Freedom in the Cloud

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Thank you
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It’s a pleasure to be here.
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I would love to think that
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the reason that we’re all here on a Friday night
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is because my speeches are so good.
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I actually have no idea
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why we’re all here on a Friday night
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but I’m very grateful for the invitation.
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I am the person who had no date tonight
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so it was particularly convenient
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that I was invited for now.
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So,
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of course, I didn’t have any date tonight.
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Everybody knows that.
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My calendar’s on the web, right?.
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The problem is that problem.
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Our calendar is on the web.
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Our location is on the web.
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You have a cell phone
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and you have a cell phone network provider
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and if your cell phone network provider is Sprint
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then we can tell you that several million times last year,
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somebody who has a law enforcement ID card in his pocket somewhere
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went to the Sprint website
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and asked for the realtime location of somebody with a telephone number and was given it.
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Several million times.
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Just like that.
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We know that because Sprint admits
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that they have a website
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where anybody with a law enforcement ID
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can go and find the realtime location of anybody
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with a Sprint cellphone.
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We don’t know that about ATT and Verizon
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because they haven’t told us.
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But that’s the only reason we don’t know
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because they haven’t told us.
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That’s a service that you think of as a traditional service -
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telephony.
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But the deal that you get
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with the traditional service called telephony
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now includes a thing you didn’t know, like spying.
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That’s not a service to you
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but it’s a service
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and you get it for free
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with your service contract for telephony.
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You get for free the service of advertising with your gmail
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which means of cause there is another service behind
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which is - untouched by human hands - semantic analysis of your email.
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I still don't understand why anybody wants that.
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I still don't understand why anybody uses it,
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but people do,
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including the very sophisticated and thoughtful people in this room
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and you get free email service
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and some storage, which is worth exactly a penny and a half
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at the current price of storage
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and you get spying all the time
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and for free, too
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and your calendar is on the web
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and everybody can see whether you have a date Friday night,
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and you have a status: Single... Looking
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and you get a service for free: advertising, single looking and spying with it, for free.
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And it all sort of just grew up that way, right, in a blink of an eye, and here we are.
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And what's that got to do with open source? Well in fact it doesn't have anything to do with open source,
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but it has a whole lot to do with free software, yet another reason why Stallman was right, it's the freedom,
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right?
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So we need to backup a little bit to figure out where we actually are and how we actually got here,
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and probably even more important whether we can get out and if so, how? And it isn't a pretty story. At all.
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David's right, I can hardly begin by saying that we won given that spying comes free with everything now.
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but we haven't lost, we've just, really, bamboozled ourselves.
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And we're going to have to unbamboozle ourselves real quickly or we're going to bamboozle a lot of other innocent people
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who didn't know that we were throwing away their privacy for them forever.
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It begins, of course, with the Internet which is why it's really nice to be here talking to the Internet society,
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a society dedicated to the health expansion and theoretical elaboration of a peer to peer network called the Internet.
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Designed as a network of peers without any intrinsic need for hierarchical or structural control,
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and assuming that every switch in the net is an independent freestanding entity whose volition is equivalent
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to the volition to the human beings who own and control it.
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That's the design of the net which, whether you're thinking of it as glued together with IPv4 or that wonderful
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improvement IPv6 we will never use, apparently, it still assumes peer communications.
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Of course it never really, really, really worked out that way. There was nothing in the technical design to prevent it.
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Not at any rate in the technical design of the interconnection of nodes and their communication.
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There was a software problem. It's a simple software problem and it has a simple two syllable name, it's name is Microsoft.
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Conceptually there was a network which was designed as a system of peer nodes, but the
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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--
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viral way, over the course of a decade and a half, the software which
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came to occupt the network was built around a very clear idea that had nothing to do with peers,
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it was called a server-client architecture.
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And the idea that the network was a network of peers
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was hard to perceive after a while,
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particularly if you were, let us say, an ordinary human being that is not a computer engineer, scientist or researcher,
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not a hacker, not a geek.
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If you were an ordinary human being it was hard to perceive
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that the underlying architecture of the net was meant to be peerage
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because the operating system software with which you interacted
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very strongly instantantiated the idea of the server and client architecture.
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In fact, of course, if you think about it, it was even worse than that.
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The thing called Windows, was a degenerate version of a thing called X Windows.
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It too thought about the world in a server client architecture
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but what we would now think about as backwards.
