[00:01.500 --> 00:04.080]  So I'm the guy with the engineer's hat.
[00:04.600 --> 00:06.780]  Because I am an engineer.
[00:07.800 --> 00:12.460]  Hardware design, which makes me a stranger in many places.
[00:13.580 --> 00:22.680]  I have said since 1964, I am an engineer and therefore a radical.
[00:24.780 --> 00:32.500]  I have experienced or participated in three revolutions.
[00:32.760 --> 00:35.840]  One of them is currently developing, and also I'll talk about each one.
[00:36.420 --> 00:42.880]  I've written a book describing my 60-year journey through two revolutions and into a third.
[00:45.140 --> 00:52.480]  It's available through QR code on my website, which is felsandsigns.com.
[00:54.340 --> 00:59.020]  And there's a table just to the left of the registration table.
[00:59.020 --> 01:00.860]  The Vintage Computer Festival table.
[01:00.880 --> 01:03.000]  They've let me camp out there.
[01:06.800 --> 01:10.000]  If I'm talking about revolution, I have to explain.
[01:10.440 --> 01:14.080]  So I define at least three characteristics for revolutions.
[01:14.360 --> 01:15.620]  One is mass participation.
[01:15.620 --> 01:17.020]  It's not just a few people.
[01:18.280 --> 01:22.020]  Number two, it overthrows an existing order.
[01:22.780 --> 01:24.600]  This is the most important part.
[01:25.220 --> 01:26.200]  Well, maybe not.
[01:26.200 --> 01:33.380]  The number three may be more important, which is the consequences of doing that are far beyond those anticipated.
[01:36.000 --> 01:41.280]  My first revolution was 1964 at Berkeley, the free speech movement.
[01:41.640 --> 01:53.860]  One hears about that, and there's a snippet of a speech by Mario Sabia that you see all the time, and it looks like we occupied a building, and then we, boom, it was over, and good.
[01:53.860 --> 01:56.580]  Well, not that simple.
[01:56.940 --> 02:06.180]  It was a reaction to the administration's attempt to suppress student support for organizing civil rights demonstrations in the North, where we were.
[02:07.160 --> 02:13.960]  Students were coming back from Mississippi summer at that time, and the university made a really stupid decision.
[02:13.960 --> 02:22.340]  And in September, they decreed that the tables that had been allowed to set up on the edge of campus weren't really outside campus.
[02:22.480 --> 02:36.860]  They were inside campus, so they had to follow their directives, and you couldn't mount demonstrations outside campus where people might get arrested.
[02:36.860 --> 02:43.400]  No, no, no, can't sell bumper stickers, can't raise funds, solicit funds, etc.
[02:43.600 --> 03:05.340]  Well, the entire spectrum of student political entities united as a united front, which became the free speech movement to oppose this, and very quickly began to initiate civil disobedience by setting up tables right in front of the administration building.
[03:06.020 --> 03:14.360]  Names were taken, people came in to replace every time someone's name was taken, there was a new person, fill the chales was the technique.
[03:14.900 --> 03:25.740]  150 students went up to the dean's office and demanded that they were there to be punished, they were told to go away, they were disrupting everything.
[03:27.120 --> 03:40.360]  And a day later, they arrested somebody, put them in a police car that they brought out on campus in a plaza, at noon, and if you know the Berkeley campus, the entire campus pours through that plaza to go out to lunch.
[03:41.160 --> 03:59.480]  It was captured by demonstrators, the car was there for 32 hours, and parents' day was coming up while they were bringing up the motorcycle cops behind the building there, and quickly a decision, an interim decision was passed out.
[03:59.480 --> 03:59.740]  Okay.
[04:00.580 --> 04:01.060]  Boom.
[04:01.180 --> 04:02.000]  It started happening.
[04:02.180 --> 04:03.320]  It went on for two months.
[04:03.700 --> 04:05.000]  It wasn't just one event.
[04:06.460 --> 04:19.420]  And it ended in December 8th of 1964, when the faculty voted to support the free speech movement's position, which was, as we put it, first and 14th or fight.
[04:20.980 --> 04:23.880]  And of course, because we were a public university, that was applicable.
[04:24.140 --> 04:27.940]  It's not applicable to private universities.
[04:29.480 --> 04:40.640]  And what we did was to overthrow the principle of in loco parentis, that the university could act in the place of the parent, of the minor child.
[04:40.920 --> 04:43.480]  Now, in those days, minor meant under 21.
[04:46.220 --> 04:47.460]  So, but that was gone.
[04:48.640 --> 04:52.840]  We had the same rights everybody else had outside of campus.
