WEBVTT 00:00:00.422 --> 00:00:01.915 Thank you 00:00:02.392 --> 00:00:04.017 It’s a pleasure to be here. 00:00:04.944 --> 00:00:07.221 I would love to think that 00:00:07.271 --> 00:00:09.543 the reason that we’re all here on a Friday night 00:00:09.593 --> 00:00:11.819 is because my speeches are so good. 00:00:11.869 --> 00:00:13.441 I actually have no idea 00:00:13.441 --> 00:00:15.256 why we’re all here on a Friday night 00:00:15.306 --> 00:00:17.717 but I’m very grateful for the invitation. 00:00:17.717 --> 00:00:20.689 I am the person who had no date tonight 00:00:20.689 --> 00:00:24.311 so it was particularly convenient 00:00:24.311 --> 00:00:26.837 that I was invited for now. 00:00:30.175 --> 00:00:31.052 So, 00:00:31.898 --> 00:00:34.621 of course, I didn’t have any date tonight. 00:00:34.621 --> 00:00:35.968 Everybody knows that. 00:00:35.968 --> 00:00:38.959 My calendar’s on the web, right?. 00:00:40.270 --> 00:00:43.398 The problem is that problem. 00:00:44.983 --> 00:00:47.671 Our calendar is on the web. 00:00:47.671 --> 00:00:50.550 Our location is on the web. 00:00:50.550 --> 00:00:53.336 You have a cell phone 00:00:53.336 --> 00:00:55.519 and you have a cell phone network provider 00:00:55.519 --> 00:00:59.652 and if your cell phone network provider is Sprint 00:00:59.652 --> 00:01:03.414 then we can tell you that several million times last year, 00:01:03.414 --> 00:01:07.965 somebody who has a law enforcement ID card in his pocket somewhere 00:01:07.965 --> 00:01:10.722 went to the Sprint website 00:01:10.799 --> 00:01:16.343 and asked for the realtime location of somebody with a telephone number and was given it. 00:01:16.466 --> 00:01:18.726 Several million times. 00:01:18.803 --> 00:01:20.337 Just like that. 00:01:20.429 --> 00:01:22.408 We know that because Sprint admits 00:01:22.408 --> 00:01:23.569 that they have a website 00:01:23.569 --> 00:01:25.194 where anybody with a law enforcement ID 00:01:25.194 --> 00:01:28.352 can go and find the realtime location of anybody 00:01:28.352 --> 00:01:29.884 with a Sprint cellphone. 00:01:29.884 --> 00:01:31.974 We don’t know that about ATT and Verizon 00:01:31.974 --> 00:01:34.609 because they haven’t told us. 00:01:35.132 --> 00:01:36.758 But that’s the only reason we don’t know 00:01:36.758 --> 00:01:38.894 because they haven’t told us. 00:01:38.894 --> 00:01:43.724 That’s a service that you think of as a traditional service - 00:01:43.724 --> 00:01:45.395 telephony. 00:01:45.395 --> 00:01:47.253 But the deal that you get 00:01:47.253 --> 00:01:49.203 with the traditional service called telephony 00:01:49.203 --> 00:01:51.804 now includes a thing you didn’t know, like spying. 00:01:51.804 --> 00:01:54.451 That’s not a service to you 00:01:54.451 --> 00:01:56.402 but it’s a service 00:01:56.402 --> 00:01:57.702 and you get it for free 00:01:57.702 --> 00:02:01.422 with your service contract for telephony. 00:02:02.160 --> 00:02:07.687 You get for free the service of advertising with your gmail 00:02:07.687 --> 00:02:10.380 which means of cause there is another service behind 00:02:10.380 --> 00:02:16.649 which is - untouched by human hands - semantic analysis of your email. 00:02:16.649 --> 00:02:19.854 I still don't understand why anybody wants that. 00:02:19.854 --> 00:02:23.058 I still don't understand why anybody uses it, 00:02:23.058 --> 00:02:25.446 but people do, 00:02:26.077 --> 00:02:30.117 including the very sophisticated and thoughtful people in this room 00:02:30.117 --> 00:02:33.414 and you get free email service 00:02:33.414 --> 00:02:37.315 and some storage, which is worth exactly a penny and a half 00:02:37.315 --> 00:02:39.312 at the current price of storage 00:02:39.312 --> 00:02:41.588 and you get spying all the time 00:02:41.588 --> 00:02:44.609 and for free, too 00:02:45.024 --> 00:02:47.671 and your calendar is on the web 00:02:47.671 --> 00:02:49.575 and everybody can see whether you have a date Friday night, 00:02:49.575 --> 00:02:51.712 and you have a status: Single... Looking 00:02:51.712 --> 00:02:57.470 and you get a service for free: advertising, single looking and spying with it, for free. 00:02:58.870 --> 00:03:04.250 And it all sort of just grew up that way, right, in a blink of an eye, and here we are. 00:03:04.250 --> 00:03:11.309 And what's that got to do with open source? Well in fact it doesn't have anything to do with open source, 00:03:11.309 --> 00:03:19.066 but it has a whole lot to do with free software, yet another reason why Stallman was right, it's the freedom, 00:03:19.066 --> 00:03:20.644 right? 00:03:20.644 --> 00:03:27.563 So we need to backup a little bit to figure out where we actually are and how we actually got here, 00:03:27.563 --> 00:03:36.619 and probably even more important whether we can get out and if so, how? And it isn't a pretty story. At all. 00:03:36.619 --> 00:03:44.328 David's right, I can hardly begin by saying that we won given that spying comes free with everything now. 00:03:44.328 --> 00:03:49.854 but we haven't lost, we've just, really, bamboozled ourselves. 00:03:49.854 --> 00:03:55.752 And we're going to have to unbamboozle ourselves real quickly or we're going to bamboozle a lot of other innocent people 00:03:55.752 --> 00:03:59.700 who didn't know that we were throwing away their privacy for them forever. 00:03:59.700 --> 00:04:08.337 It begins, of course, with the Internet which is why it's really nice to be here talking to the Internet society, 00:04:08.337 --> 00:04:17.765 a society dedicated to the health expansion and theoretical elaboration of a peer to peer network called the Internet. 00:04:17.765 --> 00:04:25.752 Designed as a network of peers without any intrinsic need for hierarchical or structural control, 00:04:25.752 --> 00:04:33.647 and assuming that every switch in the net is an independent freestanding entity whose volition is equivalent 00:04:33.647 --> 00:04:37.177 to the volition to the human beings who own and control it. 00:04:37.177 --> 00:04:45.257 That's the design of the net which, whether you're thinking of it as glued together with IPv4 or that wonderful 00:04:45.257 --> 00:04:54.452 improvement IPv6 we will never use, apparently, it still assumes peer communications. 00:04:54.452 --> 00:05:04.344 Of course it never really, really, really worked out that way. There was nothing in the technical design to prevent it. 00:05:04.344 --> 00:05:10.381 Not at any rate in the technical design of the interconnection of nodes and their communication. 00:05:10.381 --> 00:05:21.434 There was a software problem. It's a simple software problem and it has a simple two syllable name, it's name is Microsoft. 00:05:23.249 --> 00:05:32.487 Conceptually there was a network which was designed as a system of peer nodes, but the 00:05:32.487 --> 00:05:42.239 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-- 00:05:42.239 --> 00:05:47.115 viral way, over the course of a decade and a half, the software which 00:05:47.115 --> 00:05:52.734 came to occupt the network was built around a very clear idea that had nothing to do with peers, 00:05:52.734 --> 00:05:57.104 it was called a server-client architecture. 00:05:57.750 --> 00:06:01.140 And the idea that the network was a network of peers 00:06:01.140 --> 00:06:04.298 was hard to perceive after a while, 00:06:04.298 --> 00:06:11.728 particularly if you were, let us say, an ordinary human being that is not a computer engineer, scientist or researcher, 00:06:11.728 --> 00:06:14.422 not a hacker, not a geek. 00:06:14.422 --> 00:06:17.208 If you were an ordinary human being it was hard to perceive 00:06:17.208 --> 00:06:20.970 that the underlying architecture of the net was meant to be peerage 00:06:20.970 --> 00:06:25.892 because the operating system software with which you interacted 00:06:25.892 --> 00:06:33.694 very strongly instantantiated the idea of the server and client architecture. 00:06:33.694 --> 00:06:38.431 In fact, of course, if you think about it, it was even worse than that. 00:06:38.431 --> 00:06:45.072 The thing called Windows, was a degenerate version of a thing called X Windows. 00:06:45.072 --> 00:06:50.041 It too thought about the world in a server client architecture 00:06:50.041 --> 00:06:53.060 but what we would now think about as backwards. 00:06:53.060 --> 00:06:56.776 The server was the thing at the human beings end. Remember? 00:06:56.776 --> 00:07:00.258 That was the basic X Windows conception of the world. 