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The server was the thing at the human beings end. Remember?
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That was the basic X Windows conception of the world.
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It served communications with human beings at the endpoints of the net
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to processes located at arbitrary places near the center, in the middle, or at the edge of the net.
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It was the great idea of Windows, in an odd way, to create a political archetype in the net
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which reduced the human being to the client
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and produced a big centralized computer
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which we might have called a server, which now provided things to the human being
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on take it or leave it terms.
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They were of course quite take or leave it terms.
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And unfortunately everybody took it, since they didn't know how to leave once they got in.
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Now the net was made of servers in the center and clients at the edge.
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Clients had rather little power, and servers had quite a lot.
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As storage gets cheaper, as processing get cheaper,
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and as complex services that scale
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in ways that are hard to use small computers for,
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or at any rate these aggregated collections of small computers for
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the most important of which is search
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As services began to populate that net
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the hierarchical nature of the net came to see like
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it was meant to be there.
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The net was made of servers and clients,
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and the clients were the guys at the edge
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representing human beings,
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and servers were things in the middle with lots of power
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and lots of data.
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Now, one more thing happened about that time,
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It didn't happen in Microsoft Windows computers
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although it happened in Microsoft Windows servers
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and it happened more in sensible operating systems
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like Unix and GNU/Linux and other ones --
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namely, servers kept logs.
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That's a got thing to do,
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computers ought to keep logs,
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it's a very wise decision,
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when making computer operating software
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to keep logs.
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It helps with debugging,
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makes efficencies attainable,
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makes it possible to study the actual operations
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of computers in the real world,
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it's a very good idea.
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But if you have a system which centralizes servers
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and the servers centralize their logs
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then you are creating vast repositories
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of hierarchically organized data
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about people at the edges of the network
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that they do not control
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and unless they are experienced in the operation
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of servers, will not understand the comprehensiveness of,
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will not understand the meaningfullness of,
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will not understand the aggregatability of
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So we built a network out of the communications
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architecture designed for peering,
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which we defined in client-server style,
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which we then defined to be the disempowered client
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at the edge and the server in the middle.
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We aggregated processing and storage
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increasingly in the middle,
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and we kept the logs that is information about the
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flows of information in the net
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in centralized places, far from the human beings
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who controlled, or at any rate thought they controlled
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the operation of the computers that increasingly
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dominated their lives.
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This was a recipe for disaster.
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This was a recipe for disaster.
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Now, I haven't mentioned yet the word "cloud",
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which I was dealt on the top of the deck
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when I recieved the news that I was talking here tonight
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about privacy in the cloud.
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I haven't mentioned the word cloud because
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the word cloud doesn't really mean anything very much.
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In other words, the disaster we are having
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is not the catastrofe of the cloud.
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The disaster we are having is the catastrofe of the way
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we misunderstood the net under the assistance of the
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un-free software that helped us to understand it.
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What "cloud" means is that servers have ceased to be
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made of iron.
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Cloud means virtualization of servers has ocurred.
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So, out here in the dusty edges of the galaxy where we live
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in disempowered clienthood
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nothing very much has changed.
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As you walk inward towards the center of the galaxy
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it gets more fuzzy than it used to.
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We resolve now halo where we used to see actual stars,
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you know, servers with switched and buttons you can
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push and such.
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Instead, what has happened of course is that
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iron no longer represents a single server,
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iron is mearly a place where servers could be.
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And so cloud means servers have gained freedom.
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Freedom to move, freedom to dance,
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freedom to combine and separate and reaggregate
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and do all kinds of tricks.
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Servers have gained freedom, clients have gained nothing.
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Welcome to the cloud.
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It's a minor modification of the recipe for disaster.
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It improves the operability of systems that control
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the clients out there who were meant to be peers in a net
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made of equal things.
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So that's the architecture of the catastrofe.
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If you think about it, each step in that architectural
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evolution away from a network made of peers
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to servers that serve the communication with human beings
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to clients which are programs running on heavy iron,
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to clients which are the computers that people actually use
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in a fairly disempowered state and servers are high
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concentration of powers in the net,
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to servers are virtual processes running in clouds of iron
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at the center of an increasingly hot galaxy
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and the clients are out there in the dusty spiral arms.
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All of those decisions architecturally were made without
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any discussion of the social consequences long term.