[04:52.980 --> 04:54.120]  We had those on campus.
[04:54.120 --> 04:55.300]  And what happened?
[04:56.120 --> 05:00.100]  In the next year, in 1965, the counterculture erupted.
[05:01.640 --> 05:04.400]  First of all, I have to explain.
[05:07.270 --> 05:14.400]  The reason why we won was that the alienated and isolated students formed into a community.
[05:15.160 --> 05:19.920]  And that was done by facilitating cross-communication.
[05:20.460 --> 05:32.140]  We did that through our phone room, and through leafleting, and the human structure that we set up for gathering information and disseminating information.
[05:32.560 --> 05:34.280]  It doesn't just happen by itself.
[05:36.220 --> 05:38.080]  But what we got was a lot more.
[05:38.540 --> 05:41.260]  Maybe 5,000, maybe 10,000 students.
[05:41.420 --> 05:41.980]  We don't know yet.
[05:42.080 --> 05:44.500]  Nobody's done a detailed study of this.
[05:44.960 --> 05:45.420]  Dropped out.
[05:45.860 --> 05:47.340]  I said, who needs this noise?
[05:48.320 --> 05:50.880]  I'm going to go live my life the way I want to live it.
[05:50.960 --> 05:51.580]  That's the point.
[05:52.500 --> 05:55.340]  And a lot of them wound up forming the Haight-Ashbury.
[05:56.160 --> 05:56.960]  Years later.
[05:57.160 --> 05:57.840]  A few years later.
[05:59.540 --> 06:00.040]  Oops.
[06:03.820 --> 06:04.320]  Hello.
[06:04.320 --> 06:05.420]  Next slide, please.
[06:05.700 --> 06:06.080]  There we are.
[06:07.540 --> 06:09.820]  And I was so enthralled by this.
[06:09.820 --> 06:11.900]  I wanted life to be like that all the time.
[06:11.900 --> 06:12.940]  And I still do.
[06:13.520 --> 06:26.900]  It was amazing where everybody could do what they thought they wanted to do, try it out, wouldn't be reprimanded for it.
[06:27.660 --> 06:30.580]  And, you know, some students started a magazine.
[06:30.580 --> 06:33.920]  It was kind of a precursor of Rolling Stone.
[06:34.420 --> 06:38.620]  And as it happened, the future publisher of Rolling Stone was on campus, too.
[06:39.220 --> 06:40.460]  Probably got the idea.
[06:40.700 --> 06:42.280]  It only lasted a few issues.
[06:43.140 --> 06:45.260]  But, had never been seen before.
[06:45.740 --> 06:51.800]  Spider, sex politics, international communism, drugs, extremism, and rock and roll.
[06:52.320 --> 06:54.840]  It really started from sex politics, drugs, and rock and roll.
[06:54.920 --> 06:56.380]  But they had to put an I and an E in there.
[07:00.640 --> 07:02.060]  People were forming bands.
[07:02.360 --> 07:05.140]  And, of course, the Vietnam War started cracking up.
[07:06.020 --> 07:08.980]  And anti-war activity began to that.
[07:09.700 --> 07:10.400]  Fairly early.
[07:13.040 --> 07:14.720]  Second revolution.
[07:17.380 --> 07:26.720]  I date the beginning of the personal computer revolution from September of 1973, when Radio Electronics Magazine published an article.
[07:27.000 --> 07:28.460]  The TV typewriter.
[07:28.600 --> 07:30.240]  Build your own TV typewriter.
[07:31.240 --> 07:37.040]  And you would be able to type on a keyboard and see the words show up on your TV screen.
[07:40.200 --> 07:49.260]  They said you had to send in $2 in a self-addressed stamp envelope to get the construction plans, which are pretty extensive and difficult to do.
[07:50.460 --> 07:52.500]  Expected 20 responses.
[07:52.520 --> 07:54.520]  Got 10,000, each with $2.
[07:55.580 --> 07:57.220]  Something was happening.
[07:58.320 --> 08:13.120]  And I believe that the attraction was that this offered personal, first-hand, immersive experience, the hard way, with both digital technology and video technology.
[08:13.440 --> 08:14.660]  That was the attraction.
[08:14.940 --> 08:15.860]  Very powerful.
[08:18.190 --> 08:26.940]  And then things turned along until the 1975 with the Altair 8800, the first kit computer.
[08:26.940 --> 08:30.240]  There's a desperation move by a tiny company that was going broke.
[08:33.220 --> 08:36.740]  They managed... they got it on the cover of Popular Electronics Magazine.