00:07:00.258 --> 00:07:06.109 It served communications with human beings at the endpoints of the net 00:07:06.109 --> 00:07:13.679 to processes located at arbitrary places near the center, in the middle, or at the edge of the net. 00:07:13.679 --> 00:07:20.784 It was the great idea of Windows, in an odd way, to create a political archetype in the net 00:07:20.784 --> 00:07:23.942 which reduced the human being to the client 00:07:23.942 --> 00:07:28.122 and produced a big centralized computer 00:07:28.122 --> 00:07:35.552 which we might have called a server, which now provided things to the human being 00:07:35.552 --> 00:07:38.153 on take it or leave it terms. 00:07:38.153 --> 00:07:41.961 They were of course quite take or leave it terms. 00:07:41.961 --> 00:07:49.252 And unfortunately everybody took it, since they didn't know how to leave once they got in. 00:07:49.252 --> 00:07:54.500 Now the net was made of servers in the center and clients at the edge. 00:07:54.500 --> 00:07:59.144 Clients had rather little power, and servers had quite a lot. 00:07:59.144 --> 00:08:04.159 As storage gets cheaper, as processing get cheaper, 00:08:04.159 --> 00:08:07.642 and as complex services that scale 00:08:07.642 --> 00:08:12.100 in ways that are hard to use small computers for, 00:08:12.100 --> 00:08:15.862 or at any rate these aggregated collections of small computers for 00:08:15.862 --> 00:08:18.649 the most important of which is search 00:08:18.649 --> 00:08:20.924 As services began to populate that net 00:08:20.924 --> 00:08:23.803 the hierarchical nature of the net came to see like 00:08:23.803 --> 00:08:26.729 it was meant to be there. 00:08:26.729 --> 00:08:28.726 The net was made of servers and clients, 00:08:28.726 --> 00:08:30.816 and the clients were the guys at the edge 00:08:30.816 --> 00:08:33.184 representing human beings, 00:08:33.184 --> 00:08:35.181 and servers were things in the middle with lots of power 00:08:35.181 --> 00:08:37.226 and lots of data. 00:08:40.210 --> 00:08:44.934 Now, one more thing happened about that time, 00:08:44.934 --> 00:08:48.463 It didn't happen in Microsoft Windows computers 00:08:48.463 --> 00:08:52.921 although it happened in Microsoft Windows servers 00:08:52.921 --> 00:08:56.079 and it happened more in sensible operating systems 00:08:56.079 --> 00:08:59.098 like Unix and GNU/Linux and other ones -- 00:08:59.098 --> 00:09:01.559 namely, servers kept logs. 00:09:01.559 --> 00:09:02.859 That's a got thing to do, 00:09:02.859 --> 00:09:04.206 computers ought to keep logs, 00:09:04.206 --> 00:09:06.157 it's a very wise decision, 00:09:06.157 --> 00:09:08.432 when making computer operating software 00:09:08.432 --> 00:09:09.640 to keep logs. 00:09:09.640 --> 00:09:10.940 It helps with debugging, 00:09:10.940 --> 00:09:13.540 makes efficencies attainable, 00:09:13.540 --> 00:09:16.280 makes it possible to study the actual operations 00:09:16.280 --> 00:09:18.231 of computers in the real world, 00:09:18.231 --> 00:09:19.299 it's a very good idea. 00:09:19.299 --> 00:09:22.318 But if you have a system which centralizes servers 00:09:22.318 --> 00:09:26.079 and the servers centralize their logs 00:09:26.079 --> 00:09:29.191 then you are creating vast repositories 00:09:29.191 --> 00:09:31.048 of hierarchically organized data 00:09:31.048 --> 00:09:33.695 about people at the edges of the network 00:09:33.695 --> 00:09:36.203 that they do not control 00:09:36.203 --> 00:09:38.804 and unless they are experienced in the operation 00:09:38.804 --> 00:09:44.098 of servers, will not understand the comprehensiveness of, 00:09:44.098 --> 00:09:47.302 will not understand the meaningfullness of, 00:09:47.302 --> 00:09:51.343 will not understand the aggregatability of 00:09:51.343 --> 00:09:54.872 So we built a network out of the communications 00:09:54.872 --> 00:09:57.612 architecture designed for peering, 00:09:57.612 --> 00:10:01.281 which we defined in client-server style, 00:10:01.281 --> 00:10:05.600 which we then defined to be the disempowered client 00:10:05.600 --> 00:10:08.665 at the edge and the server in the middle. 00:10:08.665 --> 00:10:11.033 We aggregated processing and storage 00:10:11.033 --> 00:10:13.448 increasingly in the middle, 00:10:13.448 --> 00:10:17.163 and we kept the logs that is information about the 00:10:17.163 --> 00:10:19.764 flows of information in the net 00:10:19.764 --> 00:10:23.200 in centralized places, far from the human beings 00:10:23.200 --> 00:10:26.498 who controlled, or at any rate thought they controlled 00:10:26.498 --> 00:10:29.284 the operation of the computers that increasingly 00:10:29.284 --> 00:10:31.699 dominated their lives. 00:10:31.699 --> 00:10:34.906 This was a recipe for disaster. 00:10:35.414 --> 00:10:39.259 This was a recipe for disaster. 00:10:40.013 --> 00:10:44.052 Now, I haven't mentioned yet the word "cloud", 00:10:44.052 --> 00:10:46.653 which I was dealt on the top of the deck 00:10:46.653 --> 00:10:50.136 when I recieved the news that I was talking here tonight 00:10:50.136 --> 00:10:52.643 about privacy in the cloud. 00:10:52.643 --> 00:10:55.383 I haven't mentioned the word cloud because 00:10:55.383 --> 00:10:58.588 the word cloud doesn't really mean anything very much. 00:10:58.588 --> 00:11:01.653 In other words, the disaster we are having 00:11:01.653 --> 00:11:04.253 is not the catastrofe of the cloud. 00:11:04.253 --> 00:11:06.993 The disaster we are having is the catastrofe of the way 00:11:06.993 --> 00:11:10.383 we misunderstood the net under the assistance of the 00:11:10.383 --> 00:11:14.099 un-free software that helped us to understand it. 00:11:14.099 --> 00:11:19.114 What "cloud" means is that servers have ceased to be 00:11:19.114 --> 00:11:21.250 made of iron. 00:11:21.250 --> 00:11:26.730 Cloud means virtualization of servers has ocurred. 00:11:26.730 --> 00:11:31.421 So, out here in the dusty edges of the galaxy where we live 00:11:31.421 --> 00:11:34.114 in disempowered clienthood 00:11:34.114 --> 00:11:36.965 nothing very much has changed. 00:11:37.365 --> 00:11:39.733 As you walk inward towards the center of the galaxy 00:11:39.733 --> 00:11:42.055 it gets more fuzzy than it used to. 00:11:42.055 --> 00:11:46.188 We resolve now halo where we used to see actual stars, 00:11:46.188 --> 00:11:49.486 you know, servers with switched and buttons you can 00:11:49.486 --> 00:11:51.622 push and such. 00:11:51.622 --> 00:11:53.572 Instead, what has happened of course is that 00:11:53.572 --> 00:11:56.173 iron no longer represents a single server, 00:11:56.173 --> 00:12:00.585 iron is mearly a place where servers could be. 00:12:00.585 --> 00:12:04.439 And so cloud means servers have gained freedom. 00:12:04.439 --> 00:12:07.783 Freedom to move, freedom to dance, 00:12:07.783 --> 00:12:10.616 freedom to combine and separate and reaggregate 00:12:10.616 --> 00:12:12.334 and do all kinds of tricks. 00:12:12.334 --> 00:12:15.074 Servers have gained freedom, clients have gained nothing. 00:12:15.074 --> 00:12:17.946 Welcome to the cloud. 00:12:21.499 --> 00:12:25.709 It's a minor modification of the recipe for disaster. 00:12:25.709 --> 00:12:30.214 It improves the operability of systems that control 00:12:30.214 --> 00:12:35.136 the clients out there who were meant to be peers in a net 00:12:35.136 --> 00:12:37.489 made of equal things. 00:12:40.012 --> 00:12:43.635 So that's the architecture of the catastrofe. 00:12:43.635 --> 00:12:46.189 If you think about it, each step in that architectural 00:12:46.189 --> 00:12:49.533 evolution away from a network made of peers 00:12:49.533 --> 00:12:55.059 to servers that serve the communication with human beings 00:12:55.059 --> 00:12:58.913 to clients which are programs running on heavy iron, 00:12:58.913 --> 00:13:03.093 to clients which are the computers that people actually use 00:13:03.093 --> 00:13:06.390 in a fairly disempowered state and servers are high 00:13:06.390 --> 00:13:08.248 concentration of powers in the net, 00:13:08.248 --> 00:13:13.867 to servers are virtual processes running in clouds of iron 00:13:13.867 --> 00:13:17.304 at the center of an increasingly hot galaxy 00:13:17.304 --> 00:13:20.694 and the clients are out there in the dusty spiral arms. 00:13:20.694 --> 00:13:24.177 All of those decisions architecturally were made without 00:13:24.177 --> 00:13:28.126 any discussion of the social consequences long term. 00:13:28.234 --> 00:13:31.375 Part of our general difficulty in talking about the social 00:13:31.375 --> 00:13:34.115 consequences of technology during the great 00:13:34.115 --> 00:13:38.016 period of invention of the Internet, 00:13:38.016 --> 00:13:40.616 done by computer scientists who weren't terribly 00:13:40.616 --> 00:13:44.471 interested in sociology, social psychology or, 00:13:44.471 --> 00:13:47.726 with a few shining exceptions, freedom. 