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Part of our general difficulty in talking about the social
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consequences of technology during the great
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period of invention of the Internet,
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done by computer scientists who weren't terribly
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interested in sociology, social psychology or,
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with a few shining exceptions, freedom.
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So we got an architecture which was very subject to misuse.
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Indeed, it was in a way begging to be misused.
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And now we are getting the misuse that we setup.
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Because we have thinned the clients out
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further and further and further.
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In fact we made then mobile.
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We put them in our pockets and we started
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strolling around with them.
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There are a lot of reasons for making clients disempowered,
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and there are even more reasons for disempowering the
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people who own the clients, and who might quaintly be
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thought of as the people who ought to control them.
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If you think for just a moment how many people have an
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interest in disempowering the clients that are the mobile telephones,
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you will see what I mean.
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There are many overlapping rights owners,
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as they think of themselves, each of whom has a stake in
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disempowering a client at the edge of the network,
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to prevent particular hardware from being moved
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from one network to another, to prevent particular hardware
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from playing music not bought at the great monopoly
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of music in the sky, to disable competing video delivery
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services in favor of new chips I founded myself that won't
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run popular video standards, good or bad.
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There are a lot of business models that are based around
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mucking with the control over client hardware and software
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at the edge to deprive the human being who has quaintly
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thought that she purchased it, from actually occupying
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the position that capitalism says owners are always in,
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that is, of total control.
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In fact, what we have, as I said a couple of years ago,
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in between appearances here and another NYU function,
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in fact what we have are things we call platforms.
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The word platform, like the word cloud, doesn't
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inherently mean anything, it's thrown around a lot
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in business talk, but basically what platform means is
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places you can't leave. Stuff you're stuck to.
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Things that don't let you off, right?
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That's platforms. And the net, once it became
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a hierarchically architected zone, with servers in the center
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and increasingly disempowered clients at the edge becomes
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the zone of platforms. And platform-making becomes the order of the day.
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Some years ago a very shrewd lawer who works in the industry
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said to me: "Microsoft was never really a software company.
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Microsoft was a platform management company."
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And I thought, "yes, shot through the heart."
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So we had a lot of platform managers in a hierarchically
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organized network, and we began to evolve services.
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Services is a complicated word, it's not meaningless by any means,
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but it's very tricky to describe that we use it for a lot of different things.
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We badly need an analytical taxonomy of services,
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as my friend and collegue Phillip Begrine, in Paris,
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pointed out some two years or three ago.
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Taxonomies of services involve questions of simplicity,
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complexity, scale and control.
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To take an example, we might define a dichotomy between
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complex and simple services, in which simple services
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are things that any computer can perform for any other computer
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if it wants to, and complex services are things you can't do
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with a computer, you must do with clusters or stuctures
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of some computational or administrative complexity.
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Search is a complex service, indeed search is the archetypal
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complex service.
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Given the one way nature of links in the web,
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and other elements of the data architecture
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that we are now also living with --that's another talk another time--
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search is not a thing that we can easily distribute.
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The power in the maket of our friends at Google depends
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entirely on the fact that search is not easily distributed.
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It is a complex service that must be centrally organized
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and centrally delivered. It must crawl the web
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in a unilateral direction, link by link, figuring out where
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everything is, in order to help you find it when you need it,
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and in order to do that, at least so far, we have not evolved
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good algorithmic and delivery structures for doing it
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in a decentralized way.
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So, search becomes a archetypal complex service,
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and it draws unto itself a business model for its monetization.
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Advertizing in the twentieth century was a random activity.
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You threw things out and hoped they worked.
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Advertizing in the twenty first century is an exquisitely
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precise activity. You wait for a guy to want something
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and them you send him advertisements about what he wants,
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and bingo, it works like magic.
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So, of course, on the underside of a complex service
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called search, there is a theoretically simple service
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called advertising, which, when unified to a complex
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service increases its efficiency by orders of magnitude,
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and the increase of the efficiency of the simple service,
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when combined with the complex one,
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produces an enormous surplus revenue flow
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which can be used to strengthen search even more.
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But that's the innocent part of the story,
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and we don't remain in the innocent part of the story
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for a variety of reasons. I won't be tedious and marxise
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on a friday night and say because the bourgoisie is constantly
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engaged in distructively reinventing and improving its own activities,
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and I won't be moralistic on a friday night that you can't do that,
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say, because, you know, sin is inirrevocable, is iniradicable
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and human beings are fallen creatures, and greed is one of the sins
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we cannot avoid commiting.