[08:36.740 --> 08:38.380]  It was basically an empty box.
[08:38.860 --> 08:46.020]  It had a processor card and it had a little RAM card that at most could do 1K bytes of RAM.
[08:46.960 --> 08:48.040]  And only one...
[08:50.220 --> 08:54.100]  I think only one... only 256 bytes of that was filled.
[08:55.180 --> 08:58.400]  It had slots... it had sockets for the other chips.
[08:59.600 --> 09:01.520]  We couldn't do anything with a computer like that.
[09:01.640 --> 09:02.520]  Everybody knows that.
[09:03.140 --> 09:04.360]  Well, we didn't know.
[09:05.300 --> 09:17.120]  And so, a lot of people who were casting about for something to do started little companies to build plugins, because it did have places to plug cards in.
[09:17.560 --> 09:20.460]  It didn't have any place to plug a teletype or a terminal in.
[09:20.500 --> 09:22.280]  You had to use the front panel switches.
[09:22.280 --> 09:25.380]  So, we made those cards to plug the terminals in.
[09:26.780 --> 09:30.120]  And because of my experience with...
[09:31.440 --> 09:31.960]  Hello?
[09:32.200 --> 09:33.920]  No, that's... I'm getting ahead of the slide.
[09:34.380 --> 09:34.880]  Let's wait.
[09:37.060 --> 09:41.140]  The manufacturer of the Altair, MITS, was overwhelmed with orders.
[09:41.160 --> 09:45.500]  And that was a good thing, because they'd only expected to get 200 to break even.
[09:48.830 --> 09:51.610]  Well, I'll have to go back here, because I sort of forgot to mention.
[09:53.050 --> 10:13.050]  So, as... prior to that time, my quest for technology to facilitate community, because I'd seen the community formation, and it had been explained to me by people smarter than me, what was going on, that the barriers to lateral communication went down.
[10:13.430 --> 10:15.910]  So, how do you make a machine that does that?
[10:16.530 --> 10:25.870]  I spent several years researching that, and working in the underground press, and trying to understand what media would work.
[10:26.450 --> 10:33.250]  And by 1970, I came to the conclusion that what I was looking for was a network of computers.
[10:34.010 --> 10:38.190]  And then I said, where am I going to get a computer, let alone a network?
[10:38.950 --> 10:41.450]  Well, the universe arranged itself.
[10:41.910 --> 11:01.690]  And in one year, I was a member of a group that had, in fact, secured the donation to their nonprofit, of the same computer that had been used to run the mother of all demos, if you've heard of that, where personal use of computers was demonstrated to the industry for the first time.
[11:01.950 --> 11:06.910]  We didn't even know that was its heritage, but we got it.
[11:07.410 --> 11:09.670]  XDS 940 time-sharing system.
[11:09.790 --> 11:19.130]  And we had access through our network of, to many of the people who had developed that software and were working with it.
[11:19.230 --> 11:23.990]  So we were there in Silicon Valley, and we had done an...
[11:23.990 --> 11:26.170]  Well, let's give it credit where credit is due.
[11:26.630 --> 11:36.690]  Pamela Hart English was responsible for the hustling effort, which cannot be reproduced.
[11:36.870 --> 11:40.210]  My book explains why, but I'm not going to do that here.
[11:43.010 --> 11:44.730]  So I started a project.
[11:44.730 --> 11:49.790]  I came to them with a project for a community bulletin board.
[11:53.370 --> 11:58.470]  And since they needed a hardware engineer to help maintain the computer, I was welcome and joined the group.
[11:58.730 --> 12:12.210]  And after I got out of school, because I had to drop out for four years, I moved into the building and lived there and worked with them, kept the computer going somehow.
[12:12.950 --> 12:20.830]  And in 1973, August of 1973, we opened the first terminal on what we called community memory.
[12:22.090 --> 12:26.830]  And this was a bulletin board type system that used walk-up terminals.
[12:27.210 --> 12:31.690]  At no point did we permit external computers to be connected.
[12:32.210 --> 12:34.590]  First of all, there weren't personal computers then.
[12:35.370 --> 12:39.330]  But also on the principle that I called rust never sleeps.
[12:39.810 --> 12:45.270]  If you have a bigger, better computer, you're at an advantage over the others who can connect their computers to it.
[12:45.930 --> 12:48.230]  So you just use what we got there.
[12:48.470 --> 12:49.390]  And it works.
[12:51.950 --> 12:55.730]  Ordinary people with no training could use it.
[12:55.770 --> 12:59.330]  It was easy enough to set up the user interface.