00:13:48.372 --> 00:13:52.969 So we got an architecture which was very subject to misuse. 00:13:52.969 --> 00:13:57.103 Indeed, it was in a way begging to be misused. 00:13:57.103 --> 00:14:01.038 And now we are getting the misuse that we setup. 00:14:01.700 --> 00:14:06.158 Because we have thinned the clients out 00:14:06.158 --> 00:14:08.991 further and further and further. 00:14:08.991 --> 00:14:11.406 In fact we made then mobile. 00:14:11.406 --> 00:14:12.939 We put them in our pockets and we started 00:14:12.939 --> 00:14:15.382 strolling around with them. 00:14:18.505 --> 00:14:25.745 There are a lot of reasons for making clients disempowered, 00:14:26.207 --> 00:14:28.821 and there are even more reasons for disempowering the 00:14:28.821 --> 00:14:33.047 people who own the clients, and who might quaintly be 00:14:33.047 --> 00:14:36.298 thought of as the people who ought to control them. 00:14:36.298 --> 00:14:38.991 If you think for just a moment how many people have an 00:14:38.991 --> 00:14:42.660 interest in disempowering the clients that are the mobile telephones, 00:14:42.660 --> 00:14:44.750 you will see what I mean. 00:14:44.750 --> 00:14:47.676 There are many overlapping rights owners, 00:14:47.676 --> 00:14:50.648 as they think of themselves, each of whom has a stake in 00:14:50.648 --> 00:14:55.245 disempowering a client at the edge of the network, 00:14:55.245 --> 00:14:58.403 to prevent particular hardware from being moved 00:14:58.403 --> 00:15:02.165 from one network to another, to prevent particular hardware 00:15:02.165 --> 00:15:05.044 from playing music not bought at the great monopoly 00:15:05.044 --> 00:15:11.824 of music in the sky, to disable competing video delivery 00:15:11.824 --> 00:15:16.253 services in favor of new chips I founded myself that won't 00:15:16.253 --> 00:15:20.091 run popular video standards, good or bad. 00:15:20.091 --> 00:15:23.992 There are a lot of business models that are based around 00:15:23.992 --> 00:15:28.403 mucking with the control over client hardware and software 00:15:28.403 --> 00:15:32.490 at the edge to deprive the human being who has quaintly 00:15:32.490 --> 00:15:36.995 thought that she purchased it, from actually occupying 00:15:36.995 --> 00:15:40.849 the position that capitalism says owners are always in, 00:15:40.849 --> 00:15:43.729 that is, of total control. 00:15:45.467 --> 00:15:48.930 In fact, what we have, as I said a couple of years ago, 00:15:48.930 --> 00:15:51.640 in between appearances here and another NYU function, 00:15:51.640 --> 00:15:55.062 in fact what we have are things we call platforms. 00:15:55.062 --> 00:15:57.196 The word platform, like the word cloud, doesn't 00:15:57.196 --> 00:15:59.890 inherently mean anything, it's thrown around a lot 00:15:59.890 --> 00:16:03.049 in business talk, but basically what platform means is 00:16:03.049 --> 00:16:08.239 places you can't leave. Stuff you're stuck to. 00:16:08.808 --> 00:16:11.656 Things that don't let you off, right? 00:16:11.656 --> 00:16:15.958 That's platforms. And the net, once it became 00:16:15.958 --> 00:16:20.509 a hierarchically architected zone, with servers in the center 00:16:20.509 --> 00:16:24.781 and increasingly disempowered clients at the edge becomes 00:16:24.781 --> 00:16:32.199 the zone of platforms. And platform-making becomes the order of the day. 00:16:32.676 --> 00:16:37.493 Some years ago a very shrewd lawer who works in the industry 00:16:37.493 --> 00:16:42.957 said to me: "Microsoft was never really a software company. 00:16:42.957 --> 00:16:47.430 Microsoft was a platform management company." 00:16:47.430 --> 00:16:51.075 And I thought, "yes, shot through the heart." 00:16:52.244 --> 00:16:55.526 So we had a lot of platform managers in a hierarchically 00:16:55.526 --> 00:17:00.952 organized network, and we began to evolve services. 00:17:02.306 --> 00:17:06.037 Services is a complicated word, it's not meaningless by any means, 00:17:06.037 --> 00:17:10.634 but it's very tricky to describe that we use it for a lot of different things. 00:17:10.634 --> 00:17:14.890 We badly need an analytical taxonomy of services, 00:17:14.890 --> 00:17:18.605 as my friend and collegue Phillip Begrine, in Paris, 00:17:18.605 --> 00:17:21.587 pointed out some two years or three ago. 00:17:23.080 --> 00:17:27.414 Taxonomies of services involve questions of simplicity, 00:17:27.414 --> 00:17:30.872 complexity, scale and control. 00:17:31.764 --> 00:17:34.906 To take an example, we might define a dichotomy between 00:17:34.906 --> 00:17:39.596 complex and simple services, in which simple services 00:17:39.596 --> 00:17:43.004 are things that any computer can perform for any other computer 00:17:43.004 --> 00:17:46.794 if it wants to, and complex services are things you can't do 00:17:46.794 --> 00:17:50.324 with a computer, you must do with clusters or stuctures 00:17:50.324 --> 00:17:56.268 of some computational or administrative complexity. 00:17:56.268 --> 00:18:01.702 Search is a complex service, indeed search is the archetypal 00:18:01.702 --> 00:18:04.209 complex service. 00:18:04.209 --> 00:18:07.513 Given the one way nature of links in the web, 00:18:07.513 --> 00:18:09.598 and other elements of the data architecture 00:18:09.598 --> 00:18:14.194 that we are now also living with --that's another talk another time-- 00:18:14.194 --> 00:18:18.841 search is not a thing that we can easily distribute. 00:18:19.164 --> 00:18:21.889 The power in the maket of our friends at Google depends 00:18:21.889 --> 00:18:26.116 entirely on the fact that search is not easily distributed. 00:18:26.116 --> 00:18:29.055 It is a complex service that must be centrally organized 00:18:29.055 --> 00:18:31.905 and centrally delivered. It must crawl the web 00:18:31.905 --> 00:18:35.278 in a unilateral direction, link by link, figuring out where 00:18:35.278 --> 00:18:39.800 everything is, in order to help you find it when you need it, 00:18:39.800 --> 00:18:44.055 and in order to do that, at least so far, we have not evolved 00:18:44.055 --> 00:18:48.081 good algorithmic and delivery structures for doing it 00:18:48.081 --> 00:18:50.283 in a decentralized way. 00:18:50.283 --> 00:18:55.572 So, search becomes a archetypal complex service, 00:18:55.572 --> 00:19:01.120 and it draws unto itself a business model for its monetization. 00:19:01.905 --> 00:19:05.543 Advertizing in the twentieth century was a random activity. 00:19:05.543 --> 00:19:08.529 You threw things out and hoped they worked. 00:19:08.529 --> 00:19:11.497 Advertizing in the twenty first century is an exquisitely 00:19:11.497 --> 00:19:15.913 precise activity. You wait for a guy to want something 00:19:15.913 --> 00:19:19.024 and them you send him advertisements about what he wants, 00:19:19.024 --> 00:19:22.125 and bingo, it works like magic. 00:19:22.617 --> 00:19:26.362 So, of course, on the underside of a complex service 00:19:26.362 --> 00:19:29.194 called search, there is a theoretically simple service 00:19:29.194 --> 00:19:32.584 called advertising, which, when unified to a complex 00:19:32.584 --> 00:19:36.596 service increases its efficiency by orders of magnitude, 00:19:36.596 --> 00:19:39.816 and the increase of the efficiency of the simple service, 00:19:39.816 --> 00:19:42.106 when combined with the complex one, 00:19:42.106 --> 00:19:45.541 produces an enormous surplus revenue flow 00:19:45.541 --> 00:19:49.824 which can be used to strengthen search even more. 00:19:51.440 --> 00:19:55.108 But that's the innocent part of the story, 00:19:55.108 --> 00:19:58.777 and we don't remain in the innocent part of the story 00:19:58.777 --> 00:20:01.935 for a variety of reasons. I won't be tedious and marxise 00:20:01.935 --> 00:20:05.510 on a friday night and say because the bourgoisie is constantly 00:20:05.510 --> 00:20:10.294 engaged in distructively reinventing and improving its own activities, 00:20:10.294 --> 00:20:14.241 and I won't be moralistic on a friday night that you can't do that, 00:20:14.241 --> 00:20:19.024 say, because, you know, sin is inirrevocable, is iniradicable 00:20:19.024 --> 00:20:22.925 and human beings are fallen creatures, and greed is one of the sins 00:20:22.925 --> 00:20:25.433 we cannot avoid commiting. 00:20:25.433 --> 00:20:28.916 I will just say that, as a sort of ordinary social process 00:20:28.916 --> 00:20:33.514 we don't stop at innocent, we go on, which surely is the thing 00:20:33.514 --> 00:20:36.049 you should say on a friday night. 