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I will just say that, as a sort of ordinary social process
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we don't stop at innocent, we go on, which surely is the thing
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you should say on a friday night.
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And so we went on.
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Now, where we went on is really toward the discovery
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that all of this would be even better is you had all the logs of everything.
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Because once you have all the logs of everything
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then every simple service is suddenly a gold mine waiting to happen
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And we blew it because the architecture of the net put the logs
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in the wrong place. They put the logs where innocents
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would be tempted.
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They put the logs where the fallen state of human beings
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implies eventually bad trouble, and we got it.
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The cloud means that we can't even point in the direction
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of the server anymore.
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And because we can't even point in the direction of the server anymore
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we don't have extra-technical or non-technical means
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of reliable control over this disaster in slow motion.
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You can make a rule about logs or data flow, or preservation,
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or control, or access, or disclosure, but your laws are human laws
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and they occupy particular territory and the server's
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in the cloud.
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And that means the server is always one step ahead
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of any rule you make, or two, or three, or six,
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or poof, I just realized I'm subject to regulation,
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I think I'll move to Oceana now.
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Which means that, in effect, we lost the ability to
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use either legal regulation or anything about the physical
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architecture of the network to interfere with the process
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of falling away from innocence that was now inevitable
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in the stage I'm talking about, what we might call
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late Google stage 1.
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It is here, of course, that mister Zuckerberg enters.
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The human race has, you know, susceptibility to harm
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but, mister Zuckerberg has attained an unenviable record.
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He has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age.
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Because he harnessed, you know, friday night, that is,
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everybody needs to get laid, and he turned it into
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a structure for degenerating the integrity of human personality.
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And he has to a remarkable extent succeeded,
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with a very poor deal, namely, I will give you free web hosting,
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and some PHP doodads, and you get spying for free,
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all the time. And it works. That's the sad part, it works.
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How could that have happened?
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There was no architectural reason, really, right?
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There was no architecural reason, really.
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Facebook is the web, with "I keep all the logs,
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how do you feel about that?"
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It's a terrarium for what it feels like to live in a panopticon
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built out of web parts.
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and it shouldn't be allowed. It comes to that, it shouldn't be allowed. That's a very poor way to deliver
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those services. They are grossly overpriced at "spying all the time." They are not technically innovative.
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They depend upon an architechture subject to misuse, and the business model that supports them is misused.
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There isn't any other business model for them. It's bad. It's bad. I'm not suggesting that it should
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be illegal. It should be obsolete. We're technologists. We should fix it. I'm glad you're with me so far,
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when I come to how we should fix it, I hope you'll still be with me
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because then we could get it done. But let's say for now, that that's a really good example of where
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we went wrong and what happened to us because. It's trickier with Gmail, because of that magical "untouched
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by human hands-iness".
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when I say to my students: "Why do you let people read your email?"
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They say: "But nobody's reading my email. There's no human
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being ever touching it. That would freak me out. I would be creeped out if guys at
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Google were reading my email. But that's not happening, so I don't have a problem." Now this they cannot
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say about Facebook.
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Indeed they know way too much about Facebook, if they've let themselves really know it. You have read the stuff
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and you know. Facebook workers know who's about to have a love affair before the people do. Because they
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can see X obsessively checking the facebook page of Y.
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There's some very nice research done a couple of years ago at MIT
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in a seminar I shouldn't name by students I'm not going to describe because they were a little
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denting to the Facebook terms of service in the course of their research, they were just scraping. But
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the purpose of their scraping was to demonstrate that you could find
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closeted homosexuals on Facebook. They don't say anything about their sexual orientation. Their friends.
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Their friends are out. Their interests are the interests of their friends who are out. Their photographs
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are tagged with their friends who are out.
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And they're out. Except they're not out. They're just out in Facebook, if anybody looks. Which is not
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what they had in mind, surely.
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And not what we have in mind for them, surely. In fact
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the degree of potential informational inequality and disruption and difficulty that arises from a misunderstanding,
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a heuristic error, in the minds of human beings about what is and is not discoverable about them is now
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our biggest privacy problem.
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My students, and I suspect many of the students of the teachers in this room, too, show constantly in
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our dialogue the difficulty. They still think of privacy as "the one secret I don't want revealed."
