"3 Minutes
and 40 Seconds. Then Nothing."
Plug "Pulled" on WTP-TV? or Just a Coincidence?
First Show Now Available For Viewing
Three minutes and forty seconds of high quality audio and video, then
nothing. Thats just part of the story on WTPs initial attempt to broadcast
THE LIBERTY HOUR this past Tuesday night.
Here are the facts as we know them.
1) During the day Tuesday, in preparation of the WTP-TV broadcast, the
broadcast server and software configurations were tested repeatedly and
verified as functioning properly.
From the beginning of the broadcast at 9:30 PM Tuesday, many viewers
experienced various problems receiving the broadcast stream. Exactly one
minute after Bob Schulz completed saying the following words, the broadcast
was completely disabled and knocked off the "air":
"Later, during this broadcast, I will outline a bold but doable PLAN
that the We The People Foundation and Congress will spearhead a plan
designed to bring our servant government back under the control of the
People and our Constitution.
We call on all concerned Americans to unite behind the PLAN. The hour
is late.
At the heart of the PLAN, which I will soon outline, is a Mission
Statement as follows:
"With the grace of God and with malice toward none, and to force the
leaders of the Executive and Legislative branches of the federal
government to respond to each of the four Petitions for Redress of
Grievances that were recently served on every member of the Congress and
President Bush, we will do everything in our power, including the
creation of a Legal Defense Fund, to get three hundred thousand
(300,000) employers, employees, retirees and self-employed people to
immediately begin retaining and keeping in their possession the money
that they would otherwise have turned over to the federal government."
2) For the next hour Bob Schulz and his guest Charlie Beall completed
their remarks, in which they detailed the activities to be to be initiated
by WTP pursuant to the Mission and laid out the rationale for this civil
action. The entire presentation was recorded and archived and is available (see
link below).
3) While the production continued in the studio, our service provider
attempted to figure out why the broadcast was not going out.
4) While the number of people accessing the WTP website to watch the
broadcast was very high in numbers, the problem was not a lack of adequate
bandwidth capacity. THE LIBERTY HOURS access to the Internet is through
dedicated server with a very large data communications backbone that can
handle the throughput of over 1,000,000 users.
5) The problem was Time Warner.
6) Time Warner owns the node (a "junction box") through which pass the
cables that our streaming provider renders its service. A node is comprised
of hardware that manages the digital transmission of packets containing the
sound and video of the broadcast. Corporations like Cisco manufacture the
hardware that is used in nodes.
7) This particular node serves two large commercial multicast broadcast
providers as well as a host of commercial T-1 data lines, residential cable
customers, etc. Our broadcasters service is specifically enabled to support
the "multicast" broadcast transmission protocol that was used to broadcast
our program.
8) At 6 PM Tuesday, our web broadcaster received a message that was left
on a telephone voice recording machine from someone who identified himself
as Tony Garcia from Time Warner. The message was that Time Warner was
experiencing a problem affecting just and ONLY the specific
communications node in the local area that was to carry the broadcast. He
further informed our broadcast provider that a "work order" had been issued
for maintenance. Coincidentally, as we found out later -- the only part of
the node affected turned out to be the part that supports the multicast
digital transmission protocol we were using for our broadcast.
No other reason was given for the fact that Time Warner had deprived our
provider the ability to broadcast in this mode. It appears there was no
attempt made by Time Warner to coordinate their repair schedule with their
other commercial customers on this node that were affected -- or to
ascertain if their "maintenance" would interfere with the ongoing 24 hr/day
commercial activities of our broadcaster.
9) Our broadcaster was not able to reconfigure the server or software in
time to continue. Attempts to revive the broadcast ceased after 10 PM.
By early the next morning we had received more than 1,000 e-mails from
people, informing us of their experiences while trying to access the website
to watch the broadcast. We thank everyone who did so. It was very helpful.
Besides getting knocked off the air after three minutes and forty
seconds, we have been informed by many people that during the first few
minutes of the broadcast they had intermittent audio but no video, or video
but no audio. This kind of problem is usually attributable to dial up
connections with slower speed modems and older operating systems, but also
could also have been directly caused by the hardware problems at the
communications node.
Finally, We had reports from many people who said that when they went to
our website, the entire page was filled with "gibberish." Here is a sample:
"<N'ms,)kH*fg2ʨGjw9K6995-Hzloss>;'gg[/?T
˙{/K@JHm-
With some people, the gibberish would not be there when they re-booted
their computer. With others, it was.
This problem seems to occur every time we have a major event. The last
time it occurred was on November 14, 2002, which was the day of our live
webcast of Freedom Drive 2002 from the National Mall in DC. Before that it
occurred on April 8, 2002, which was the day of our live webcast of our
press conference from the National Press Club in DC.
The technology experts tell us we have a "very sophisticated" hacker at
work. Somebody is interested in limiting the number of people who can access
our website at times of high importance to us. We are taking steps to
prevent the problem from occurring in the future.
The "gibberish" computer attack appears to interact with Internet
Explorers web page memory cache and certain system level settings on our
GiveMeLiberty.org server. Usually, the effects of this attack can be
alleviated by users by clearing out the temporary and history files in
Internet Explorer. This is done by selecting "Tools" "Internet Options" on
I/E and then selecting the "Delete Temporary Files" and the "Clear History"
options.
Now for some good news.
The initial production of THE LIBERTY HOUR was recorded and is now
available. The show is 1hour and 23 minutes long. NOTE: future shows will be
kept under 1 hour in length.
Click Here
mms://www.kbjsoft.com/WTPBroadcast1.wmv to watch the broadcast using
Media Player. NOTE: Due to system workarounds that were implemented to
provide streaming of the broadcast, until next Wednesday, no more than 1500
users will be able to connect at the same time. After next Wednesday, there
will be no limit to the number of simultaneous connections. We are
reconfiguring our system.
If you want, you can download the file directly to your hard drive
(approximately 63 MB) so you can watch it off-line or copy it to a CD-ROM to
distribute to your friends.
Click
Here
to easily download the video file (via FTP) onto your PC.
We encourage everyone to watch the full broadcast of the January 7th
show and to tell others about it. Our next broadcast of THE LIBERTY HOUR
will be on January 21, 2003 at 9:30 P.M. (Eastern), 6:30 P.M. (Pacific).
After that, we intend to broadcast every Tuesday evening.
We apologize for the inconvenience we know many people experienced as a
result of our problem with Time Warner and our hacker. We have taken the
necessary steps to see that those problems do not occur again.
Click here
to read and download a transcript of the January 7, 2003 show.
Click Here
to watch the broadcast using Media Player.
Click
Here
to Download the Video File (via FTP) onto Your PC
Our homepage is:
www.GiveMeLiberty.org