00:20:37.680 --> 00:20:40.005 And so we went on. 00:20:40.420 --> 00:20:43.127 Now, where we went on is really toward the discovery 00:20:43.127 --> 00:20:46.795 that all of this would be even better is you had all the logs of everything. 00:20:46.795 --> 00:20:49.489 Because once you have all the logs of everything 00:20:49.489 --> 00:20:56.269 then every simple service is suddenly a gold mine waiting to happen 00:20:56.269 --> 00:20:58.963 And we blew it because the architecture of the net put the logs 00:20:58.963 --> 00:21:02.724 in the wrong place. They put the logs where innocents 00:21:02.724 --> 00:21:04.953 would be tempted. 00:21:04.953 --> 00:21:08.065 They put the logs where the fallen state of human beings 00:21:08.065 --> 00:21:12.111 implies eventually bad trouble, and we got it. 00:21:18.019 --> 00:21:23.454 The cloud means that we can't even point in the direction 00:21:23.454 --> 00:21:25.777 of the server anymore. 00:21:25.777 --> 00:21:29.567 And because we can't even point in the direction of the server anymore 00:21:29.567 --> 00:21:34.721 we don't have extra-technical or non-technical means 00:21:34.721 --> 00:21:39.895 of reliable control over this disaster in slow motion. 00:21:39.895 --> 00:21:46.703 You can make a rule about logs or data flow, or preservation, 00:21:46.703 --> 00:21:52.972 or control, or access, or disclosure, but your laws are human laws 00:21:52.972 --> 00:21:57.105 and they occupy particular territory and the server's 00:21:57.105 --> 00:21:59.236 in the cloud. 00:21:59.852 --> 00:22:03.206 And that means the server is always one step ahead 00:22:03.206 --> 00:22:06.626 of any rule you make, or two, or three, or six, 00:22:06.626 --> 00:22:09.956 or poof, I just realized I'm subject to regulation, 00:22:09.956 --> 00:22:13.029 I think I'll move to Oceana now. 00:22:14.567 --> 00:22:17.759 Which means that, in effect, we lost the ability to 00:22:17.759 --> 00:22:21.753 use either legal regulation or anything about the physical 00:22:21.753 --> 00:22:26.223 architecture of the network to interfere with the process 00:22:26.223 --> 00:22:30.251 of falling away from innocence that was now inevitable 00:22:30.251 --> 00:22:32.911 in the stage I'm talking about, what we might call 00:22:32.911 --> 00:22:35.722 late Google stage 1. 00:22:41.122 --> 00:22:45.171 It is here, of course, that mister Zuckerberg enters. 00:22:46.955 --> 00:22:51.487 The human race has, you know, susceptibility to harm 00:22:53.133 --> 00:22:58.665 but, mister Zuckerberg has attained an unenviable record. 00:23:00.496 --> 00:23:06.565 He has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age. 00:23:11.795 --> 00:23:16.025 Because he harnessed, you know, friday night, that is, 00:23:16.025 --> 00:23:19.631 everybody needs to get laid, and he turned it into 00:23:19.631 --> 00:23:25.056 a structure for degenerating the integrity of human personality. 00:23:26.118 --> 00:23:30.407 And he has to a remarkable extent succeeded, 00:23:30.407 --> 00:23:36.412 with a very poor deal, namely, I will give you free web hosting, 00:23:36.412 --> 00:23:43.177 and some PHP doodads, and you get spying for free, 00:23:43.177 --> 00:23:51.441 all the time. And it works. That's the sad part, it works. 00:23:52.903 --> 00:23:55.555 How could that have happened? 00:23:55.555 --> 00:24:00.311 There was no architectural reason, really, right? 00:24:00.311 --> 00:24:03.004 There was no architecural reason, really. 00:24:03.004 --> 00:24:07.416 Facebook is the web, with "I keep all the logs, 00:24:07.416 --> 00:24:10.164 how do you feel about that?" 00:24:11.506 --> 00:24:15.988 It's a terrarium for what it feels like to live in a panopticon 00:24:15.988 --> 00:24:16.488 built out of web parts. 00:24:16.488 --> 00:24:18.345 and it shouldn't be allowed. It comes to that, it shouldn't be allowed. That's a very poor way to deliver 00:24:18.545 --> 99:59:59.999 those services. They are grossly overpriced at "spying all the time." They are not technically innovative. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They depend upon an architechture subject to misuse, and the business model that supports them is misused. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 There isn't any other business model for them. It's bad. It's bad. I'm not suggesting that it should 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 be illegal. It should be obsolete. We're technologists. We should fix it. I'm glad you're with me so far, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 when I come to how we should fix it, I hope you'll still be with me 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 because then we could get it done. But let's say for now, that that's a really good example of where 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 we went wrong and what happened to us because. It's trickier with Gmail, because of that magical "untouched 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 by human hands-iness". 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 when I say to my students: "Why do you let people read your email?" 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They say: "But nobody's reading my email. There's no human 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 being ever touching it. That would freak me out. I would be creeped out if guys at 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Google were reading my email. But that's not happening, so I don't have a problem." Now this they cannot 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 say about Facebook. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Indeed they know way too much about Facebook, if they've let themselves really know it. You have read the stuff 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and you know. Facebook workers know who's about to have a love affair before the people do. Because they 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 can see X obsessively checking the facebook page of Y. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 There's some very nice research done a couple of years ago at MIT 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 in a seminar I shouldn't name by students I'm not going to describe because they were a little 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 denting to the Facebook terms of service in the course of their research, they were just scraping. But 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 the purpose of their scraping was to demonstrate that you could find 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 closeted homosexuals on Facebook. They don't say anything about their sexual orientation. Their friends. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Their friends are out. Their interests are the interests of their friends who are out. Their photographs 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 are tagged with their friends who are out. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And they're out. Except they're not out. They're just out in Facebook, if anybody looks. Which is not 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 what they had in mind, surely. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And not what we have in mind for them, surely. In fact 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 the degree of potential informational inequality and disruption and difficulty that arises from a misunderstanding, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 a heuristic error, in the minds of human beings about what is and is not discoverable about them is now 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 our biggest privacy problem. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 My students, and I suspect many of the students of the teachers in this room, too, show constantly in 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 our dialogue the difficulty. They still think of privacy as "the one secret I don't want revealed." 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And that's not their problem. Their problem is all the stuff that's the cruft 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 the daily dandruff of life 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that they don't think of as secret in any way, but which aggregates to stuff that they don't want 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 to know. Which aggregates not to just stuff they don't want people to know, but to predictive models 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 about them, that they would be very creeped out to think could exist at all. