenes. I'm still running the store. I'm still financing. I'm still updating binrab.com
forums. I'm still in there. I just I took my name out of it. You know, I had my feelings hurt
pretty badly. And yeah, I guess I sound like a punk, but I hurt my feelings really badly when I had
some people in an old IRC channel tell me that binrab was all about my ego and that it was just
all my all about staying dog that meant and I don't know, it just made me I like I guess it's
really sensitive to me because I could have kept staying dog.com and let it grow and let it be
the big name and let it I didn't want that. We purposely the motivation to start binrab was say
it's not about individuals. It's not me. I do nothing. I am nobody. I mean, I don't know how to say
that. That's not me like belittling myself putting myself down. I'm confident. I have a good job. I
very good at what I do. I'm technically proficient and a lot of things, but there's always somebody
out there who's better at you than you are. There's 13-year-old kids in the forums that can program
circles around me and see. You know, I know some see and I'm comfortable with it. I do it for my
job sometimes, but there's some kid out there who's taught himself that knows it better or somebody
who graduated from college. Hey, I know some basic penetration testing. I took my C.E.H. certification.
I've done episodes about that. That's another topic. I know how to do some of that stuff. I can
push the buttons and type the commands to do that. I'm not good at it. There's a million people
better. I am not anything special. I'm not. I'm just a guy who tried to start this to get people
working together to take the individually individuality out of it. And that's my biggest, I guess,
but hurt about the whole thing is that when somebody tries to say that it's about me, that's why I
step away. That's why I don't get involved. That's why I haven't been putting out content
recording. Actually, I mean, I'll come out with a confession right here that no one knows.
I have been putting stuff out under another name. A couple of other names lately because I don't want,
I'm trying to pull away, but I still like producing content and putting things out.
So I've been writing under another statement lately because I don't want it to be about me. I don't
want it. That's not what it's about.
Stank, I, yeah, sorry, this is probably something that we should have offline, but I don't think
you really need to worry about that, to be honest, because, you know, I listened to Ben Rev and I never,
ever got the feeling that it was about you. Well, yeah, well, there's a there's a sand and
gruggers enough. So there you go. There you go. There you go. I was being so good.
There really, there really is. I'm sorry. There, there is. I know you don't see it and I'm sorry
to bring it up and go again, take this into but hurt direction, but it's one of the things that
drove me out, one of the many things that not being fine, the constant poking, harassing, the
accusations that it's an ego trip and all these other things. It's just like, you know what,
that's not what I'm in this for, that's not what hacking is about. I don't want to be involved
in that anymore. It's, you know, it's just I stay out of it. So I'm doing it behind the scenes.
I don't want or need any credit. Again, you get the credit for HBR. You're doing a lot of this
along with the response. I would actually like to stop you there, because everybody is thanking me for
this stuff. And I just want to make it clear to everybody again. I appreciate it and all,
but stop to the best. The best thing that you can do is just help out in some way. And that's
what people are doing. So it's great. You know what I mean. I'm saying you because you're on
the phone, unfortunately, but again, we've listed them. I mean, between droops and an egg,
the thing, get all the credit. That's my point. It's not me. It's you meaning you all, all of you,
all of you listening, all of you correspondence, all of you who have contributed it. And again,
like you said earlier, even if it's an email saying, hey, I hate that you guys do this. I don't like
that you use foul language. We're going to talk about some of those things on another episode.
That's fine. That is good feedback. I die appreciate that. That has value. Thank you for that.
Give it, but it has to have something of value in it. You know, not just you suck. I hope you die.
You know, you know, people started a set of forums a couple of years ago, where their forum titles
were like things like shut up and die stank dog. If you got 10 posts and if you got 20 posts,
it was like stank dog will die or stuff like that. I mean, this is the kind of stuff I get and I have
to put up where. You know, I don't deserve that. I don't need that. You know, shouldn't fall back in it.
I don't care what you people think about stuff like that. So I have turned angry towards the
community because I think the community has turned on me and there's not enough support for people
who do good things. So when I say you can, yes, it's you, but it's also all of the other people we
mentioned. I support people who are producing and doing positive content, providing content,
giving positivity and going in the direction that Ben rev is always been about supporting
constructive product of creation, originality, artistic ability, do something good. I will back you
up every single freaking time. Even if I don't like it or agree with, I'll say, you know what?
I have a different opinion, but I respect him for saying his.
And I think that will bring us to a natural end to the show.
Thank you. Take a deep breath. Have some more ST.
And anything else that you want to say just to finish off?
You know, just to be, I do get mad, I do start ranting. To those of you I did mention who are
producing positive, I do think you know who you are. I'm not going to sit here and single you out
anymore. We've already talked about a few, but post in the forums, there are people in the forums
that I see them posting and I give them what do you call it, the reputation points and I rank them
up. I see who's contributing. I know who's doing good, positive things. I support you. I appreciate it
and I will have your back. Just know that. So if you're doing something good and positive,
I'm supporting you. If you're not, get out of the way.
Cool. Um, Stank, I'd like to, first of all, thank you for taking the time to do the interview.
And hopefully we can come on and do a few more about the servers and some of the changes that
are going to go on. But I'd also like to thank you for putting your hand in your pocket and
funding bin rev and HPR and have a nice rest of the evening. Thanks guys. Bye bye.
Thank you for listening to Hacker Public Radio. For more information on the show and how to
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