[13:00.290 --> 13:02.850]  Because we could do things you couldn't do in a business computer.
[13:04.110 --> 13:08.590]  We told people whether they were entering an item or searching for an item.
[13:08.790 --> 13:09.510]  Think of a word.
[13:11.470 --> 13:12.010]  Enter it.
[13:12.190 --> 13:14.430]  That will be the keyword for whatever you're going to enter.
[13:14.770 --> 13:16.470]  Or you enter it to search.
[13:16.650 --> 13:18.170]  You're looking for everything with that keyword.
[13:19.630 --> 13:22.210]  And the software kept all the books and kept it all straight.
[13:22.310 --> 13:23.470]  It wasn't simple software.
[13:26.890 --> 13:29.450]  So this was a success.
[13:29.630 --> 13:30.910]  It went through three generations.
[13:30.910 --> 13:32.630]  There was a big gap in the meantime.
[13:35.290 --> 13:41.370]  And we did not structure it to be a commercial entity.
[13:41.690 --> 13:43.930]  We didn't charge for it.
[13:44.350 --> 13:46.790]  Because we wanted to see if people would use it.
[13:46.870 --> 13:51.730]  And I've got a series of posters and t-shirts up on this display.
[13:51.910 --> 14:02.010]  And one of them says, we opened the door to cyberspace and found that it was hospitable territory.
[14:04.490 --> 14:13.310]  And that was our, I'm missing the word here, but that's what we got out of it.
[14:14.470 --> 14:15.150]  Okay.
[14:16.970 --> 14:24.210]  Now, we come to the personal computer crowd.
[14:24.210 --> 14:33.750]  It was an underground at the time, at least in, certainly in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, centered around Menlo Park, California.
[14:35.590 --> 14:36.850]  We all knew.
[14:37.130 --> 14:38.050]  Oh, wait a minute.
[14:38.410 --> 14:38.990]  I know.
[14:43.260 --> 14:44.320]  Here we go.
[14:45.420 --> 14:50.760]  Ted Nelson, the inventor of hypertext, published a book.
[14:50.960 --> 14:52.880]  I couldn't find a picture of the cover here.
[14:55.100 --> 14:57.520]  Computer Lib in 1974.
[14:58.040 --> 15:00.740]  You can and must understand computers now.
[15:01.060 --> 15:02.520]  That's what it said on the cover.
[15:03.780 --> 15:10.620]  And he used a collage technique, uh, imitating the whole earth catalog.
[15:11.740 --> 15:16.380]  And a lot of people read it who didn't have to be academically qualified.
[15:17.160 --> 15:21.080]  I know because a lot of them came to me and said, I got into this through this book.
[15:22.100 --> 15:29.700]  It basically gave you a tutorial on not only how a computer worked, but why the mainframe computers were the wrong thing.
[15:30.840 --> 15:33.180]  Uh, it was a call to arms.
[15:34.660 --> 15:40.120]  And, uh, we formed the Homebrew Computer Club around the first Altair that came out.
[15:40.500 --> 15:41.440]  I should...
[15:42.220 --> 15:48.800]  Uh, we shared software, uh, which was a no-no in the big computer world.
[15:49.800 --> 15:51.940]  And we began the process of open-source.
[15:53.180 --> 15:54.520]  That was one way to do it.
[15:56.780 --> 16:01.160]  IBM, which we were feared, we were afraid, would, uh, crush us.
[16:01.260 --> 16:02.480]  And now we'll go back to that slide.
[16:03.920 --> 16:07.660]  They were the big, big dog in computers.
[16:08.020 --> 16:09.280]  What they said went.
[16:09.840 --> 16:16.820]  And they would sue you and, uh, screw you to, if you try to do anything that opposed that.
[16:17.140 --> 16:18.720]  Anybody, any company that...
[16:18.720 --> 16:21.340]  And there were companies who tried to make plug-in compatibles.
[16:22.400 --> 16:24.640]  Things like disk drives and things of that sort.
[16:25.640 --> 16:26.820]  Oh, lawsuits.
[16:27.620 --> 16:28.660]  You know, all that stuff.
[16:29.200 --> 16:32.280]  I think they lost the lawsuit, but it took years.
[16:33.100 --> 16:35.500]  They guarded all of their designs jealously.
[16:35.500 --> 16:47.400]  I know as a hardware freak that if you're taking... if you're rummaging through the bin of surplus stuff and you come across something that says IBM on it, never mind.
[16:47.480 --> 16:49.460]  You'll never be able to get any information of it.
[16:49.800 --> 16:51.640]  It's made of parts that you can't get.