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And that's not their problem. Their problem is all the stuff that's the cruft
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the daily dandruff of life
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that they don't think of as secret in any way, but which aggregates to stuff that they don't want
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to know. Which aggregates not to just stuff they don't want people to know, but to predictive models
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about them, that they would be very creeped out to think could exist at all.
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The simplicity with which, you can unanonymize theoretically anonymized data, the ease with which from
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multiple source available to you through third and fourth party commercial transactions for information
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you can assemble data maps of people's live, the ease with which, once you begin constraining
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by the few things you know about people, the data available to you, you can quickly infer immense amounts
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more
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My friend and collegue Bradley Kooning, who works at the Software Freedom Law Center
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is one of those archaic human beings who believes that his social security number is a private thing.
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and he goes to great lengths to make sure that his social security number is not disclosed,
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which is his right under our law, oddly enough
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though, try to get health insurance, or get a safe deposit box, or in fact, operate the business at all.
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We bend over backwards, sometimes, in the operation of our business, because
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Bradley's social security number is a secret.
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And I said to him one day, "You know, it's over now, because Google knows your social security number."
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He says: "No they don't, I've never told it to anybody."
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I said: "Yeah, but they know the social security number of everybody else born in Baltimore. Yours is
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the other other one."
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And, as you know, that's true. The data that we infer is the data in the holes between the data
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we already know if know enough things.
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So where we live has become a place in which it would be very unwise to say a
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about anything that it isn't known if you are pretty widely known. And all of us, for one reason or another
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are pretty widely known in the net. We want to live there.
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It is our neighborhood.
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We just don't want to live with a video camera on every tree, and a microphone on every bush
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and data miner beneath our feet everywhere we walk.
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And the net's like that now.
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I'm not objecting to the presence of AOL newbies in usenet news.
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Right, it's not an asthetic judgment from 1995, you know
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that they neighborhood is now full of people who don't share our ethnocentric technogeekery, right?
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I'm not lamenting progress of a democritizing kind.
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I'm lamenting progress of a totalizing kind. I'm lamenting progress hostile to human freedom.
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We all know that it's hostile to human freedom. We all understand it's dystopic possibilities,
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because the dystopias of which it is fertile were the stuff of the science fiction we read when we were
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children.
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The Cold War was fertile in the fantastic invention
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of where we live now, and it's hard for us to accept that, but it's true.
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Fortunately, of course, it's not owned by the government. Well, it is, it's fortunate, it's true.
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It's owned by people who you can bribe to get the thing no matter who you are.
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If you're the government, you have an easy way of doing it. You fill out a subpoena blank and you mail
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it.
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I spent two hours yesterday with a law school class, explaining in detail why the Fourth Ammendment does
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not exist anymore. And I'm not going to do it again, because that's Thursday night, and
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who would do that on a Friday night?
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But the Fourth Amendment doesn't exist anymore.
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I'll put the audio on the net, and the FBI and you can listen to it.
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anytime you want.
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We have to fess up. If we're the people who care about freedom, it's late in the game, and we're behind.
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We did a lot of good stuff, and we have a lot of tools lying around that we built over the last 25 years
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I helped people build those tools, I helped people keep those tools safe,
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I helped people prevent the monopoly from putting all those tools in its bag and walking off with them
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And I'm glad the tools are around, but we do have to admit: we have not used them to protect freedom
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because freedom is decaying. And that's what David
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meant in his very kind introduction.
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In fact, people who are investing in the new enterprises of unfreedom, are also the people you will hear
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if you hang out in Silicon Valley these days telling you that Open Source has become irrelevant.
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What's their logic? Their logic is Software as a Service is becoming the way of the world.
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Since nobody every gets any software anymore, the licenses that say if you give people software, you
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have to give them freedom, don't matter, because you're not giving anybody any software, you're only
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giving them services.
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Well, that's right, Open Source doesn't matter anymore. Free Software matters a lot.
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Because, of course, Free Software is Open Source software with freedom.
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And Stallman was right, it's the Freedom that matters, ok, the rest of it is just source code.
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Freedom still matters, and what we need to do is to make Free Software matter to the problem that we
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have, which is un-free services, delivered in un-free ways really begining to deteriorate the structure
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of human freedom.
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Like a lot of un-freedom, the real underlying social process that force this un-freedom along, is nothing
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more than perceived convenience.
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All sorts of freedom goes over perceived convenience.