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The simplicity with which, you can unanonymize theoretically anonymized data, the ease with which from 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 multiple source available to you through third and fourth party commercial transactions for information 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 you can assemble data maps of people's live, the ease with which, once you begin constraining 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 by the few things you know about people, the data available to you, you can quickly infer immense amounts 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 more 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 My friend and collegue Bradley Kooning, who works at the Software Freedom Law Center 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 is one of those archaic human beings who believes that his social security number is a private thing. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and he goes to great lengths to make sure that his social security number is not disclosed, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 which is his right under our law, oddly enough 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 though, try to get health insurance, or get a safe deposit box, or in fact, operate the business at all. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We bend over backwards, sometimes, in the operation of our business, because 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Bradley's social security number is a secret. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And I said to him one day, "You know, it's over now, because Google knows your social security number." 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 He says: "No they don't, I've never told it to anybody." 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I said: "Yeah, but they know the social security number of everybody else born in Baltimore. Yours is 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 the other other one." 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And, as you know, that's true. The data that we infer is the data in the holes between the data 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 we already know if know enough things. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So where we live has become a place in which it would be very unwise to say a 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 about anything that it isn't known if you are pretty widely known. And all of us, for one reason or another 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 are pretty widely known in the net. We want to live there. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It is our neighborhood. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We just don't want to live with a video camera on every tree, and a microphone on every bush 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and data miner beneath our feet everywhere we walk. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And the net's like that now. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I'm not objecting to the presence of AOL newbies in usenet news. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Right, it's not an asthetic judgment from 1995, you know 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that they neighborhood is now full of people who don't share our ethnocentric technogeekery, right? 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I'm not lamenting progress of a democritizing kind. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I'm lamenting progress of a totalizing kind. I'm lamenting progress hostile to human freedom. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We all know that it's hostile to human freedom. We all understand it's dystopic possibilities, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 because the dystopias of which it is fertile were the stuff of the science fiction we read when we were 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 children. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The Cold War was fertile in the fantastic invention 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 of where we live now, and it's hard for us to accept that, but it's true. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Fortunately, of course, it's not owned by the government. Well, it is, it's fortunate, it's true. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It's owned by people who you can bribe to get the thing no matter who you are. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 If you're the government, you have an easy way of doing it. You fill out a subpoena blank and you mail 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 it. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I spent two hours yesterday with a law school class, explaining in detail why the Fourth Ammendment does 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 not exist anymore. And I'm not going to do it again, because that's Thursday night, and 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 who would do that on a Friday night? 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But the Fourth Amendment doesn't exist anymore. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I'll put the audio on the net, and the FBI and you can listen to it. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 anytime you want. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We have to fess up. If we're the people who care about freedom, it's late in the game, and we're behind. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We did a lot of good stuff, and we have a lot of tools lying around that we built over the last 25 years 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I helped people build those tools, I helped people keep those tools safe, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I helped people prevent the monopoly from putting all those tools in its bag and walking off with them 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And I'm glad the tools are around, but we do have to admit: we have not used them to protect freedom 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 because freedom is decaying. And that's what David 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 meant in his very kind introduction. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 In fact, people who are investing in the new enterprises of unfreedom, are also the people you will hear 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 if you hang out in Silicon Valley these days telling you that Open Source has become irrelevant. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 What's their logic? Their logic is Software as a Service is becoming the way of the world. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Since nobody every gets any software anymore, the licenses that say if you give people software, you 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 have to give them freedom, don't matter, because you're not giving anybody any software, you're only 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 giving them services. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Well, that's right, Open Source doesn't matter anymore. Free Software matters a lot. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Because, of course, Free Software is Open Source software with freedom. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And Stallman was right, it's the Freedom that matters, ok, the rest of it is just source code. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Freedom still matters, and what we need to do is to make Free Software matter to the problem that we 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 have, which is un-free services, delivered in un-free ways really begining to deteriorate the structure 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 of human freedom. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Like a lot of un-freedom, the real underlying social process that force this un-freedom along, is nothing 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 more than perceived convenience. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 All sorts of freedom goes over perceived convenience. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 You know this, you've stopped paying for things with cash, you use a card you can wave at an RFID reader 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Convenience is said to dictate that you need free web hosting and PHP doodads in return for spying all t 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 the time, because webservers are so terrible to run. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Who could run a webserver of his own, and keep the logs? 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It would be brutal. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Well, it would if it were IIS, I mean, you know, it was a self fulfilling, well, it was intended to be 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 a self fulfilling, yeah, it was designed to say "you're a client, I'm a server. I invented Windows 7. " 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 "It was my idea, I'll keep the logs, thank you very much." 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 That was the industry. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We built another industry. It's in here. But it's in - well, yeah, it is kind of in here, huh? 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So where isn't it? 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Well, it's not in the personal web server I don't have that would prevent me from falling... 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Well why don't we do something about that? 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So what do we need? 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We need a really good web server that you can put in your pocket and plug in any place 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 In other words, it shouldn't be any larger than the charger for your cellphone. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And you shouldn't be able to plug it into any power jack in the world and into any wire near it 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 or sink it up to any wifi router that happens to be in its neighborhood 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It should add a couple of USB ports to attach it to things. It should know how to bring itself up 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 it should know how to start its web server. It should know how to go and collect your stuff out of all 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 of the social networking places where you've got it. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It should know how to send an encrypted backup of everything to your friends servers. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It should know how to microblog. It should know how to make some noise that's like tweet, but not gonna 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 infringe anybody's trademark. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 In other words, it should know how to be your - oh, excuse me, I have to use a dangerous word - avatar 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 , in a free net that works for you, and keeps the logs. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 You can always tell what's happening in your server, and if anybody else what's happening in your server 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 they can get a search warrant. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And if you feel like moving your server to Oceana, or Sealand or New Zealand, or the North Pole, well 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 buy a plane ticket and put it in your pocket. Take it there and leave it behind. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Now there's a little more we got to do, but you know it's all trivial. We need some dynamic DNS, and 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 all stuff we've already invented, it's all there, nobody needs anything special. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Do we have the server you can put in your pocket? 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Indeed we do, off the shelf hardware now, right? 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Beautiful little wall warts, made with ARM chips 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 exactly what I spec'ed for you. Plugin 'em in, plug 'em in, wire'em up. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 How's the software stack in there? I don't know, gee, it's any software stack you want to put in there. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Ubuntu 9.04, 9.10, 8.04, 8.10, Debian, Fedora, it doesn't matter, it can do it in an instant. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 In fact we will send it to you with somebody's top of the charts current distro in it, you just have 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 to name which one you want. Which one do you want? 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Well, you ought to want the Debian GNU/Linux social networking stack 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Delivered to you free, free as in freedom, I mean. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Which does all of things I mean, brings itself up, runs its little Apache, or it's OIAUTH, or it's tinyHTTP or, HTTPlighty, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 whatever you want. Does all of the things we need it to do, syncs up, gets your social network 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 data from the places, locks it down, does you backup, searches, find your friends, registers your dynamic 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 DNS. All of it is trivial, all of it is stuff we've got. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We need to put that together. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I'm not talking about a thing that's hard for us - we need to make a Free Software distribution 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 how many of those do we do? 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 right? 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We need to give a bunch to all of our friends and we need to say: "Here, fool around with this and make 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 it better." 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We need to do the one thing we are really, really, really, really good at. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Because all the rest of it is done, in the bag, cheap, it's ready. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Those wall wart servers, those are $99 now, going to $79, when there are 5 million of them, they will 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 be $29.99 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Then we go to people and we say: "$29.99 once, for a lifetime. Great social networking. Updates automatically. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Software so strong, you coudn't knock it over if you kicked it. Used in hundreds of millions of servers 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 all over the world, doing a wonderful job, and you know what? You get no spying, for free. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They want to know a what's going on in there? Let them get a search warrant. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 For your appartment, your home, your castle, the place where the Fourth Amendment still sort of exists 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 every other Tuesday and Thursday, when the Supreme Court is not in session 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We can do that. We can do that. That requires us to do only the stuff we're really really good at. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The rest of it, we get for free. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Mr. Zuckerberg? Not so much. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Because of course, when there is a competitor to "All spying all the time, whether you like it or not" 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 the competition's going to do real well. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Don't expect Google to be the competitor, that's a platform. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 What we need is to make a thing that's so greasy, that thre will never be another platform again 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Can we do it? Yeah, absolutely, in fact, if you don't have 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 a date on Friday night, let's just have a hackfest and get it done. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Right, it's well within our reach. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Are we going to do it before the Facebook IPO, or are we going to wait until after? 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Really, honestly, seriously? 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 See, the problem that the law has very often in the world where we live in and practice where we work 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The problem that the law has is very often the problem that technology can solve, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and the problem that technology can solve is the place where we go to the law. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 That's the Free Software movement, right? There's software hacking over here, and there's legal hacking 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 over there, and you put'em both together. The whole is bigger than the sum of the parts. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So, it's not like we have to live in the catastrophe. We don't have to live in the catastrophe. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It's not like what we have to do to begin to reverse the catastrophe is hard for us. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We need to re-architecht services in the net. We need to redistribute services back towards the edge 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We need to de-virtualize the servers where your life is stored, and we need to restore some autonomy 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 to you, as the owner of the server. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The measures for taking those steps are technical. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 As usual, the box builders are ahead of us. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The hardware isn't the constraint. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 As usual, nowadays, the software isn't really that deep of a constraint, either. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Because we've made so much wonderful software, which is in fact being used by all of the guys 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 on the bad architecture. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They don't want do without our stuff. The bad architecture is enabled, powered by us. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The re-architecture is, too. And we have our usual magic benefit. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 If we had one copy of what I'm talking about, we'd have all of the copies we need. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We have no manufacturing, or transport or logistics constraint. If we do the job, it's done. We scale. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 This is a technical challenge for a social reason. It's a frontier for technical people to explore. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 There is enormous social payoff for exploring it. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The payoff is plain, because the harm being ameliorated is current, and people you know are suffering 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 from it. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Everything we know about why we make Free Software says that's when we come into our own. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It's a technical challenge, incrementally attainable by extension from where we already are 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that makes the lives of the people around us and whom we care about immediately better. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I have never, in 25 years of doing this work, I have never seen us fail to rise to a challenge that could 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 be defined in those terms. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So I don't think we're going to fail this one either, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Mr. Zuckerberg richly deserves bankruptcy. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Let's give it to him. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Let's give it to him. For free. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And I promise, and you should promise, too, not to spy on the bankruptcy proceedings. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It's none of our business, it's private. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 This is actually, you know, a story potentially happy. It is a story potentially happy. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Anf if we do it, we will have quelled one more rumor about the irrelevance of us. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And everybody in the Valley will have to go find another buzzword. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And all the guys who think that Sand Hill Road is going to rise into new power and glory by spying on 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 everybody and monetizing it, will have to find another line of work, too. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 All of which is purely on the side of the angels. Purely on the side of the angels. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We will not be rid of all of our problems, by any means, but just moving the logs from them to you 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 is the single biggest step that we can take in resolving a whole range of social problems that I feel 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 badly in what remains in what remains of my American constitution, and that I would feel badly aboute 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 if I were watching the failure of the European data protection law from the inside instead of outside 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and that I would feel kind of hopeful about, if I were, oh, say a friend of mine in China. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Because you know, of course, we really ought to put a VPN in that wall wart, and probably we gotta put 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 a Tor router in there, and of course we've got BitTorrent. And by the time you get done with all of that 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 we have a Freedom Box. We have a box that not merely climbs us out of the hole we're in, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We have a box that puts the ladder up for people who are deeper in the hole than we are. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Which is another thing we love to do. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I do believe the United States State Department is going to go slanging away at the Chinese Communist 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Party about internet freedom, and I believe the Chinese Party is going to go slanging back. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And what they are going to say is: "you think you've got real good privacy and autonomy in the internet in 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 your neighborhood?" 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And I got to admit, everytime they do that now, as they have been doing it in the last two weeks 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I would say "Ouch" if I was Hillary Clinton and I knew anything about it. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Because we don't. Because we don't. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It's true, we have a capitalist kind, and they've got a centralist vanguard of the party sort of marxists 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 kind, or maybe marxists, or maybe just totalitarian kind. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But we're not going to win the freedom of the net discussion carrying Facebook on our backs. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We're not. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But just through those wall wart servers around pretty thickly in American society and start taking back 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 the logs and if you want to know who I talk to on a Friday night, get a search warrant, and stop reading 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 my email, and by the way, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 there's my GPG key, and now we really are encrypting, for a change, and so on 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and so on, and so on 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and it begins to look like something we might want to go on an international crusade about 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 we really are making freedom, here, for other people, too. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 For people who live in places where the web don't work. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So this is not a challenge we don't want to rise to, it's a challenge that we want to rise to plenty. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 In fact, we're in a happy state that all the benefits that we could get are way bigger than the technical 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 intricacy of doing what needs to be done, which isn't much. isn't much. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 That's where we came from. We came from our technology was more free than we understood 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and we gave away a bunch of the freedom before we knew it was gone 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We came from un-free software had bad social consequences further down the road than even the freedom 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 agitators knew. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We came from un-freedom's metaphors tend to produce bad technology. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 In other words, we came from stuff that our movement, if I can call it 'ours,' was designed to confront 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 from the beginning, but we came from there. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And we're still living with the consequences of: we didn't do it quite right the first time. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Though we cought up, thanks to Richard Stallman, and we're moving on. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Where we live now, is no place where we're going to have to see our grandchildren live. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Where we live now is no place we would like to conduct guided tours of. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I used to say to my students: "How many video cameras are there between where you live and the law school? 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 count them." 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I now say to my students: "How many video cameras are there between the front door of the law school 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and this classroom? Count them." 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I now say to my students: "Can you find a place where there are no video cameras?" 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Now what happened in that process, was that we created immense cognitive auxiliaries for the State. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Enourmous engines of listening. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 You know how it is if you live in an American university, thanks to the movie and music companies, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 which keep reminding you of the consequeces of living in the midst of an enormous surveillence network. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We're surrounded by stuff listening to and watching us. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We're surrounded by mineable data. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Not all of that is going to go away, because we took Facebook and split it up and carried away our little 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 shards of it. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It's not going go away because we won't take free webhosting with spying inside, anymore 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We'll have other work to do. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And some of that work is lawyers' work, I will admit that. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Some of that work is law drafting and litigating and making trouble and doing lawyer stuff. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And I'm, that's fine, ready. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 My friends and I, we'll do the lawyers' work. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It would be way simpler to do lawyers' work if we were living in a society which had come to understand 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 its privacy. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It would be way simpler to do lawyers' work if young people realized that when they grow up and start 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 voting or start voting now that they're grown up, this is an issue. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 That they need to get the rest of it done, the way we fixed the big stuff when we were kids. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And we'll have a much easier time 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 with the enormous confusions of international interlocking of regimes 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 when we have deteriorated the immense force of American capitalism enforcing us to be less free and more 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 surveiled for other people's profit all of the time. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It isn't that this gets all problems solved, but the easy work is very rich and rewarding right now. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The problems are really bad. Getting the easy ones out will improve the politics of solving the hard 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 ones. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And it's right up our alley. The solution is made of our parts. We gotta do it. That's my message. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It's Friday night, some people don't want to go right back to coding, I'm sure 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We could put it off until Tuesday, but how long do you really want to wait? 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 How long do you really want to wait? 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 You know, every day that goes by, there's more data we'll never get back 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Every day that goes by, there's more inferences we can't undo. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Every day that goes by, we pile up more stuff in the hands of the people who got too much. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So it's not like we should just say: "one of these days, I'll get around to that." 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It's not like we should say: "you know, umn, I think I'd rather, sort of, spend my time browsing news a 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 about iPad." 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It's way more urgent than that. It's way more urgent. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It's that we haven't given ourselves the direction in which to go. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So let's give ourselves the direction to go. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The direction in which to go is towards freedom, using Free Software, to make social justice. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 alright? 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But, but, but, you know this. That's the problem with talking on a Friday night. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 You talk for an hour, and all you tell people is what they know already. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So thanks a lot. I'm happy to take your questions.