hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0684.txt

Episode: 684
Title: HPR0684: Eben Moglen Freedom In the Cloud
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0684/hpr0684.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 00:55:46

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Felt your road, can fell in the sand on them, and just had to go to the radio, hacker, and public.
Hello and welcome to Hacker Public Radio. My name is Ken Fallon and I'd like to wish everybody listening a happy, same Patrick's Day.
Today's syndicated Thursday is a speech given by Evan Moglum at the meeting of the Internet Society's New York branch on 5 February 2010.
It's entitled Freedom in the Cloud, Software Freedom, Privacy, and Security for Web2.0 and Cloud Computing.
This speech has inspired the FreedomBox Foundation.org and they are currently running a campaign to push the FreedomBox Foundation from 0 to 60 in 30 days.
It's a Kickstarter campaign and there will be two more days left to run. So even if you want to donate a dollar, it'll show the support for the project.
If you would like to suggest any other creative commons works that we should include on syndicated Thursday, feel free to suggest them by emailing admin at hackerpublicradio.org.
Just one note to people listening on iTunes. If you could reload Episode 0681, my first computer hosted by Mr. Gadget from Monday, the 14th of March. If you could reload that episode, that would be fantastic.
I'm currently working on a new iTunes feed, so expect some additional duplicated shows to come down in your feed shortly.
Just a small note. This is an enhanced episode and you can see the video of the speech on the hackerpublicradio website.
I remember that he said at that time, well basically we won and it was true in the sense that free open source offers is and what's used now on every environment from a hand-held computer or a smart phone to.
Now used on every type of computer imaginable from a, it's for the web cost. One more time.
Okay, is used on every type of device from a smartphone to a super computer. But happily we are faced with new challenges in terms of software freedom, the freedom to know what the software you use actually does, how it works, to modify it and customize it and enhance it.
And to freely redistribute it, these freedoms are challenged by the new cloud computing services and web-food.no services where basically you don't even know where physically your data or your application will process resides.
It could be anywhere in any country with different laws and different kinds of law enforcement. And again, there is the issue of who actually owns your data when, for example, you're using a service like Gmail where your data resides on Google servers and you really don't know what they're doing with it or the promise that they're going to be not evil.
So on that note, I'd like to throw this over to Evan and here you go.
Thank you, David. It's a pleasure to be here. I would love to think that the reason that we're all here on a Friday night is because my speeches are so good.
I actually have no idea why we're all here on a Friday night, but I'm very grateful for the invitation. I am the person who had no date tonight.
So it was particularly convenient that I was invited for now.
So, of course, I didn't have any date tonight. Everybody knows that. My calendar is on the web, right?
The problem is that problem, right? It is that problem. Our calendar is on the web, our locations on the web.
You have a cell phone and you have a cell phone network provider and if your cell phone network provider is Sprint, then we can tell you that several million times last year somebody who has a law enforcement ID card in his pocket somewhere went to the Sprint website and asked for the real time location of somebody with a telephone number and was given it several million times just like that.
We know that because Sprint admits that they have a website where anybody with a law enforcement ID can go and find the real time location of anybody with a Sprint cell phone.
And we don't know that about AT&T and Verizon because they haven't told us. But that's the only reason we don't know, right? Because they haven't told us.
That's a service that you think of as a traditional service telephony. But the deal that you get with the traditional service called telephony now includes the thing you didn't know, like Sprint.
That's not a service to you, but it's a service. And you get it for free with your service contract for telephony, right?
You get for free the service of advertising with your Gmail, which means of course there's another service behind, which is untouched by human hands semantic analysis of your email.
I still don't understand why anybody wants that. I still don't understand why anybody uses it, but the people do, including the very sophisticated and thoughtful people in this room.
And you get free email service and some storage, which is worth exactly a penny and a half at the current price of storage. And you get spying all the time.
And for free, too. And your counters on the web and everybody can see whether you have a date Friday night and you have a status, single looking.
And you get a service for free advertising single looking and spying with it. And it all sort of just grew up that way, right? In the blink of an eye. And here we are.
And what's that got to do with open source? Well, in fact, it doesn't have anything to do with open source. That has a whole lot to do with free software.
Yet another reason why Stolman was right. It's the freedom, right? So we need to back up a little bit and figure out where we actually are and how we actually got here.
And probably even more important, whether we can get out and if so, how? And it isn't a pretty story at all.
David's right. I mean, I can hardly begin by saying that we won, given that spying comes free with everything now.
But we haven't lost. We've just really bamboozled ourselves. And we're going to have to unbambuzzle ourselves real quickly or we're going to bamboozle a lot of other innocent people who didn't know that we were throwing away their privacy for them forever.
It begins, of course, with the Internet, which is why it's really nice to be here talking to the Internet Society, a society dedicated to the health expansion and theoretical elaboration of a peer-to-peer network called the Internet.
Designed as a network of peers without any intrinsic need for hierarchical or structural control and assuming that every switch in the net is an independent freestanding entity whose volition is equivalent to the volition of the human beings who own and control it.
That's the design of the net, which, whether you're thinking about it as glued together with IPv4 or that wonderful improvement IPv6, we will never use, apparently.
It still assumes peer communications. Of course, it never really, really, really worked out that way.
There was nothing in the technical design to prevent it, not at any rate in the technical design of the interconnection of nodes and their communication.
There was a software problem. It's a simple software problem and it has a simple name, its name is Microsoft.
Conceptually, there was a network which was designed as a system of peer nodes, but the operating software which occupied the network.
In an increasingly, I'll use the word, they use it about us, why can't I use it back viral way over the course of a decade and a half.
The software that came to occupy the network was built around a very clear idea that had nothing to do with peers. It was called a server client architecture.
And the idea that the network was a network of peers was hard to perceive after a while, particularly if you were, let us say, ordinary human being, that is not a computer engineer, scientist or researcher, not a hacker, not a geek.
If you were an ordinary human being, it was hard to perceive that the underlying architecture of the net was meant to be peerage because the operating system software with which you interacted very strongly instantiated the idea of the server and client architecture.
In fact, of course, if you think about it, it was even worse than that. The thing called Windows was a degenerate version of a thing called X Windows.
It too thought about the world in a server client architecture, but what we would now think of as backwards. The server was the thing at the human being's end, remember?
That was the basic X Windows conception of the world. It served communications with human beings at the end points of the net to processes located at arbitrary places near the center in the middle or at the edge of the net.
It was the great idea of Windows in an odd way to create a political archetype in the net which reduced the human being to the client and produced a big centralized computer which we might have called a server which now provided things to the human being on take it or leave it terms.
They were, of course, quite take it or leave it terms and unfortunately everybody took it because they didn't know how to leave once they got in.
Now the net was made of servers in the center and clients at the edge. Clients had rather little power and servers had quite a lot.
As storage gets cheaper, as processing gets cheaper, and as complex services that scale in ways that are hard to use small computers for or at any rate these aggregated collections of small computers for are the most important of which is search.
As services began to populate that net the hierarchical nature of the net came to seem like it was meant to be there. The net was made of servers and clients and the clients were the guys at the edge representing human beings and servers were things in the middle with lots of power and lots of data.
Now one more thing happened about that time. It didn't happen in Microsoft Windows computers although it happened in Microsoft's Windows servers and it happened more insensible operating systems like Unix and GNU Linux and other ones.
Namely, servers kept logs. That's a good thing to do. Computers are to keep logs. It's a very wise decision when making computer operating software to keep logs. It helps with debugging, makes efficiencies attainable, makes it possible to study the actual operations of computers in the real world. It's a very good idea.
But if you have a system which centralizes servers and the servers centralize their logs then you are creating vast repositories of hierarchically organized data about people at the edges of the network that they do not control.
And unless they are experienced in the operation of servers will not understand the comprehensiveness of will not understand the meaningfulness of will not understand the aggregate ability of.
So we build a network out of a communications architecture design for peering which we defined in client server style which we then defined to be the disempowered client at the edge and the server in the middle.
We aggregated processing and storage increasingly in the middle and we kept the logs that is information about the flows of information in the net in centralized places far from the human beings who controlled or at any rate thought they controlled the operation of the computers that increasingly dominated their lives.
This was a recipe for disaster. Now I haven't mentioned yet the word cloud which I was dealt on the top of the deck when I received the news that I was talking here tonight about privacy in the cloud.
I haven't mentioned the word cloud because the word cloud doesn't really mean anything very much. In other words if the disaster we are having is not the catastrophe of the cloud that disaster we are having is the catastrophe of the way we misunderstood the net under the assistance of the unfree software that helped us to understand it.
What cloud means is that servers have ceased to be made of iron. Cloud means virtualization of servers has occurred. So out here in the dusty edges of the galaxy where we live in disempowered clienthood nothing very much has changed.