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You know this, you've stopped paying for things with cash, you use a card you can wave at an RFID reader
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Convenience is said to dictate that you need free web hosting and PHP doodads in return for spying all t
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the time, because webservers are so terrible to run.
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Who could run a webserver of his own, and keep the logs?
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It would be brutal.
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Well, it would if it were IIS, I mean, you know, it was a self fulfilling, well, it was intended to be
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a self fulfilling, yeah, it was designed to say "you're a client, I'm a server. I invented Windows 7. "
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"It was my idea, I'll keep the logs, thank you very much."
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That was the industry.
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We built another industry. It's in here. But it's in - well, yeah, it is kind of in here, huh?
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So where isn't it?
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Well, it's not in the personal web server I don't have that would prevent me from falling...
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Well why don't we do something about that?
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So what do we need?
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We need a really good web server that you can put in your pocket and plug in any place
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In other words, it shouldn't be any larger than the charger for your cellphone.
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And you shouldn't be able to plug it into any power jack in the world and into any wire near it
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or sink it up to any wifi router that happens to be in its neighborhood
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It should add a couple of USB ports to attach it to things. It should know how to bring itself up
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it should know how to start its web server. It should know how to go and collect your stuff out of all
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of the social networking places where you've got it.
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It should know how to send an encrypted backup of everything to your friends servers.
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It should know how to microblog. It should know how to make some noise that's like tweet, but not gonna
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infringe anybody's trademark.
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In other words, it should know how to be your - oh, excuse me, I have to use a dangerous word - avatar
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, in a free net that works for you, and keeps the logs.
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You can always tell what's happening in your server, and if anybody else what's happening in your server
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they can get a search warrant.
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And if you feel like moving your server to Oceana, or Sealand or New Zealand, or the North Pole, well
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buy a plane ticket and put it in your pocket. Take it there and leave it behind.
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Now there's a little more we got to do, but you know it's all trivial. We need some dynamic DNS, and
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all stuff we've already invented, it's all there, nobody needs anything special.
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Do we have the server you can put in your pocket?
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Indeed we do, off the shelf hardware now, right?
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Beautiful little wall warts, made with ARM chips
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exactly what I spec'ed for you. Plugin 'em in, plug 'em in, wire'em up.
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How's the software stack in there? I don't know, gee, it's any software stack you want to put in there.
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Ubuntu 9.04, 9.10, 8.04, 8.10, Debian, Fedora, it doesn't matter, it can do it in an instant.
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In fact we will send it to you with somebody's top of the charts current distro in it, you just have
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to name which one you want. Which one do you want?
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Well, you ought to want the Debian GNU/Linux social networking stack
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Delivered to you free, free as in freedom, I mean.
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Which does all of things I mean, brings itself up, runs its little Apache, or it's OIAUTH, or it's tinyHTTP or, HTTPlighty,
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whatever you want. Does all of the things we need it to do, syncs up, gets your social network
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data from the places, locks it down, does you backup, searches, find your friends, registers your dynamic
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DNS. All of it is trivial, all of it is stuff we've got.
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We need to put that together.
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I'm not talking about a thing that's hard for us - we need to make a Free Software distribution
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how many of those do we do?
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right?
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We need to give a bunch to all of our friends and we need to say: "Here, fool around with this and make
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it better."
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We need to do the one thing we are really, really, really, really good at.
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Because all the rest of it is done, in the bag, cheap, it's ready.
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Those wall wart servers, those are $99 now, going to $79, when there are 5 million of them, they will
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be $29.99
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Then we go to people and we say: "$29.99 once, for a lifetime. Great social networking. Updates automatically.
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Software so strong, you coudn't knock it over if you kicked it. Used in hundreds of millions of servers
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all over the world, doing a wonderful job, and you know what? You get no spying, for free.
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They want to know a what's going on in there? Let them get a search warrant.
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For your appartment, your home, your castle, the place where the Fourth Amendment still sort of exists
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every other Tuesday and Thursday, when the Supreme Court is not in session
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We can do that. We can do that. That requires us to do only the stuff we're really really good at.
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The rest of it, we get for free.
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Mr. Zuckerberg? Not so much.
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Because of course, when there is a competitor to "All spying all the time, whether you like it or not"
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the competition's going to do real well.
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Don't expect Google to be the competitor, that's a platform.