[16:52.720 --> 16:54.400]  And that was quite intentional.
[16:54.980 --> 17:07.780]  And the people that they trained, working-class men, because they had very few women working for them, uh, were... who underwent an intensive training situation.
[17:08.000 --> 17:13.000]  And also were trained in much more obscure aspects of the technology.
[17:13.720 --> 17:20.400]  For example, IBM, uh, I mean, if you know the X, XOR function, it's simple.
[17:20.600 --> 17:22.060]  Are things equal?
[17:22.220 --> 17:22.600]  It's different.
[17:23.280 --> 17:24.120]  Two things.
[17:24.300 --> 17:25.500]  It's a symmetric function.
[17:25.700 --> 17:29.980]  But to IBM, it was an asymmetric function because you had to have another factor in there.
[17:30.080 --> 17:32.360]  You had to do, XOR on something else.
[17:32.500 --> 17:33.700]  I don't even understand that.
[17:34.740 --> 17:37.000]  But that's the way they kept things obscure.
[17:37.480 --> 17:48.260]  And the people that they trained knew that what they had learned was their whole career and existence and weren't going to go bring other people in.
[17:48.540 --> 17:50.380]  Weren't going to tell you out the back door.
[17:51.160 --> 17:54.320]  They would guard the technology because that was their livelihood.
[17:55.460 --> 18:01.140]  And so they were feared and loathed by us, uh, computer freaks.
[18:02.300 --> 18:07.560]  And so we... that's what we meant when we were talking about demystifying technology.
[18:08.220 --> 18:13.680]  It's really breaking IBM's stranglehold on computers.
[18:14.440 --> 18:19.020]  Because we felt that, you know, once they discover us, they'll shut us down.
[18:19.220 --> 18:22.100]  I actually heard people say that in our club meetings.
[18:23.660 --> 18:26.860]  And so last item on this slide.
[18:27.740 --> 18:28.740]  What happened?
[18:30.440 --> 18:33.560]  IBM is living off of open-source.
[18:34.500 --> 18:36.500]  They are a software shop.
[18:37.080 --> 18:39.300]  And they're dependent upon Linux.
[18:40.300 --> 18:43.200]  I can think of no sweeter revenge.
[18:46.240 --> 18:48.640]  They put out a personal computer in 1975.
[18:49.280 --> 18:51.120]  They called it the portable computer.
[18:51.380 --> 18:52.800]  It weighed 30 pounds.
[18:53.540 --> 18:57.540]  This minimum version cost like $8,000 in 1975.
[18:57.900 --> 18:58.860]  That's not today's dollars.
[19:00.640 --> 19:03.440]  And they withdrew it from the market in 1979.
[19:04.220 --> 19:06.940]  And it had the number 5100.
[19:07.680 --> 19:13.000]  And IBM introduced the personal computer as 5150.
[19:13.860 --> 19:15.940]  But they had to do it open.
[19:16.680 --> 19:20.320]  They had to publish the schematics and publish the ROM code.
[19:21.000 --> 19:24.640]  Something that IBM would never put up with.
[19:25.980 --> 19:27.300]  But they had to change.
[19:28.740 --> 19:36.240]  So that was the order that was overthrown.
[19:36.440 --> 19:38.280]  IBM dominates all.
[19:38.860 --> 19:41.080]  And you keep your hands out of the technology.
[19:41.260 --> 19:42.580]  They wouldn't even sell computers.
[19:42.780 --> 19:43.940]  They would rent your computers.
[19:45.460 --> 19:49.020]  Now we come to revolution number three.
[19:51.020 --> 19:53.460]  Which I believe is in progress.
[19:53.620 --> 19:54.480]  It's pretty obvious.
[19:54.480 --> 19:56.320]  It's a communication revolution.
[19:57.240 --> 20:04.780]  The recapture of the commons of information from the mass media that it had become.
[20:04.920 --> 20:06.060]  Now I need to explain this.
[20:09.000 --> 20:10.820]  Civilization developed in the village.
[20:11.120 --> 20:13.880]  Not in the houses, but in the spaces between the houses.
[20:13.880 --> 20:15.040]  The public space.
[20:15.040 --> 20:19.600]  And that became the Agora of Greece.
[20:20.380 --> 20:24.600]  The Piazza of Renaissance Italy.
[20:24.860 --> 20:30.720]  The plain of the Netherlands Renaissance.
[20:31.260 --> 20:33.720]  And the public square in the U.S.
[20:34.420 --> 20:43.420]  It's where personal, political, and economic transactions are carried out in public.