As you walk inward towards the center of the galaxy it gets more fuzzy than it used to. We resolve now halo where we used to see actual stars you know servers with switches and buttons you can push and such.
Instead what has happened of course is that iron no longer represents a single server iron is merely a place where servers could be.
And so cloud means servers have gained freedom. Freedom to move freedom to dance freedom to combine and separate and re aggregate into all kinds of tricks servers have gained freedom clients have gained nothing welcome to the cloud.
It's a minor modification of the recipe for disaster. It improves the operability of systems that control the clients out there who were meant to be peers in a net made of equal things.
So that's the architecture of the catastrophe. If you think about it each step in that architectural evolution away from a network made of peers to servers that serve the communication with human beings to clients which are programs running on heavy iron to clients which are the computers that people actually use in a fairly disempowered state and servers are high concentration of powers in the net
to servers are virtual processes running in clouds of iron at the center of an increasingly hot galaxy and the clients are out there in the dusty spiral arms all of those decisions architecturally were made without any discussion of the social consequences long term part of our general difficulty in talking about the social consequences of technology during the great period of invention of the internet.
Done by computer scientists who are terribly interested in sociology social psychology or with a few shining exceptions freedom.
So we got an architecture which was in very subject to misused indeed it was in a way begging to be misused and now we are getting the misuse that we set up.
Because we have thinned the clients out further and further and further in fact we made the mobile we put them in our pockets and we started strolling around with them.
There are a lot of reasons for making clients disempowered and there are even more reasons for disempowering the people who own the clients and who might quaintly be thought of as the people who ought to control it.
If you think for just a moment how many people have an interest in disempowering the clients that are the mobile telephones you will see what I mean.
There are many overlapping rights owners as they think of themselves each of whom has a stake in disempowering a client at the edge of a network to prevent particular hardware from being moved from one network to another to prevent particular hardware from playing music not bought at the great monopoly of music.
To disable competing video delivery services in favor of new chips I founded myself that won't run popular video standards good or bad.
There are a lot of business models that are based around mucking with the control over client hardware and software at the edge to deprive the human being who has quaintly thought that she purchased it from actually occupying the position that capitalism says owners are always in that is of total control.
In fact what we have as I said a couple of years ago in between the appearances here another and while you function in fact we have things we call platforms.
The word platform like the word cloud doesn't inherently mean anything it's thrown around a lot in business talk but basically what platform means is places you can't leave.
Stuff your stuck to things that don't let you off right that's platforms.
And the net once it became a hierarchically architected zone with servers in the center and increasingly disempowered clients at the edge becomes the zone of platforms and platform making becomes the order of the day.
Some years ago a very shrewd lawyer who works in the industry said to me Microsoft was never really software company Microsoft was a platform management company and I thought yes shot through the heart.
So we had a lot of platform managers in a hierarchically organized network and we began to evolve services.
Services is a complicated word it's not meaningless by any means but it's very tricky to describe that we use it for a lot of different things.
We badly need an analytical taxonomy of services as my friend and colleague Philly Begrin in Paris pointed out some two years or three ago.
Taxonomies of services involve questions of simplicity complexity scale and control.
To take an example we might define a dichotomy between complex and simple services in which simple services are things that any computer can perform for any other computer if it wants to.
And complex services are things you can't do with a computer you must do with clusters or structures of some computational or administrative complexity.
Search is a complex service indeed searches the archetypal complex service given the one way nature of links in the web and other elements of the data architecture that we are now also living with.
That's another talk another time search is not a thing that we can easily distribute the power in the market of our friends at Google depends entirely on the fact that search is not easily distributed.
It is a complex service that must be centrally organized and centrally delivered.
It must crawl the web in a unilateral direction link by link figuring out where everything is in order to help you find it when you need it.
And in order to do that at least so far we have not evolved good algorithmic and delivery structures for doing it in a decentralized way.
So search becomes a archetypal complex service and it draws on to itself a business model for its monetization advertising in the 20th century was a random activity you threw things out and hope they worked.
Advertising in the 21st century is an exquisitely precise activity you wait for a guy to want something and then you send him advertisements about what he wants and bingo it works like magic.
So of course on the underside of a complex service called search there is a theoretically simple service called advertising which when unified to a complex service increases its efficiency by orders of magnitude and the increase of the efficiency of the simple service when combined with the complex one produces an enormous surplus revenue flow which can be used to strengthen search even more.
But that's the innocent part of the story and we don't remain in the innocent part of the story for a variety of reasons.
I won't be tedious and Marx is on a Friday night and say because the bourgeoisie is constantly engaged and destructively reinventing and improving its own activities and I won't be moralistic on a Friday night that you can't do that.
And say because you know sin is in irrevocable and human beings are fallen creatures and greed is one of the sins we cannot avoid committing.
I will just say that as a sort of ordinary social process we don't stop at innocent and we go on with surely is the thing you should say on a Friday night.
And so we went on. Now where we went on is really towards the discovery that all of this would be even better if you had all the logs of everything because once you have all the logs of everything then every simple service is suddenly a gold mine waiting to happen and we blew it because the architecture of the net put the logs in the wrong place.
They put the logs where innocence would be tempted. They put the logs where the fallen state of human beings implies eventually bad trouble and we got it.
If a cloud means that we can't even point in the direction of the server anymore and because we can't even point in the direction of the server anymore we don't have extra technical or non technical means of reliable control over this disaster in slow motion.
You can make a rule about logs or data flow or preservation or control or access or disclosure but your laws are human laws and they occupy particular territory and the server is in the cloud.
And that means the server is always one step ahead of any rule you make or two or three or six or proof I just realized I'm subject to regulation I think I'll move to ocean and now.
Which means that in effect we lost the ability to use either legal regulation or anything about the physical architecture of the network to interfere with the process of falling away from innocence that was now inevitable in the stage I'm talking about what we might call late Google stage one.
It is here of course that Mr Zuckerberg enters the human race has you know susceptibility to harm but Mr Zuckerberg has attained an unenviable record he has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age.
Because he hardest you know Friday night that is everybody needs to get laid and he turned it into a structure for degenerating the integrity of human personality and he has to remarkable extent succeeded with a very poor deal namely I will give you free web hosting and some PHP do dads.
And you get spying for free all the time and it works but that's the sad part it works how could that have happened there was no architectural reason really right there was no architectural reason really Facebook is the web with I keep all the logs how do you feel about that.
It's a terrarium for what it feels like to live in a panopticon build out of web parts and it shouldn't be allowed it comes to that it shouldn't be allowed that's a very poor way to deliver those services they are grossly overpriced at spying all the time.
They are not technically innovative they depend upon an architecture subject to misuse and the business model that supports them is misuse there isn't any other business model for them this bad this bad I'm not suggesting it should be illegal it should be obsolete we're technologists we should fix it.
I'm glad I'm with you so far when I come to how we should fix it a little later I hope you'll still be with me because that we could get it done all right but let's say for now that that's a really good example of where we went wrong and what happened to us because it's trickier with Gmail because of that magical
untouched by human handsiness when I say to my students why do you let people read your email they say but nobody's reading my email and no human being ever touch ever that would freak me out I would be creeped out you know if guys at Google were reading my email but that's not happening so I don't have a problem now this they cannot say about that.
Facebook. Indeed they know way too much about Facebook if they let themselves really know it you have read the stuff and you know Facebook workers know who's about to have a love affair before the people do because they can see X obsessively checking the Facebook page of Y.
There's some very nice research done a couple of years ago at MIT and a seminar I shouldn't name by students I'm not going to describe because they were a little denting to the Facebook terms of service in the course of their research they were just scraping but the purpose of their scraping was to demonstrate that you could find closeted homosexuals on Facebook.
They don't say anything about their sexual orientation their friends.
Thanks Jay I appreciate them. Their friends are out their interests are the interests of their friends who are out their photographs are tagged with their friends who are out and they're out except they're not out.
They're just out in Facebook if anybody wants which is not what they had in mind shortly and now we have in mind for them shortly.
In fact the degree of potential informational inequality and disruption and difficulty that arises from a misunderstanding a heuristic error in the minds of human beings
about what is and is not discoverable about them is now our biggest privacy problem.
My students and I suspect many of the students of the teachers in this room to show constantly in our dialogue the difficulty they still think of privacy as the one secret I don't want revealed.
And that's not the problem their problem is all the stuff that's the cruft the data dandruff of life that they don't think of a secret in any way but which aggregates to stuff that they don't want anybody to know.
Which aggregates in fact not just the stuff they don't want people to know but to predictive models about them that they would be very creeped out to think could exist at all.
The simplicity with which you can unanonymize theoretically anonymize data the ease with which from multiple sources available to you through third and fourth party commercial transactions for information you can assemble data maps of people's lives.
The ease with which once you begin constraining by the few things you know about people the data available to you you can quickly infer immense amounts more.