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What we need is to make a thing that's so greasy, that thre will never be another platform again
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Can we do it? Yeah, absolutely, in fact, if you don't have
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a date on Friday night, let's just have a hackfest and get it done.
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Right, it's well within our reach.
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Are we going to do it before the Facebook IPO, or are we going to wait until after?
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Really, honestly, seriously?
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See, the problem that the law has very often in the world where we live in and practice where we work
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The problem that the law has is very often the problem that technology can solve,
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and the problem that technology can solve is the place where we go to the law.
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That's the Free Software movement, right? There's software hacking over here, and there's legal hacking
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over there, and you put'em both together. The whole is bigger than the sum of the parts.
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So, it's not like we have to live in the catastrophe. We don't have to live in the catastrophe.
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It's not like what we have to do to begin to reverse the catastrophe is hard for us.
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We need to re-architecht services in the net. We need to redistribute services back towards the edge
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We need to de-virtualize the servers where your life is stored, and we need to restore some autonomy
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to you, as the owner of the server.
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The measures for taking those steps are technical.
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As usual, the box builders are ahead of us.
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The hardware isn't the constraint.
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As usual, nowadays, the software isn't really that deep of a constraint, either.
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Because we've made so much wonderful software, which is in fact being used by all of the guys
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on the bad architecture.
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They don't want do without our stuff. The bad architecture is enabled, powered by us.
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The re-architecture is, too. And we have our usual magic benefit.
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If we had one copy of what I'm talking about, we'd have all of the copies we need.
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We have no manufacturing, or transport or logistics constraint. If we do the job, it's done. We scale.
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This is a technical challenge for a social reason. It's a frontier for technical people to explore.
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There is enormous social payoff for exploring it.
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The payoff is plain, because the harm being ameliorated is current, and people you know are suffering
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from it.
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Everything we know about why we make Free Software says that's when we come into our own.
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It's a technical challenge, incrementally attainable by extension from where we already are
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that makes the lives of the people around us and whom we care about immediately better.
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I have never, in 25 years of doing this work, I have never seen us fail to rise to a challenge that could
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be defined in those terms.
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So I don't think we're going to fail this one either,
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Mr. Zuckerberg richly deserves bankruptcy.
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Let's give it to him.
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Let's give it to him. For free.
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And I promise, and you should promise, too, not to spy on the bankruptcy proceedings.
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It's none of our business, it's private.
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This is actually, you know, a story potentially happy. It is a story potentially happy.
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Anf if we do it, we will have quelled one more rumor about the irrelevance of us.
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And everybody in the Valley will have to go find another buzzword.
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And all the guys who think that Sand Hill Road is going to rise into new power and glory by spying on
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everybody and monetizing it, will have to find another line of work, too.
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All of which is purely on the side of the angels. Purely on the side of the angels.
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We will not be rid of all of our problems, by any means, but just moving the logs from them to you
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is the single biggest step that we can take in resolving a whole range of social problems that I feel
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badly in what remains in what remains of my American constitution, and that I would feel badly aboute
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if I were watching the failure of the European data protection law from the inside instead of outside
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and that I would feel kind of hopeful about, if I were, oh, say a friend of mine in China.
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Because you know, of course, we really ought to put a VPN in that wall wart, and probably we gotta put
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a Tor router in there, and of course we've got BitTorrent. And by the time you get done with all of that
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we have a Freedom Box. We have a box that not merely climbs us out of the hole we're in,
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We have a box that puts the ladder up for people who are deeper in the hole than we are.
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Which is another thing we love to do.
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I do believe the United States State Department is going to go slanging away at the Chinese Communist
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Party about internet freedom, and I believe the Chinese Party is going to go slanging back.
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And what they are going to say is: "you think you've got real good privacy and autonomy in the internet in
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your neighborhood?"
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And I got to admit, everytime they do that now, as they have been doing it in the last two weeks
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I would say "Ouch" if I was Hillary Clinton and I knew anything about it.
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Because we don't. Because we don't.
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It's true, we have a capitalist kind, and they've got a centralist vanguard of the party sort of marxists
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kind, or maybe marxists, or maybe just totalitarian kind.
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But we're not going to win the freedom of the net discussion carrying Facebook on our backs.
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We're not.
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But just through those wall wart servers around pretty thickly in American society and start taking back
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the logs and if you want to know who I talk to on a Friday night, get a search warrant, and stop reading
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my email, and by the way,
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there's my GPG key, and now we really are encrypting, for a change, and so on
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and so on, and so on
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and it begins to look like something we might want to go on an international crusade about
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we really are making freedom, here, for other people, too.