[20:43.960 --> 20:45.720]  That's the most important word.
[20:45.940 --> 20:46.680]  In public.
[20:47.480 --> 20:51.720]  So that all can hear and, when necessary, can testify that that's what they heard.
[20:53.300 --> 20:56.820]  And it's something that civilization needs.
[20:57.500 --> 21:06.640]  Over the centuries and millennia, as literacy developed, it moved on to printed form.
[21:06.760 --> 21:12.720]  And for quite a while, only a few people were literate, but it was more than just the clergy.
[21:13.880 --> 21:18.920]  So, books were written to be read to groups.
[21:19.600 --> 21:21.120]  You can tell the way they're written.
[21:22.300 --> 21:26.460]  And then they worked to enclose it.
[21:27.180 --> 21:29.380]  You know, that's what capitalism developed.
[21:30.660 --> 21:35.080]  And they tried to enclose and privatize everything.
[21:35.300 --> 21:39.460]  So that became the mass media, which went through stages.
[21:40.280 --> 21:43.980]  And now is hegemonic.
[21:44.120 --> 21:53.100]  In other words, there's no real support for the public square, except we let a few nutcases give speeches in public.
[21:55.880 --> 21:59.200]  So, here we come to my talking about community memory.
[21:59.460 --> 22:00.220]  There are terminals.
[22:05.160 --> 22:16.840]  Where we are now, of course, we see that the media companies, the digital media companies, are definitely squeezing social media for all the profit they can get out of it.
[22:17.900 --> 22:20.440]  And it seems to be the way everything is done.
[22:20.560 --> 22:24.720]  Of course, all along, the way things was happening seemed to be the way things were done.
[22:24.940 --> 22:27.500]  But better was possible.
[22:28.840 --> 22:31.440]  And that's what engineers do.
[22:33.060 --> 22:38.220]  So, we can do better using open-source and what I call a civic structure.
[22:38.320 --> 22:52.260]  In other words, I'm specifying, working on the specifications, I've done the descriptions for the next version of social media, my style, which should be a civic system.
[22:52.440 --> 22:57.460]  It has to be something that you expect to be in the community, like public parks.
[22:58.460 --> 23:00.520]  Maybe they should be run by Parks and Rec.
[23:00.720 --> 23:01.320]  It doesn't matter.
[23:01.440 --> 23:06.900]  But whatever it is, the managers should be librarians.
[23:08.500 --> 23:12.220]  And it needs to have a management structure.
[23:12.460 --> 23:21.120]  Any study of the commons will tell you that commonses, it's the same word singular or plural, need to have management.
[23:22.100 --> 23:24.800]  Fishing, fisheries are like that.
[23:25.980 --> 23:27.960]  They elect their own management.
[23:30.400 --> 23:31.740]  This will need management.
[23:32.400 --> 23:37.920]  And it's not going to be free because otherwise, you know, you're the product and somebody else is buying you.
[23:38.700 --> 23:40.280]  But it can be pretty cheap.
[23:41.540 --> 23:57.780]  And so that what I'm designing has a a payment system built in and will be able to support people to do the work of the algorithms.
[23:58.600 --> 23:59.220]  No algorithms.
[24:00.020 --> 24:03.640]  It's just, first of all, the system is built to support conversations in public.
[24:04.280 --> 24:08.720]  I go into this in much more detail in the book and in the documents I'm writing.
[24:09.320 --> 24:24.220]  Uh, at the table where I've got the displays is that I have business cards and they have a QR code, which is the talk I might have given here if I thought I had was, was not late, not too late to sign up for it.
[24:25.340 --> 24:27.900]  Um, and
[24:31.020 --> 24:38.660]  the, the functions of the, the supervisory or management functions of the system will be done by people.
[24:39.380 --> 24:40.940]  First of all, referents.
[24:41.360 --> 24:43.740]  That's E-N-T-S, referents.
[24:43.960 --> 24:46.220]  People who refer other people.
[24:46.460 --> 24:48.420]  You probably know people like that.
[24:48.520 --> 24:55.120]  They just love to tell everybody where, what they've heard and where you can go to find this or that.
[24:55.580 --> 25:00.660]  Everybody on the system, in theory, should subscribe to more than one referent.
[25:01.600 --> 25:05.380]  Uh, there will also be a stratum of journalists.
[25:05.840 --> 25:08.080]  Speak of the last session here.
[25:09.940 --> 25:14.060]  So that they, their job is to observe and report.
[25:14.280 --> 25:16.360]  They don't have any power to do anything.