My friend and colleague Bradley cool who works at the software freedom law center is one of those archaic human beings who believes that a social security number is a private thing.
And he goes to great lengths to make sure that his social security number is not disclosed which is his right or our law oddly enough.
Though trying to get health insurance to get a safe deposit box or in fact operate the business at all we bend over backwards sometimes in the operation of our business because Bradley social security number is a secret.
And I said to him one day you know it's over now because Google knows your social security number.
He said no that don't I've never told to anybody I said yeah but they know the social security number of everybody else born involved.
Yours is the other one.
And as you know I mean that's true right the data that we infer is the data in the holes between the data we already know if we know enough things.
So where we live has become a place in which it would be very unwise to say about anything that it isn't known.
If you are pretty widely known in the net and all of us for one reason or another are pretty widely known in the net we want to live there.
It is our neighborhood.
We just don't want to live with a video camera on every tree and a microphone on every bush and the data minor beneath our feet everywhere we walk.
And the net's like that now.
I'm not objecting to the presence of AOL newbies in use net news right.
It's not an aesthetic judgment from 1995 you know but the neighborhood is now full of people who don't share our ethno you know centric techno geekery right.
I'm not lamenting you know progress of the sort of democratizing kind.
On the contrary I'm lamenting progress of a totalizing kind.
I'm lamenting progress hostile to human freedom.
We all know that it's hostile to human freedom.
We all understand its dystopic possibilities because the dystopias of which it is fertile were the stuff of the science fiction that we read when we were children.
The Cold War was fertile in the fantastic invention of where we live now and it's hard for us to accept that but it's true.
Fortunately of course it's not owned by the government.
Well it is it's fortunate it's true.
It's fortunate that it's owned by people who you can bribe to get the thing no matter who you are.
If you're the government you have easy ways of doing it. You fill out a subpoena building and you mail it.
I spent two hours yesterday with a law school class explaining in detail why the Fourth Amendment doesn't exist anymore.
And I'm not going to do it again because that's Thursday night and we would do that on a Friday night.
But the Fourth Amendment doesn't exist anymore. I'll put the audio on the FBI and you can listen to it anytime you want.
We have to fess up.
If we're the people who care about freedom it's late in the game and we're behind.
We did a lot of good stuff and we have a lot of tools lying around that we built over the last 25 years.
I help people build those tools. I help people keep those tools safe.
I help people prevent the monopoly from putting all those tools in its bag and walking off with them.
And I'm glad the tools are around but we do have to admit we have not used them to protect freedom because freedom is decaying.
And that's what David meant in his very kind introduction.
In fact people who are investing in the new enterprises of on freedom are also the people you will hear if you hang out in Silicon Valley these days telling you that open source has become irrelevant.
What's their logic?
The logic is software as a service is becoming the way of the world.
Since nobody ever gets any software anymore the licenses that say if you give people software you have to give them freedom don't matter because you're not giving anybody software you're only giving them services.
Well that's right open source does matter free software matters a lot because of course free software is open source software with freedom.
And someone was right it's the freedom that matters okay the rest of it is just source code freedom still matters.
And what we need to do is to make free software matter to the problem that we have which is unfree services delivered in unfree ways really beginning to deteriorate the structure of human freedom.
Like a lot of unfreedom the real underlying social process that forces this unfreedom along is nothing more than perceived convenience.
All sorts of freedom goes over perceived convenience you know this you stop paying for things with cash you use a card you can wave at a RFID reader.
Convenience is said to dictate that you need free web hosting and PHP do dads in return for spying all the time because web servers are so terrible to run.
Who could run a web server of his own and keep the logs it would be brutal.
Well it would be where I asked right.
You know it's sort of it was a self fulfilling well yeah it was intended to be a self fulfilling yeah it was designed to say you're a client I'm a server.
I invented Windows 7 it was my idea I'll keep the logs thank you that was the that was the industry.
We built another industry it's in here but it's not in well yeah it's sort yeah it is kind of in here so where isn't it well it's not in the personal web server I don't have that would prevent me from falling well why don't we do something about that.
So what do we need we need a really good web server you can put in your pocket and plug in any place.
In other words it shouldn't be any larger than the charger for your cell phone.
And you should be able plug it into any power jack in the world and then any wire near it or sink it up to any Wi-Fi router that happens to be in his neighborhood.
You have a couple USB ports that attach it to things it should know how to bring itself up.
It should know how to start its web server.
It should know how to go and collect your stuff out of all the social networking places where you've got it.
It should know how to send an encrypted backup of everything to the your friends servers.
It should know how to micro blog. It should know how to make some noise that's like tweet but not gonna infringe anybody's trademark.
In other words it should know how to be your oh excuse me I gotta use a dangerous word avatar in a free net that works for you and keeps the logs.
You can always tell what's happening in your server and if anybody else wants to know what's happening in your server they can get a search warrant.
And if you feel like moving your server to Oceana or Cland or New Zealand or the North Pole well by plane ticket and put it in your pocket take it there leave it behind.
Now there's a little more we gotta do but you know it's all trivial we need some dynamic DNS and all stuff we've already invented it's all there nobody needs anything special.
Do we have the server you can put in your pocket?
Deep we do.
Off to shelf hardware now right?
Beautiful little wall warts made with arm chips.
Exactly what I expect for you.
Plug them in, plug them in, wire them up.
How's the software stack in there I don't know gee it's any software stack you want to put in there open to 904 910 804 810 Debian the red or the matter they do it in an instant.
In fact I'll send it to you with somebody's top of the charts current distro in it you just have to name which one you want.
Which one do you want?
Well, you ought to want the Debian GNU Linux social networking stack.
Deliver to you free, free is in freedom, I mean.
Which does all the things I name, brings itself up, runs its little patchy, or it's
Hawaii author, it's tiny light, HTTP lighting, whatever you want.
Does all the things we needed to do, syncs up, gets your social network data from the
places, locks it down, does your backup searches, finds your friends, registers your dynamic
DNS.
All this trivial, we know all this is stuff we've got.
We need to put that together.
I'm not talking about a thing that's hard for us, we need to make a free software distribution
guys, how many does do we do, right?
We need to give a bunch to all our friends and we need to say here, fool around with this
and make it better.
We need to do the one thing, we are really, really, really, really good at it.
Because all the rest of it is done in the bag, cheap, ready.
Those wall wart servers, those are 99 now going to 79 when they're 5 million of them, they'll
be 29, 99.
Then we go to people and we say, 29, 99 wants for a lifetime, great social networking,
updates, automatically, software so strong, you couldn't knock it over if you kicked it.
Used in hundreds of millions of servers all over the planet, doing a wonderful job and
you know what, you get no spying for free, right?
They want to know what's going on in there, let them get a search warrant.
For your apartment, your home, your castle, the place where the Fourth Amendment still sort
of exists every other Tuesday and Thursday when the Supreme Court's not in session.
We can do that, we can do that, that requires us to do only the stuff we're really, really
good at.
The rest of it, we get for free.
Mr. Zuckerberg, not so much.
Because of course, when there is a competitor to all spying all the time, whether you like
it or not, the competition is going to do real well.
Don't expect Google to be the competitor, that's our platform.
What we need is to make a thing that's so greasy that there will never be another social
network platform again, right?
Can we do it?
Yeah, absolutely.
In fact, if you don't have a date on Friday night, let's just have a hack fast and get
it done.
Right?
It's well within our reach.
We're going to do it before the Facebook IPO, we're going to wait until after.
Really?
Honestly, seriously?
See, the problem that the law has, very often in the world where we move and practice
and work.
The problem that the law has is very often the problem that technology can solve.
And the problem that technology can solve is the place where we go to the law.
That's the free software movement, right?
There's software hacking over here and there's legal hacking over there and you put them
both together and the whole is bigger than some of the parts.
So it's not like we have to live in the catastrophe.
We don't have to live in the catastrophe.
It's not like what we have to do to begin to reverse the catastrophe is hard for us.
We need to re-architect services in the net.
We need to redistribute services back towards the edge.
We need to de-vertualize the servers where your life is stored and we need to restore
some autonomy to you as the owner of the server.
The measures for taking those steps are technical.
As usual, the box builders are ahead of us.
The hardware isn't the constraint.
As usual, nowadays, the software isn't really that deep a constraint either because we've
made so much wonderful software which is in fact being used by all the guys on the bad
architecture.
They don't want to do without our stuff.
The bad architecture is enabled, powered by us.
The re-architecture is too.
And we have our usual magic benefit.
If we had one copy of what I'm talking about, we'd have all the copies we need.
We have no manufacturing or transport or logistics constraint.
If we do the job, it's done.
We scale.
This is a technical challenge for social reason.
It's a frontier for technical people to explore.
There is enormous social payoff for exploring it.