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For people who live in places where the web don't work.
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So this is not a challenge we don't want to rise to, it's a challenge that we want to rise to plenty.
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In fact, we're in a happy state that all the benefits that we could get are way bigger than the technical
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intricacy of doing what needs to be done, which isn't much. isn't much.
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That's where we came from. We came from our technology was more free than we understood
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and we gave away a bunch of the freedom before we knew it was gone
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We came from un-free software had bad social consequences further down the road than even the freedom
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agitators knew.
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We came from un-freedom's metaphors tend to produce bad technology.
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In other words, we came from stuff that our movement, if I can call it 'ours,' was designed to confront
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from the beginning, but we came from there.
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And we're still living with the consequences of: we didn't do it quite right the first time.
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Though we cought up, thanks to Richard Stallman, and we're moving on.
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Where we live now, is no place where we're going to have to see our grandchildren live.
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Where we live now is no place we would like to conduct guided tours of.
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I used to say to my students: "How many video cameras are there between where you live and the law school?
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count them."
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I now say to my students: "How many video cameras are there between the front door of the law school
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and this classroom? Count them."
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I now say to my students: "Can you find a place where there are no video cameras?"
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Now what happened in that process, was that we created immense cognitive auxiliaries for the State.
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Enourmous engines of listening.
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You know how it is if you live in an American university, thanks to the movie and music companies,
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which keep reminding you of the consequeces of living in the midst of an enormous surveillence network.
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We're surrounded by stuff listening to and watching us.
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We're surrounded by mineable data.
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Not all of that is going to go away, because we took Facebook and split it up and carried away our little
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shards of it.
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It's not going go away because we won't take free webhosting with spying inside, anymore
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We'll have other work to do.
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And some of that work is lawyers' work, I will admit that.
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Some of that work is law drafting and litigating and making trouble and doing lawyer stuff.
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And I'm, that's fine, ready.
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My friends and I, we'll do the lawyers' work.
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It would be way simpler to do lawyers' work if we were living in a society which had come to understand
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its privacy.
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It would be way simpler to do lawyers' work if young people realized that when they grow up and start
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voting or start voting now that they're grown up, this is an issue.
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That they need to get the rest of it done, the way we fixed the big stuff when we were kids.
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And we'll have a much easier time
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with the enormous confusions of international interlocking of regimes
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when we have deteriorated the immense force of American capitalism enforcing us to be less free and more
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surveiled for other people's profit all of the time.
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It isn't that this gets all problems solved, but the easy work is very rich and rewarding right now.
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The problems are really bad. Getting the easy ones out will improve the politics of solving the hard
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ones.
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And it's right up our alley. The solution is made of our parts. We gotta do it. That's my message.
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It's Friday night, some people don't want to go right back to coding, I'm sure
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We could put it off until Tuesday, but how long do you really want to wait?
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How long do you really want to wait?
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You know, every day that goes by, there's more data we'll never get back
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Every day that goes by, there's more inferences we can't undo.
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Every day that goes by, we pile up more stuff in the hands of the people who got too much.
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So it's not like we should just say: "one of these days, I'll get around to that."
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It's not like we should say: "you know, umn, I think I'd rather, sort of, spend my time browsing news a
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about iPad."
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It's way more urgent than that. It's way more urgent.
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It's that we haven't given ourselves the direction in which to go.
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So let's give ourselves the direction to go.
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The direction in which to go is towards freedom, using Free Software, to make social justice.
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alright?
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But, but, but, you know this. That's the problem with talking on a Friday night.
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You talk for an hour, and all you tell people is what they know already.
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So thanks a lot. I'm happy to take your questions.

Title:: Freedom in the Cloud
Description:: Eben Moglen talks about "Freedom in the Cloud" at the Feb 5, 2010 meeting of the Internet Society's New York chapter. This was the first speech where Eben talks about the FreedomBox, an idea which has turned into the independent FreedomBox Foundation (http://freedomboxfoundation.org) and numerous software development projects. Both highlights and a full transcript of the talk are available here: http://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2010/ISOC-NY-Moglen-2010/

Original video by Joly MacFie at: http://www.archive.org/details/isoc-ny1710

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Video Language:: English

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