[25:17.180 --> 25:18.760]  But that's what journalists do.
[25:19.680 --> 25:25.360]  Uh, and we want them to be able to support themselves doing that in principle.
[25:26.940 --> 25:27.880]  Exactly how?
[25:28.040 --> 25:29.620]  Well, that's the work that remains to be done.
[25:31.080 --> 25:36.000]  And the system is going to be open-source.
[25:37.140 --> 25:45.260]  As I say, the, in the ideal, the community that it benefits will host it, one way or the other.
[25:46.160 --> 25:49.560]  And the users will pay for the value that they get out of it.
[25:50.100 --> 25:58.200]  It should be an extremely active, uh, commons of information because you can hang out your shingle there.
[25:58.340 --> 26:00.720]  You can lurk and see everything.
[26:01.080 --> 26:05.340]  You can start by jumping up and down and giving performance.
[26:05.540 --> 26:07.280]  And then that's how you start a thread.
[26:08.300 --> 26:15.580]  Uh, or you're just part of the, uh, list of, uh, index words and so forth.
[26:15.760 --> 26:17.860]  That's where the, the indexing database goes.
[26:18.000 --> 26:18.780]  The rest of it is network.
[26:19.640 --> 26:28.000]  You can comment on a thread and negotiate with the owner of that thread as to whether they'll accept it.
[26:28.260 --> 26:29.920]  And acceptance gives you a green light.
[26:30.500 --> 26:36.820]  Otherwise they, you know, people reading it know, well, this is a comment that wasn't accepted, but it might be interesting, or this was accepted.
[26:37.580 --> 26:41.340]  You know, that would be useful to follow.
[26:41.460 --> 26:45.460]  But in no case can you block the flow.
[26:46.420 --> 26:54.980]  And you can't disrupt it because everything, at every time you make a comment, you're not blocking a papyrus scroll.
[26:55.980 --> 26:58.180]  You're adding a page to a book.
[26:58.840 --> 27:03.400]  I'm using the book metaphor rather than the scroll metaphor.
[27:04.900 --> 27:11.960]  So, uh, I could go much, much further, but I don't want to, you know, run out of time here.
[27:12.900 --> 27:14.680]  And I am recruiting, in effect.
[27:15.140 --> 27:16.820]  Uh, I brought some cards.
[27:17.420 --> 27:22.480]  That's, they include that QR code and the information on how you can contact me.
[27:22.580 --> 27:25.620]  Or I encourage you to go to the exhibit.
[27:26.340 --> 27:27.860]  You also have merch.
[27:28.080 --> 27:29.820]  Everybody knows the money's in the merch.
[27:30.680 --> 27:32.940]  Uh, with posters and t-shirts.
[27:33.220 --> 27:35.560]  They're not really making me rich now, but whatever.
[27:35.760 --> 27:36.560]  I gotta try.
[27:38.300 --> 27:39.420]  And, uh, the book.
[27:39.660 --> 27:40.580]  Buy the book.
[27:41.580 --> 27:45.480]  There's a QR code for everything that gets you to the order page on my website.
[27:45.660 --> 27:46.920]  So that's my commercial notice.
[27:48.220 --> 27:49.260]  That's all for now.
[27:49.920 --> 27:52.980]  Uh, I can take questions if we have any time left.
[27:52.980 --> 27:54.500]  Yeah, I, I think we have.
[27:56.120 --> 27:56.740]  Thank you.
[27:59.970 --> 28:01.370]  I have two questions, yeah.
[28:04.430 --> 28:07.650]  So, so I do think we have time for, like, some brief questions.
[28:08.030 --> 28:10.390]  Uh, we, obviously, the next talk is coming very soon.
[28:10.590 --> 28:12.110]  So, uh, maybe take two or three.
[28:12.330 --> 28:14.650]  Folks have anything to say to either me or Lee?
[28:16.310 --> 28:17.830]  Maybe I've silenced them all.
[28:17.950 --> 28:19.070]  Yeah, no questions at all.
[28:19.170 --> 28:19.770]  It's a bit disturbing.
[28:21.570 --> 28:22.750]  Well, it's only started.
[28:24.110 --> 28:26.970]  Yeah, we, we, we're going to need a lot of help.
[28:28.030 --> 28:28.490]  Yes, thank you.
[28:28.910 --> 28:30.010]  Okay, thank you.
[28:31.490 --> 28:33.170]  Okay, I think maybe one question, no?
[28:33.630 --> 28:33.950]  Okay.
[28:34.230 --> 28:34.830]  Yes, one question.
[28:35.010 --> 28:35.710]  Thank you so much.