The payoff is plain because the harm being ameliorated is current and people you know are suffering
from it.
Everything we know about why we make free software says that's when we come into our own.
It's a technical challenge incrementally attainable by extension from where we already are that
makes the lives of the people around us and who we care about immediately better.
I have never, in 25 years of doing this work, I have never seen us fail to rise to a challenge
that could be defined in those terms.
So I don't think we're going to fail this one either.
Mr Zuckerberg, richly deserves bankruptcy.
Let's give it to him.
Let's give it to him.
For free.
For free.
For free.
For free.
For free.
For free.
For free.
For free.
For free.
For free.
This is actually, you know, a story potentially happy.
It is a story potentially happy.
And if we do it, then we will have quelled one more rumor about the irrelevance of us.
And everybody in the valley will have to go find another buzzword.
And all the guys who think that San Hill Road is going to rise into new power and glory
by spying on everybody and monetizing it, we'll have to find another line of work too.
All of which is purely on the side of the angels, purely on the side of the angels.
We will not be rid of all our problems by any means.
But just moving the logs from them to you is the single biggest step that we can take
in resolving a whole range of social problems, that I feel badly in what remains of my
American constitution, and that I would feel badly about if I were watching the failure
of European data protection law from inside, instead of outside, and that I would feel kind
of hopeful about if I were, oh, say a friend of mine in China.
Because you know, of course, we really ought to put a VPN in that wall wart, and probably
we ought to put a tour router in here.
And of course, we got bit time, and by the time you get done with all of that, we have
a freedom box.
We have a box that not merely climbs us out of the hole, and we have a box that actually
puts a ladder up for people who are deeper in the hole than we are, which is another thing
we love to do.
I do believe the United States State Department will go slanging away at the Chinese Communist
Party for a year or two about Internet freedom.
And I believe the Chinese Communist Party will go slanging back.
Now, what they're going to say is, you think you got real good privacy and autonomy in
the Internet over in your neighborhood?
And I got to admit, every time they do that now, as they have been doing in the last two
weeks, I would say out, if I was Hillary Clinton, and I knew anything about it.
Because we don't.
Because we don't.
It's true.
We have a capitalist kind, and they've got a centralist vanguard of the party sort of
Marxist kind, or maybe Marxist, maybe just totalitarian kind.
But we're not going to win the freedom of the net discussion carrying Facebook on our
backs.
We're not.
But just through those wall wart servers around pretty thickly in American society and start
taking back the logs.
And if you want to know who I talk to on a Friday night, get a search warrant and stop
reading my email.
And by the way, there's my GPG key in there, and now we really aren't fifting for a change
and so on and so on and so on.
And it begins to look like something we really might want to go on an international crusade
about.
We really are making freedom here for other people too, for people who live in places where
the web don't work.
So this is not a challenge we don't want to rise to.
This is a challenge we want to rise to Clinton.
In fact, we're in a happy state that all the benefits we can get are way bigger than the
technical intricacy of doing what needs to be done, which isn't much, isn't much.
That's where we came from.
We came from our technology was more free than we understood and we gave away a bunch of
the freedom before we really knew it was gone.
We came from unfree software had bad social consequences further down the road than even
the freedom agitators knew.
We came from unfreetings metaphors tend to produce bad technology.
In other words, we came from stuff that our movement, if I can call it ours, was designed
to confront from the beginning, but we came from there and we're still living with the
consequences of we didn't do it quite right the first time, though we caught up thanks
to Richard Stallman and we're moving on.
Where we live now is no place we're going to have to see our grandchildren live.
Where we live now is no place we would like to conduct guided tours of.
I used to say to my students, how many video cameras are there between where you live
and the law school, count them?
I now say to my students, how many video cameras are there between the front door of the
law school and this classroom, count them?
I now say to my students, can you find a place where there are no video cameras?
Now what happened in that process was that we created immense cognitive auxiliaries for
the state, enormous engines of listening.
You know how it is if you live in an American university thanks to the movie and music companies
which keep reminding you of the consequences of living in the midst of an enormous surveillance
network.
We're surrounded by stuff listening to and watching us, we're surrounded by mindable
data.
You know all of that is going to go away because we took Facebook and split it up and
carried away our little shards of it.
It's not going to go away because we won't take free web hosting with spying inside.
We'll have other work to do.
And some of that work is lawyers work.
I will admit that.
Some of that work is law drafting, litigating and making trouble and doing lawyer stuff.
And I'm, that's fine, ready.
My friends and I will do the lawyers work.
It would be way simpler to do the lawyers work if we were living in a society which had
come to understand its privacy better.
It would be way simpler to do the lawyers work if young people realized that when they
grow up and start voting or start voting now that they're grown up, this is an issue that
they need to get the rest of it done the way we fixed the big stuff when we were kids.
We'll have a much easier time with the enormous confusions of international interlocking
of regimes when we have deteriorated the immense force of American capitalism in forcing
us to be less free and more surveilled for other people's profit all the time.
It isn't that this gets all the problems solved but the easy work is very rich and rewarding
right now.
The problems are really bad.
Getting the easy ones out will improve the politics for solving the hard ones.
And it's right up our alley, the solution is made of our parts, we got to do it.
That's my message.
It's Friday night.
Some people don't want to go right back to coding, I'm sure.
We could put it off until Tuesday.
Now how long do you really want to wait?
How long do you really want to wait?
You know, every day that goes by there's more data we'll never get back.
Every day that goes by there's more inferences we can't undo.
Every day that goes by we pile up more stuff in the hands of the people who got too much.
So it's not like we should just say one of these days I'll get around to that.
It's not like we should say, you know, I think I'd rather sort of spend my time browsing
news about iPad.
It's way more urgent than that.
It's way more urgent than that.
It's that we haven't given ourselves the direction in which to go.
So let's give ourselves the direction in which to go.
The direction in which to go is towards freedom using free software to make social justice.
Yeah.
That's the problem with talking on a Friday night.
You talk for an hour and all you tell people is what they know.
So thanks a lot.
I'm happy to take your question.
Okay.
I have a quick announcement.
The Internet Society actually has a project, it's a very terminal stage to create something
like what you're talking about.
It's called ISX.
Internet Society Linux and the current plan that we had was focused on the client with
things like the tour of anonymizing software included with a Linux desktop on a live CD.
There's a short step from that to add the freedom box type of functionality.
So if you're interested in helping with this, leave your email address as you leave
and write ISX next to it and then put you on a list.
Right.
I mean, you can decompose.
You can decompose this project work into pieces, right?
There's infrastructure for privacy and secrecy.
There's social networking in a disaggregated mode where you replace with RSS feeds, a whole
bunch of intracite behavior, right?
There's pieces of transition and configuration work.
Yeah, it's all stuff you divide it up, you see how it goes.
Yes?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Aren't we all ready?
Yeah.
Alright.
Around.
どうじゃ?
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Then we'll look at a piece of the original.
Well, and akanライ conunditional?.
Mmhmm.
need is to put the APIs over there so that we can take the data out to over here.
And at that point, Mr. Murdoch will begin to fight us.
Exactly.
It's like WordPress or Tumblr or status.net for uploading the Twitter API, except the
Twitter API doesn't have a license associated with it, so it's kind of unknown what happens
when all these WordPress blogs are using the Twitter API.
However, a lot of these open standards for our social networks are licensing.
Well, that's more or less work than with, yeah, we'll do it.
So the one thing I sort of feel was missing from the landscape you painted was spam and
zombie computers.
Somebody who basically had a blog that brought down her friend's personal, privately run
server.
When you're going to have to comment spam, there's no images and that's all text.
It seems to me that one major discouraging factor for people running their own servers
right now is just this large zombie that is out there throwing crap at everything.
So how does that change what you've presented to us?
And what kinds of things do we need to do in order to work as that?
Well, so let's agree that there are two layers of things that we can do for people.
We can give them technology for controlling data they don't want to get.
And spam controlling the email stream is actually at a fairly high level of goodness these
days.
A comment spam on blogs is one of the reasons why blogs may not be the last thing we ever
do.
And once again, there are things we can do to help.
The German government is on the right track about the zombies.
The German government says, gee, if you're here in Germany, we think you shouldn't use
Internet Explorer.
That's the beginning of the end.
We're going to have a whole lot of cyber war pulse pounding this year.
It's budget season, it's an election year.
The Pentagon doesn't really want to be known for the war in Afghanistan.
It will be very interested in telling us, keep us all cyber safe as part of our job because
we have another $150,000, please.
And we do have to deliver a message.
We do have to.
We do have to deliver a message that says, if you want to make American infrastructure safe,
don't let Windows run here.
You all know this.
You really do.
It's the elephant in the room.
Our friends at Google, who are very sophisticated and they're very shocked, shocked, shocked,
the German got in.
But where did they get in anyway?
What operating system was it that Google should not have been running?
Well, my heavens to Betsy, people got stuff that fished them to malware sites that caused
them to have terrible malware because they weren't broning a browser that had no script
in it.
You are running a browser that has no script in it?
Well, when you are running a browser that has no script in it, the kids in St. Petersburg
will write less JavaScript to hurt you with because there's no fun writing JavaScript
that nobody will ever run.
I mean, there's no fun writing JavaScript, but we actually do have to clean up the neighborhood
in other ways.
We have a net full of junk and the junk is made possible by bad software.
And we don't make any of that bad software.
We truly don't.
Our software has problems.
Our software has problems.
We have problems that cause things to get knocked over.
But we have no things that cause hundreds or even tens of millions of computers to get
knocked over and lie there gasping for instructions, months after month after month after month.
So running service is not fun because the net's a crappy neighborhood.
But we can help.
I mean, you take a modern distribution of free software and you install it on a box
and there aren't any ports open.
There aren't ports open.
And that's a social effort.
You need to have the social power to go out there to every last person who grabs on
me and says to me, and I know a lot of little Bronx, I'm telling you, you can do that.
Those people like you and me probably could replace some computers that are presently
running with $29 armed boxes that plug into the wall.
And you know the level thing about $29 armed boxes, right?
You could not install windows on them by accident, right?
You couldn't do it, right?
It would be really, really good for us to help people move to hardware if they can't reach.
And if we do that, a lot of things will also get better that are buggy.
Yeah.
Let me just hang on, Jay.
Let me try the paper.
I promise you will.
Let me see.
Yes.
Oh, sir.
And you are seeming to suggest that if we move into a distributed model where we try
to have their own data and their own social network connected here and so on, everything.
But building such systems has proven to be very hard.
You have your suggesting that we just figure it out of that because we know how to solve
it.
In fact, we know how to solve this problem is not a solution because it's very easy for
you to expand and so keep an eye on it.
But when you put it down into the details and the question before me suggested a very
important problem, they are updating the software and securing the software.
It's not very simple when you have to secure a software that runs at Google and you have
to pay a very massive personnel, imagine trying to secure everyone running a server of their
computer.
That is not the simple thing.
And so what's running on your laptop?
No.
I don't think there's a laptop.
What's running on your computer that you use every day?
I have everything.
How's the Ubuntu update doing for you?
The company is updating you and so it takes care of that and there are people who hate
to do it.
But you see there's nobody paying to update mine and it's update every 24 hours and it's
going to roll out.
Are you sure the problem is as hard as you think?
Yes.
So now what we have is a data disagreement.
There are a bunch of people in the room who like me think that some of the things you think
are harder hard and some of the things you think are harder easy and the things that Facebook
needs to be replaced with aren't the hardest.
No, because you're not listening out.
I'm trying to say it's not only the updating.
The updating is one of the things is how to properly set up the system, how to make it so
that it looks uniform across computers, how to make it so that it has a user experience
that could be understandable to your friends, for example, to whoever wants to join your
network.
We'll have everybody have their own different network and also when we are in everyday life,
we visit coffee shops, we visit other social places, why don't we call everyone to come
at our apartments, we visit other places because they offer value added services.
This type of services cannot be offered by the individual at all of the time or by a network
of individuals.
I just want to say if the problem wasn't hard, it wouldn't be any problem.
We are having a conversation in which in the absence of details is not working well.
The reason it's not working well is that I, at least, that maybe other people here think that to be
really, really brutal and honest about it, you're not living in our world.
We think we live in a world where those problems are way more solved than you think and where
the things that are concerning you, we worked around a long time ago.
We may be wrong in thinking that, but I can't be the only person in this room who thinks that
you don't understand where we are now compared to where we were five years ago.
Yes?
I have a question about something a little bit related to that.
Can you say something comforting to those of us who are too chicken?
You mentioned running a onion router on these 29 dollar boxes.
Can you say something that will make people feel less chicken about doing that?
Because I've never heard about doing that on your own computer or whatever it is.
It will wind in tears and disaster and it will ruin your family.
And why will it do that?
Because the government will come to you and say you're certainly comfortable with your own party.
And we need all of your computers and we have a subpoena and your lawyer says we can do this.
Yeah, well, we're not taking all of your stuff.
Which kind of comfort did you want?
The legal services policy or statement that the United States government has better things to do?
Or that's not really the way it's working these days.
But I can't tell you that Barack Obama isn't going to have an outburst of big brother in the second term.
I would say to you that lots of people wanted you to be afraid about that.
The most powerful people who wanted you to be afraid about that were Verizon and AT&T.
And they wanted you to be afraid about that because more than anything else in the whole world,
they did not want you to run an open wireless router.
Because if you ran an open wireless router, they were dead.
And so enormous amounts of money and vast political cloud went into asking a lot of people
to be silent while they told you through all sorts of channels,
some of them out disclosed and some of them pretending to be independent voices,
that you mustn't do that or else.
I'm not sure if he was understanding it.
I'm not sure if he was understanding it.
I know, but what I'm telling you is the be scared of tour is really a descendent of be scared of an open wireless router.
It really started with bandwidths guys trying to prevent the telephone business from dying.
The success in scaring people away from that means that there are a lot of other people now piggybacked on top.
I run an open wireless router in my apartment.
I do that for a reason.
I run a tour router in my apartment.
I do that for a reason.
The reason is that I hope they come for me instead of you.
Because if they come for me, I won't be scared.
I'm used to work at a tour.
I research libraries where wireless networks and all the people who invented Wi-Fi
all run open access wireless routers in their houses.
And there's the people who invented it and understand it, you know, and theoretically, you know, understanding security implications.
So it's interesting that you're comparing it to that because that they can sort of see and believe
that I have no problem running an open wireless router in my house.
Like that doesn't scare me somehow as much as the story.
Then I think what you should do when we ship you the thing.
And you connect your browser to it for the first time.
And it shows you the check boxes.
You should probably uncheck tour.
Because I don't want you to be frightened.
And if I find a lot of people don't want to have tour, then maybe I ship it with tour turned off for a year or two or three.
But I tell you when you make a Chinese friend, you may decide you feel different.
And so what I think is you should know that you won't have to worry about that in the same way that you won't have to worry about the crashing
data destroying bugs in your Linux kernel.
Because somebody else will have fixed it already.
Come along behind us.
I'll run the tour router for you for a decade.
And you'll watch.
And if I'm standing here 10 years from now, I'm still unbloodied and unbound.
Look, remember, in 1991, after a bunch of looking around for somebody with the courage to do it,
I found a guy called Phil Zimmerman in Boulder, Colorado, who was willing to do a thing you shouldn't do.
Which was to teach people how to use industrial strength, public key cryptography in a program that ran on a PC that anybody could use and read.
And people said, you shouldn't do that.
And in fact, the night I saw PGP for the first time on a fight of bulletin board here in Manhattan,
I wrote an unsolicited email message to the guy called Phil Zimmerman who had written the thing.
And I said, congratulations.
You're going to change the world.
You're also going to get in a shitload of trouble.
And when it happens, I can help you.
Here's who I am. Here's what I do when trouble strikes call me.
And I was two weeks ahead of the nice kind custom service investigator who knocked on Phil's door in Boulder.
And we fixed that.
You're not afraid to use GPG anymore.
You're not afraid that if you take your computer with you on vacation outside the United States,
you're going to get arrested for exportation of cryptography.
You're not afraid that they're going to come to you and say that you're abetting nuclear terrorism and pedophilia
because you encrypt your email.
There were people are very afraid about that in the early 1990s.
And that's why I thought I had to do what each of us had to do.
I hear you. I hear you.
It's frightening you. It shouldn't, but that's not your fault.
Powerful people want you to be frightened of something we're not frightened of.
So let us deal with it and then you'll see.
I hear you. We will fix it.
What about the ISP's terms of service?
As a residential service, AT&T and Verizon, the cable companies,
they prohibit private running of the server.
And the business plans either don't come to the home where they cost a lot more.
Well, call me out of the job.
Right. So best buy.
Not a bunch of people I'm particularly fond of.
In fact, I've got a GPL compliance lawsuit pending.
Best buy. It does still own speak easy.
But they know better than to mess with the business model.
So maybe you needed the ESL supplier who doesn't impose those bad terms on you.
In fact, if your friends at Verizon discover that you are leaving,
along with five or 10,000 of your neighbors in your zip code,
in order to go to speak easy because you happen to dislike terms of service
that tell you you're only allowed to be a client, then they will fix that.
They will have to fix that.
Their problem now is they must offer DSL service to you on the terms you will accept.
If they don't, you're lost to them forever.
You're never going to buy files on the terms you won't accept.
You're going to leave the telephony system behind.
You may even be ticked off enough not to be a Verizon wireless customer.