[28:35.950 --> 28:44.290]  Um, uh, what is your, uh, recommended method for, um, out-of-bound verification like, uh, chain of trust?
[28:44.650 --> 28:51.430]  Um, I know, for instance, like, um, Roger at Tor has his, uh, key fingerprint.
[28:51.430 --> 28:54.370]  Um, is there anything that we can do to...
[28:54.370 --> 28:54.570]  Identity.
[28:55.230 --> 28:56.290]  Yeah, to, to validate?
[28:57.170 --> 29:19.230]  This might go over like a lead balloon, but, uh, I realized that in the fourth, you know, 30, 40 years that we've been waiting, the, in the, uh, phone systems has solved at least four problems that we knew we were going to have to address but had no idea how we were going to do it.
[29:19.330 --> 29:21.870]  One is identity, like, use a phone number.
[29:21.950 --> 29:27.550]  Now, I know there's lots of fakery that's possible there, and we want to try to work out some improvement on that.
[29:28.450 --> 29:33.090]  The other is, uh, uh, uh, collecting money.
[29:34.250 --> 29:41.550]  The other is, uh, ubiquity and security.
[29:42.570 --> 29:48.050]  I mean, we'll probably wind up, for the first system, co-locating our equipment behind...
[29:48.050 --> 29:49.150]  in a phone system.
[29:49.510 --> 29:51.650]  Everybody can say, eek, the phone system.
[29:51.650 --> 29:59.350]  Well, it works, and we've got to have something that works while we invent something better.
[30:00.810 --> 30:02.310]  Best I can do right now.
[30:03.230 --> 30:04.850]  I don't have the magic solution.
[30:04.850 --> 30:08.090]  Again, as a, as a hardware jock, I wouldn't really understand it.
[30:09.170 --> 30:12.990]  But I'm, I definitely want to talk with people who do, or think they do.
[30:13.210 --> 30:22.230]  So, just on a quick note, NIM has, uh, obviously one of the problems you have anonymous communication systems of how to commute, find people, and preserve their anonymity.
[30:22.910 --> 30:29.370]  Uh, NIM works by sending Sphinx packets, which basically drop off Dropbox locations within the Mixnet.
[30:29.490 --> 30:31.350]  Those are called single-use reply blocks.
[30:31.850 --> 30:33.970]  And you can base... that's how we work.
[30:34.110 --> 30:36.550]  It's more of like a chat paradigm, the hidden service paradigm.
[30:37.110 --> 30:41.110]  Um, it'd be interesting if someone tried to build hidden services on top of NIM.
[30:41.190 --> 30:42.330]  No one has tried that yet.
[30:42.850 --> 30:47.550]  Um, and then there is a, kind of, building on this Dropbox metaphor.
[30:48.070 --> 30:49.070]  I don't have time to go into it.
[30:49.150 --> 30:58.210]  There's a large, there's a design called Pudding, P-U-D-D-I-N-G, published by University of Cambridge, building on top of NIM, and, uh, Usenix, I think, last year.
[30:58.650 --> 31:00.610]  However, it has not been fully coded up.
[31:00.690 --> 31:13.010]  So, if there's any cool, free software hackers that want to build an anonymous contact discovery protocol, uh, with some form of, uh, kind of not long-term persistent identity, I think that'd be a great project, and we'd be happy to support.
[31:14.390 --> 31:15.910]  One more question, and then we got to run.
[31:46.870 --> 31:46.950]  No, no.
[31:46.950 --> 31:53.630]  There's going to be all possible solutions, and we're going to have to maybe bring them together and keep them from fighting.
[31:55.090 --> 31:56.670]  And we'll come up with it.
[31:57.070 --> 32:05.250]  But right now, the immediate and obvious solution, which is not the best, is use phone numbers.
[32:05.250 --> 32:07.370]  But, you know, that's not good enough, really.
[32:07.370 --> 32:10.830]  So, so we'll be around outside at the, at the, near the info desk.
[32:11.070 --> 32:12.110]  So, stop by and say hello.
[32:12.310 --> 32:13.090]  Thanks so much, everyone.
[32:13.270 --> 32:13.550]  Okay.
[32:14.050 --> 32:14.630]  See you at the table.
[32:14.850 --> 32:14.890]  Thank you.
[32:14.890 --> 32:15.270]  Thank you.
[32:15.270 --> 32:15.290]  Thank you.
[32:15.290 --> 32:15.330]  Thank you.
[32:15.390 --> 32:15.750]  Thank you.
[32:15.750 --> 32:15.850]  Thank you.