DSL to home is now a commodity they have to get you to take.
Because if they don't, then you're not a secure platform inhabitant.
And so they will have to negotiate with you if you make them.
But you won't walk away just yet, A, because you think there isn't any better deal,
although in fact, there are.
And, you know, we're standing in a big university.
It could put its Ethernet way out into Greenwich Village if you wanted to.
In fact, it should.
In fact, my dear old friend John Sexton has been busy buying up little pieces of lower Manhattan
and should have been leaving behind NYU University services everywhere he went.
Had he done so, the Verizon would be back on its heels in lower Manhattan.
I have a nice service.
Not maybe compared to France, but compared to everywhere else.
In fact, I really do have my service. I have 100 megabits to home.
And it works great. And I pay $39 a month for it and my ISP is Columbia University.
Which I kind of like because I have tenure at Columbia.
And if my ISP behaves, I have recourse.
We need to take a hard look.
We need to take a hard look at bouncing around the bandwidth sellers in the United States.
We do need to take a hard look at this.
If you bother ever listening to crap, I say.
You heard me say this many a time.
Free bandwidth is the last and most difficult part of the revolution we are working with.
And I used to think we wouldn't even begin to be able to come to grips with those guys.
You are way scarier than Microsoft and way scarier than Disney because way more politically powerful.
I didn't think we were going to be able to come to grips with the free bandwidth problem in society until the 2020s.
And I didn't think that because I didn't know that Mark Spencer and his friends were going to make asterisk.
But when we formed SFLC in 2005, one of my first priorities was get to asterisk, make them a client, start protecting asterisk.
And within the limits set by its relationship with Digi and we have done everything we could to protect asterisk.
Because we are going to destroy telephony.
Now here is the other part of the story which you need to know I know I am coming, I promise.
Here is the other part of this particular story that you need to know.
It is a public announcement of the Symbian Foundation.
The Symbian Foundation finished as you may know as a Friday last, releasing all of Symbian as free software under EPL in nice, debianized packages.
So Symbian is an interesting operating system for technical study reasons.
And it is now a free non-platform.
More important still, the Symbian Foundation has indicated and intent to demonstrate somewhere between mid-February and mid-March of this year that is, soon, weeks, the making of telephone calls from a Beagle board.
Using only free software and a radio chip.
From a Beagle board, a project board.
So we are a couple of weeks from proof of concept of totally free telephony.
Using what is now free software which is currently installed on 330 million operating phones.
So we are getting close now.
We have PBX in free software that we can put into any switching gear in the world.
We are going to have free telephony on free software with very limited reliance on the hardware and the patents that lie in the GSM stack.
We are going to point some daggers at the heart of the telecommunications ISPs.
And eventually, I promise you this, if we, the lawyers are doing our jobs right and the technologists make good.
We are going to be bargaining with them with our knees on their chests by the middle of the 2020s.
I promise you this.
This is not a war we can't fight.
It is a bitch, but we can do it.
First of all, I want to commend you for the notion of the freedom box because you are right.
It is necessary, but it is not sufficient.
And I am not focused on some of the small little technical hurdles.
I think there are two major hurdles that we have.
One, which you just cited, which is the ban on publication, which is the asymmetry of how the infrastructure has been rolled out.
Both on the cable side and on the DSL side.
It has been very asymmetric.
All the bandwidth is for you as a consumer.
If you are watching television and very little for you to participate, which is the essence of the Internet.
And I don't know how we overcome that.
We had a panel here a few months back about structural separation of my belt.
But I don't want to go back in time if you all see the video that Jolly posted up.
The second big hurdle that we have to overcome is the rest of society, and is the societal behavior of them.
The rest of the world doesn't understand why Facebook is zero.
Why is it a problem to have this stuff?
Because that is where all my friends are.
So it is necessary to have the freedom box so you can offer them an alternative.
But the behavior, the messaging is going to be really hard to change their behavior.
What are your thoughts about that?
Right.
The big pipe down and an hour pipe up was an intended architectural consequence.
I used to write for the National Magazine back when all sorts of things,
mostly when the fact that I didn't get paid in the bottom because I was permitted.
And in 1996, after doing some stuff about Microsoft and the music meltdown and so on,
I pitched a 700 word piece on why the FCC are to require symmetric BSL.
But my editor, Karen Rothmeyer, very smart and very capable editor of the nation,
said, makes my eyes glaze over after five words, why would I ever care?
And I said not this decade, Karen, but the next one.
But of course, journals of opinion are about math, they're not about the future.
What good would be the nation word about the future?
So you're right.
I mean, that's another example.
We blew it.
Technology has extraordinary social consequences.
They minded their knitting.
We didn't mind ours.
We're behind the eight-ball map.
And my friends who talk about network neutrality, it's just unhelpful.
It doesn't help us.
Neutrall isn't what we need.
We need gravitational balance and all ports open.
We're going to take time to get there and the pressure back from politics is going to be enormous.
But here's the thing.
In the summer of 2005, I was in a European capital and I had a meeting with the CTO of a newly
no longer nationalized telecommunications monopolist, one of those people living in a fortress
filled after the war by the president of the newly free republic for the national telephone company.
And we got in there and we were two on a side and we had our little cups of coffee and then we slid the door shut.
And the CTO of this thing said to me, okay, we'll agree with you.
We will say here what we wouldn't say outside this room.
Nobody will make money moving bits in the 21st century.
And I said, good, I'm really glad to hear that we agree about that.
But I must admit, it leaves me with a question, what's your business?
And he said, oh, our business is the delivery of premium content to homes and businesses.
And I said, thank you.
I appreciate your candor about that.
That's what I hear from our colleagues in the telecoms business in North America too.
But I got to admit that leaves me with two questions.
First of all, you don't own that content.
Mr. Rupert Murdock owns that content.
So is your business to make Mr. Rupert Murdock richer?
Second, you don't own that content.
Mr. Rupert Murdock owns that content.
And if you're right and that's your business in the 21st century and he already owns it,
how come Mr. Rupert Murdock just spent 600 million dollars buying my space?
Yes, he said, thank you.
That's my space there.
And you could be right, he said.
But if you're right, then we're just back to moving bits again.
And I said, boy, that's lovely.
It was really as short as that.
It's 90 seconds long.
And we went through the loop and he didn't have a business.
Now, here we are, okay?
He still doesn't have a business.
And he was the lucky one because his government gave him years to continue the monopoly
in return for delivering excellent service everywhere in his hexagonal country,
in return for the continuing discipline monopoly and he fulfilled.
And his people inside their hexagonal country have excellent service at reasonable prices,
which with wide pipes up and down and they participate in everything.
But no crypto.
Well, don't be so sure.
More you should have said, but weird three strikes, you're out legislation that never dies no matter what
because it turns out that the bit movers, even with a good political inside deal,
are less aggressive than the bitstream owners.
But all I wanted to tell that story for was to say, actually, we have the long run advantage.
The problem is they don't have business.
We do have the fact that in the long run, nobody will make good money moving bits in the 21st century.
It just takes a really long time to get there.
And now we come exactly your second point.
Why does it take a long time to get there?
Because stupidity taxes are the easiest taxes to get people to pay.
And we got an ignorance gap and we have to close it.
And what does that mean?
We got to teach an annual.
The good news is the annual doesn't believe in the fact that you get telephone companies.
The annual doesn't believe that they have a right to make money moving bits.
The annual does not, in fact, believe any of the things that the annual would have to believe in
order to grow up and be their customer.
And that's our advantage.
Their business is time limit.
There's not a really solid business model underneath.
There's only people who don't know better.
We'll get there.
We will get there.
We will get there.
You know, I taught at Columbia for 19 years doing some work that was kind of interesting
in areas like this before anybody said to me, why don't you come and talk and launch
in the computer science department.
And I will say, I was very glad to accept the invitation.
And I went to a lunch talk in the computer science department.
Every single professor in the computer science department, including the guy who invited me,
skipped the talk.
But I could barely get in the room because it was so full of graduate students and undergraduates
who wanted to talk to me about some stuff.
I'm having fun with teachers college.
I don't expect a whole immense faculty turnout.
And I don't even know whether anybody who cares whether eight year olds are taught about this
or not, I truly don't know.
It's not obvious to me.
I have friends, many, in a place in India, a tiny little place called Carol with 31 million
people in which the use of free software is universal in schools.
The use of free software is taught beginning at age five.
And the philosophy of free software is taught in fifth grade at age 10.
It's not that it can't be done.
It's not that it can't be done.
It's not that there aren't advanced models we could look into.
It's that we don't want to teach our children this stuff because stupidity taxes are the easiest taxes to collect.
All you need to do is perpetuate ignorance.
How to stop perpetuating ignorance is not a talk for Friday night.
Because there's so many people who want to go out and get stupid.
Going back to the tour conversation.
I think we probably be a bit more comfortable taking that risk.
Receive the risk if we do what to do when things happen to us as a result.
Yes, and the EFF would like to help you learn what to do when things happen to you.
And it would be good to contribute to EFF and it would be good to help the EFF and it would be good to look at the EFF website.
But I must tell you that I have a little bit of experience in dealing with the secret world in a hostile adversary legalized context over stuff they take seriously like encryption.
And I'm perfectly prepared to say if you're feeling peakish about this, don't do it at home.
Let other people do it.
It's not a matter of feeling peakish about it.
But rather not having any kind of idea what the real risk is from a financial perspective or from a civil liberties perspective being arrested detained or neutral.
Or having your reputation solved.
I don't know what those realistically are.
I can't realistically provide you legal advice in public parties.
I'm sorry, I think it was purely hypothetical.
In a context in which it would be irresponsible of me to appear to be telling you X will never happen, which lawyers don't say.
Do you really want to have this dialogue?
Okay, let's do this.
We'll do the one true lawyer conversation.
You come to me and you say, I am thinking about this, what's my risk?
Do you know what the lawyer says time?
Oh, if you don't, I'll tell you.
The lawyer says it depends.
That's the one true lawyer conversation.
And so I'll give you all the legal advice you need. It depends.
You want to tell phone number 212580800.
Okay, that's the software for you to listen.
I don't actually do EFFs work.
But you need to tell phone number every day.
If you're really thinking about this, and you decide to go out and experiment on your own,
and you find a car that just seems to be parked across the street from your room too much, call us.
I'll refer you.
Okay.
I'll make this down to the open floor.
What happened to the Philadelphia Open Indian Municipal and Citywide?
Wires?
Bogstown in the private public partnership that you always get into when you talk about municipal
wirelessly in the United States.
And remember that the deal was Philadelphia can have it in return for the passage of a state
legislation that says no other municipality can have it on, particularly not Pittsburgh
where CMU might decide just to do it.
Okay.
Philadelphia wasn't the best possible place and Pennsylvania wasn't the best possible state,
and everyone there wasn't the best possible governor and a Supreme Court that has purchased
judges on it is not the best possible Supreme Court to have.
Municipal wireless has so far not turned out to be the big city solution because big city
politics aren't clean.
And among the people who aren't clean in big city politics, the telephone companies aren't
a very important piece of the story.
I'm not so interested in municipal wireless.
I'm really, really interested in potato chip cans.
In potato chip cans.
Pringles cans.
I'm really, really interested in self-assembled wires.
Municipal wireless is wireless run by guys who can't trust.
I care in which public private partnership they exist.
And I can trust my neighbor and I can trust me and I can trust the guy across the street
where the Pringles can.
When I want open wireless and Riverside Park, I point the Pringles can out my window.
And I light up a little piece of Riverside Park on a Sunday afternoon and I go out and
work there and people see me and they say, is there wireless?
And I say, yeah, it seems to be.
Because here seems to be wireless.
Some bother me.
My back wall is the Columbia University network.
And if people want telephone service, they're all given to them.
Another little client of mine called OpenVTS, which makes a GSM base station in a laptop
with a cone hanger, I'll give you that too.
We're not actually defenseless against this.
We don't have to wait for bigger powers.
But right now, today, I wanted to talk about self-assembled solutions to privacy in the cloud.
It's self-assembled solutions to the bandwidth crisis.
It's another good topic.
Let's do it on the Monday.
Yeah.
Sorry.
So the other solution to privacy, which you make, you apply earlier, it was helpless, is that you make a useless
to have the laws.
So for example, in evidence rules and courts, there are certain kinds of evidence that can't
fit if it was gathered in the police.
So people all bother together in theory.
Because that's totally hopeless.
No, I don't think it's totally hopeless.
I wanted to talk about something simple and optimistic, and things that actors can do.
If we really don't talk about this, I want to get out the pseudonymity riff and explain how we need multiple
identities that don't link well in databases.
Because we always do this with that one, and this with that one, and this with something else.
We have identity management, which is meant for privacy instead of what the current would call identity management,
which is spying inside for free again.
There are other roads to go.
I didn't want to say this is it, and only it, and nothing else.
And if I implied useless, I apologize.
But what I would imply is, we take the road I'm talking about now, and we make a big public splash,
and we not go over a bad thing that shouldn't be there.
And then we start telling people, you know, there's more.
We want to do some stuff that helps you bang better.
We want to do some stuff that helps you shop better.
We want to do some stuff that will help you to avoid all that.
Gee, we just noticed you had a baby.
How would you like to buy out of this amount and the other thing and stuff, right?
We might even want to talk about healthcare reform, we can't.
No, we really should.
We really ought to be talking about, do we really have to wait for them to figure out what the health information that we're going to be?
Or could we actually play a little bit of a role there?
And could we affect the politics in each of these areas by being a little bit can?
So I would say sure.
And let's offer a course and let's teach for 14 weeks and learn from one another,
and lots and lots of stuff would come up.
This was not meant to be an exclusive list.
This was just meant to prove that we don't have to be really sad on a Friday night.
That's all.
You talked about the social networks and opening up the sort of data exchange.
What do you think of the prospects for changing the free software licenses
that government also offered to put these on its use?
To force them to open their data, their services or whatever in that direction?
Well, this is why the AGPL exists.
It's a license meant to explore that turf.
It's a license that we allowed for in the process of updating GPL.
But not a license we could compel people to use.
Because there is a conflict of freedoms here.
The right to modify software and not share it with people is also a right.
It's an important right.
The right of private modification is the intellectual freedom guarantee in the free software world.
You don't have to give people software.
You don't have to show them.
You are allowed to think your own private thoughts.
If you're not, then we messed up freedom somewhere.
So when we came into the GPL 3 process just to take an example of a software licensing thing I know a little bit about.
When we came into that process, everybody said, oh my God, sky's falling.
They're going to aferoize everything and they're going to make us,
and the financial services sector was ready to have the vapors.
They thought that a bad change to software licenses could really ruin the financial system of the United States.
So we didn't do it.
Much good it did us.
So we can't just...
Here we, I'm speaking on behalf of people who care a lot about software freedom and adjust licenses.
We can't just adjust the license underneath to do that.
We would be acting against freedom.
We can create an alternative license that does that.
And we can allow free software under an existing copy left license called the GPL
where a lot of software is to move in there if it wants to.
If you look out there on what used to be Google Video and is inside YouTube,
you'll find a speech I gave at Google some years ago in which I said,
you know, if you didn't behave really well, if you ever actually started being evil,
the afero license would become for you what the GPL was for Microsoft.
It would be the thing that went after your business model in order to redress a social imbalance.
And I was, I suppose, you know, violating the one true rule of,
don't be mean to Google on its own turf.
The little Tyrannosaurus Rex didn't fall over on me as I walked by.
But it was kind of an uppity thing to say, I suppose.
I still believe it. It's important.
Those, the licenses that say, if you're going to provide services over modified versions of this code,
release your mods, they're important licenses.
But they're important in a way for they're into roar and effect.
More important is write code that offers services, release it under such licenses,
and therefore begin to create a copy left universe of code for the offering of free services.
And if you look around the world right now, you'll find a lot of that.
I don't mean a lot numerically compared to pure GPL code,
but if you look in the world of service provision,
it isn't just the signers of the Franklin Street statement,
it isn't just the people with the strongest interest in free services.
If you file the licenses on fresh meat, you will see service provision code is beginning to consider
the alternative of beginning from the beginning with licenses that do what you suggest,
which implies that the social pressure I was naming all those years ago
in reflections on the world's largest computer and what it runs on,
that the pressures that I was naming are beginning to have their ecological counterplate.
People are using those licenses because they feel concerned.
Also, while it may sound stupid, it's important to remember that it's perfectly legal
and maybe even more often charged as to finish attacks on free services.
Well, it's a question of which ecological externalities you're allowed to impose in return.
I don't know whether a stupidity tax that charges you money is exactly the same as a stupidity tax
that deteriorates human integrity or even just eliminates the privacy of uncautious users.
We have to ask what the ecological consequences are of code.
The same way we asked about the ecological consequences of pesticides and air adulterants
and drinking water problems in the 1960s and 70s.
We need to ask ourselves how the technology individuals choose to use affects the larger overall social ecology
and I'm not sure that each and every one of those possible taxes
which are actually externalities of a negative kind imposed on the general public,
we ought to be willing to regulate.
The difficulty is that you can regulate the emission of pollutants more than you can regulate information flows
because we have a First Amendment and we really care.
The HEPL is better than the HEPL.
You could right now even have a Facebook regarding all the HEPL code.
We already know that they find on the HEPL, the HEPL's primary advantage is not a primary act to restore privacy.
It is much more simply a question of getting all service provision code back into commons
so that it is easier to fork and run in a privacy respecting manner.
If Facebook were made of HEPL components that our colleagues concern that we couldn't possibly duplicate it functionally
because it's way too complicated would simply be the fact they're all right.
We'd have what they started from, we'd have the mods, we'd be done.
The licenses are not the answers to social problems.
I speak as a guy who cares a lot about licenses.
But I tell you, once again, licenses are the constitutions of free software communities.
They resolve problems inside the communities.
They are not tools whose primary benefit is to be found in their external consequences.
AGPL is a way for people who care about services freedom to work together in an assurance of services freedom,
the same way that GPL allows programmers who care about software freedom pure and simple to work in the assurance of software freedom.
When we begin to see massive collaboration in freedom respecting services,
you'll see AGPL come into its own as a device for regulating and mediating collaboration
like the function performed by GPL in the world of software you distribute.
Yes?
In this room we're going to do a Facebook app, just show hands.
So just run software for Facebook.
I have to point the question.
You'll know that Facebook has very strict rules about data manipulation you can do, right?
And they forbid you from doing certain API calls in the name of their users' privacy.
And it's a curious fact about this code as law that they'll actually prevent you from seeing which users are running your application on Facebook out of privacy considerations.
Now that information obviously they know and they block you the developer from knowing.
Well, certainly.
They want the laws. Why should they share them with you?
That's because you're developing software to improve your system.
In a sense all those lines being drawn are somewhat arbitrary and it's Facebook's best attempt to make forcing external developers to abide by some gray area of privacy.
They don't want developers coming in and exploiting privacy in the way that they are.
Right, in the way that Facebook is.
That is to say they have a business model in which you provide code and they keep the laws.
And they're not going to share them with you.
So what I guess I'm asking you is, anybody running a federated service can behave in this fashion.
Users have demonstrated that they're basically insensitive to a third party app developer having access to certain API calls to develop their laws.
How do we make it necessary that people care about that?
Because it's kind of secondary to their experience.
Even if they do get access to the code in their privacy as being respected.
If we are actually running on a free application stack for social networking, then they will passively benefit from the activity
of those who care in the same way that the people who use free software stacks now for operating system and application passively benefit from the pro security and pro privacy activity of people who are specialists in that as they benefit from the bug fixers and everybody else.
We cannot make everybody care about how every program works all the time.
I have read X source code in my life, but I don't do that for fun.
I would do that because we represent people who might need us to read their code for a reason.
I am very grateful that there are other people who read that code.
So the users that are using the free software social services that benefit passively from the freedom and privacy?
And they benefit passively from our attempt to create rules about how that stack works which are fair to users as well as developers and put users privacy first.
There might have to be quick because we are running out of time.
But there is no queue deviled to comment spam or blogs.
And users need to be protected, enter buyers, etc.
And as the claim is also emailed, but also if you are using this with this freedom box that somebody could plug in, have their data there, and then maybe they don't plug it, but their services can still be breached, presumably somebody else is posting it as a courtesy, shake the tour, free that, whatever.
It could not be somebody who does the spam issue and why they are concerned about both pertaining to bad actors.
Somebody can monitor, you know, I've heard about tour exit notes being monitored.
Sure.
Please watching everybody's traffic.
I'm posting my fake Facebook line, but somebody else is kind of nice doing it for me.
And I still have a couple logs, but they have a packet smith for watching all my exit traffic there.
We are not assuming, we are not assuming, I think, that our goal is to build perfect software.
I'm sure we won't.
And I am not assuming that our goal is to quell all bad actors.
I doubt that we can, and I don't think we're engineering for it.
I think we are really engineering for a fairly simple outcome.
Not only feature compatibility with existing social networking, but feature improvement.
It doesn't have to be much, but feature improvement along every dimension and you keep the logs.
That's basically the spec.
You keep the logs, you have everything you have now, your data, your social contacts, your feeds, your everything.
Pretty much works the same at layer seven as it used to work for you.
But underneath it's really quite different, because we've re-architected this stuff,
which you as an application user on the web, don't really ever need to understand.
And we have abstracted from the client server model back to the peerage model.
And pretty much working all the same to you, except a little nicer and a little easier.
And you pay one price once and nobody ever spies on you again.
Is everybody going to rush right out and use it? No.
Will the first 100,000 people make a difference? Yes.
Will the next 100,000 people make a difference? Yes.
Can the Facebook IPO happen? No.
Is the world a better place? You tell me.
Yes.
I wonder if he's talked for a second then about whether this might get into sort of a cycle,
because when you're talking about Facebook and, you know,
we need to make a open or rather a free stack to replace it,
a free federated service that aims for future parity and hopefully future improvement.
You're still talking about sort of cloning and existing service,
making a service that already exists and sort of building it with free software principles in mind
because that works better for us.
And when you're talking about a service that is so inherently sort of about
the network hitting, that it accretes, the amount of users that can get involved
and therefore necessarily needs to have a lot of mass appeal to be useful to users.
Then I wonder, are we going to just get in a cycle where we make a free Facebook?
And then, but then all the users care more about whatever the next thing is.
They get to develop privately that we then have to sort of engage in this effort to make it free.
See the funny thing is, see the funny thing is Facebook is just the web with spine.
It's not actually an innovation event.
There's no actual thing happening there.
The underlying data model of Facebook is the web with spine.
PHP? No, thank you. I don't actually want it, right?
And RSS, which I do actually want, but I don't want it if they keep the logs.
That's all. We're not actually, what we're really doing is pulling stuff back into the web
and changing how web servers are geometrically organized in a web whose typology is way more flexible
than Mr. Zuckerberg can ever make.
That you're asking another really good question, what is the platform for web innovation?
So let me ask you, what do you think if you're a guy with an innovative web idea,
which do you want Facebook with its API monopolization or control model,
which is the Microsoft API monopolization and control model brought to the web,
or a couple hundred million wallboards servers out there that people could apt get to?
I mean, if you have 400 million wallboards servers out there, can you use them? Yes, I can.
Okay, so that's part of why I told you the Symbian story.
Because part of what's happening is I just told you somebody freed the guts of a thing
with 330 million boxes in field. Is that interesting to you? Yeah, it's very interesting.
That is because there's some 330 million boxes.
Well, an interesting more if I tell you that Nokia assured me in the beginning of this whole long story
that they have never sold an S60 phone anywhere in the world
that prohibited installation of third-party applications. What?
Rod, Nokia says, I have no way of independently verifying this.
Nokia says that at no time have they ever sold an S60 phone anywhere in the world
that was locked down against the installation of third-party applications
at the level on which they delivered it. So what do you think?
Could we possibly be actually looking at a thing that comes a little close to what I just offered you
that you so well? You had that?
See, the funny thing is I said this long ago about the D.R. Animal Wars, right?
Left to their own devices. They would never give us any freedom.
But they're not left to their own devices. We have their devices.
I'm not so sure. I know what you mean. I understand your question.
How do we accumulate enough to get to critical matters?
I guess what I want to tell you is I think the critical matters out there already
the question is how do we free it?
That's good news, but I'm not sure. I think my question was actually more about
how can we move from a mode of feature duplication and feature improvement
into sort of...
You know, you do remember, right, when Richard and I were each a little younger
and had less gray hair that people used to ask, because how could we ever catch up with Microsoft?
You remember how that went, right?
And I don't use that question anymore.
I don't think that network effects were so drastic.
You don't.
But they seemed pretty drastic to anybody who tried to compete with Microsoft except us.
Jay, it's your time for the last question.
Oh my goodness. Thank you.
Okay, I want to agree with what Amy said, of course.
And what you said. And who are the persons for the Bronx said.
And you sure are right behind me.
Oh, you may not be there.
You may not be there.
I know what you mean.
I don't want to agree with Joe Pockett.
Your last question.
And the crushing of the server, very much to the point, particularly at this moment,
because of the iPad.
What is the iPad?
The iPad is a machine with a claimed, completely 100% competent team of sys admins.
We have root of the iPad.
And we'll make everything easier.
Now, what Amy said at the beginning was, the internet was designed.
And by definition of the RSCs, it's appeared to be your file sharing network.
Only it's not because of somebody here said, terms of service.
They don't let you run!
A little Sheva plug freedom box.
And also, it's actually very difficult to set up a patchy.
Every time I have to do it, I don't use this equipment.
I'm frightened!
And I have to go and read the things.
And the answer is that incompetent software tends toward infotainment central controlling the entire world,
including all of our should be private communications.
That's why our software has to be not only better than what they've got out there.
It's got to be much better.
And we also have to sell it like hell.
And I was going to say more of it.
So here's a cheerful thought to end on for Friday night.
It comes from your question, what is the iPad?
My answer is proof that Steve Jobs isn't perfect.
Thanks a lot.
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