[00:00.580 --> 00:02.200]  Yeah, I just start this.
[00:02.360 --> 00:08.380]  And this was not in order, so I think each of us will introduce ourselves so we know who is who.
[00:09.700 --> 00:12.540]  And yes, this is about the past, present and the future.
[00:12.960 --> 00:16.040]  And I think we have tried to break this into really two sections.
[00:16.720 --> 00:20.240]  The first section is where we want to talk about the past and the present.
[00:20.680 --> 00:33.980]  But most importantly, we want to focus on the future and we want to brainstorm with you guys together and how we can build a better future using technology, where the computer underground is going and where the computer industry is going.
[00:34.500 --> 00:37.300]  And yeah, how we can make the world a little bit better.
[00:37.960 --> 00:40.580]  So I think we start with some very short introduction.
[00:41.540 --> 00:42.980]  And I start first.
[00:43.220 --> 00:43.960]  I'm Skyper.
[00:44.120 --> 00:51.040]  I used to run a SecFold.net where I gave Rootshell to hackers and restarted that a few years ago.
[00:51.720 --> 00:59.660]  And I worked for THC in Temtasso and I was the editor of the Frag magazine from 2001 onwards until 2007.
[01:00.680 --> 01:02.320]  And yeah, I give it to Panther.
[01:03.620 --> 01:04.720]  Hi, I'm Panther.
[01:05.180 --> 01:08.800]  I'm an old assembly C, C++ coder.
[01:09.080 --> 01:12.360]  Worked at some very early security software companies.
[01:13.100 --> 01:15.120]  I was a reverser for a while.
[01:15.500 --> 01:17.300]  Played with phones in my early days.
[01:17.300 --> 01:24.460]  And then I went to Wall Street and I've been working on building low latency trading networks and applications software.
[01:25.720 --> 01:26.280]  Bill?
[01:26.740 --> 01:28.120]  Hi, I'm Bill Buddington.
[01:28.360 --> 01:31.720]  I worked for the EFF for about 12 years now.
[01:31.720 --> 01:42.940]  I started in the kind of a political, radical, leftist, anarchist scene a few decades ago.
[01:43.820 --> 01:54.600]  And kind of got into hacking from there, doing security trainings for those who are at risk of mass arrest or were involved in defense of the earth, defense of animals.
[01:54.600 --> 01:58.740]  And so that's where I started teaching PGP.
[01:58.840 --> 01:59.620]  That was a long time ago.
[02:00.560 --> 02:07.360]  And and also have have been interested in that and making sure that everyone's safe ever since.
[02:16.000 --> 02:16.580]  Hey, y'all.
[02:16.680 --> 02:16.940]  How you doing?
[02:17.400 --> 02:18.140]  I'm Jeremy Hammond.
[02:19.220 --> 02:20.700]  A late addition to this panel.
[02:20.820 --> 02:21.400]  Thanks for the invite.
[02:21.400 --> 02:28.360]  But yeah, so I mean, my I was growing up in the 90s and 2000s and stuff, a little different generation, perhaps than some.
[02:29.560 --> 02:30.440]  Hacked this site.
[02:30.540 --> 02:35.300]  Hacked this scene was editor of a hacking magazine for a couple of years above ground.
[02:35.480 --> 02:40.120]  We got involved in anonymous, most notably decentralized hacktivist networks underground.
[02:41.080 --> 02:41.920]  Excited to be on this panel.
[02:45.980 --> 02:47.080]  I am TMZ.
[02:47.080 --> 02:51.200]  I work with Tmp.out magazine of research group.
[02:51.500 --> 02:55.240]  I'm also current editor on the staff for the Phrack magazine.
[02:56.000 --> 02:59.300]  I'm into computer viruses, low level assembly stuff.
[02:59.840 --> 03:01.060]  And yeah, that's it.
[03:03.580 --> 03:07.000]  And so this is a very open panel.
[03:07.240 --> 03:09.400]  We really want you guys to get involved.
[03:09.620 --> 03:16.080]  It's a unique opportunity here to ask us questions and to be part of this discussion.
[03:16.080 --> 03:19.120]  And we are going to ask each other some questions.
[03:19.420 --> 03:22.840]  But maybe there are some questions that you like us to discuss.
[03:23.180 --> 03:26.120]  And there are some topics that we don't have the same opinion.
[03:26.300 --> 03:27.660]  And these are the interesting topics.
[03:27.860 --> 03:29.460]  So try to pick those where we differ.
[03:30.460 --> 03:36.840]  And I think the first thing that my question to this panel is, you know, what was hacking like?
[03:36.980 --> 03:39.400]  Why did you start hacking when you were young?
[03:39.800 --> 03:43.460]  So I asked Panther first, why did you start hacking?
[03:43.460 --> 03:44.640]  What triggered you?
[03:47.160 --> 03:49.320]  I'm from the early 80s crowd.
[03:50.080 --> 03:50.880]  Probably the oldest one here.
[03:52.220 --> 03:54.620]  Back in my day, phones were expensive.
[03:55.320 --> 03:56.320]  Many phone calls.
[03:56.560 --> 03:59.140]  I call... if I want to call... I'm from the Bronx.
[03:59.620 --> 04:02.300]  If I want to call New Jersey, it would be expensive.
[04:02.520 --> 04:04.800]  But a call from the house, a payphone, whatever it may be.
[04:04.840 --> 04:05.540]  Can you hold the microphone closer?
[04:05.780 --> 04:06.360]  Yeah, absolutely.
[04:06.560 --> 04:07.000]  Can you hear me now?
[04:07.600 --> 04:08.600]  All right, sweet.
[04:09.560 --> 04:11.800]  So I'm from the early 80s.
[04:12.680 --> 04:14.860]  Back then, phones were expensive.
[04:15.760 --> 04:17.060]  Grew up here in the Bronx.
[04:17.200 --> 04:21.380]  If I call from 718 out into Jersey, it would cost me a small fortune.
[04:21.920 --> 04:24.120]  Minimum wage back then was probably $2 and change.
[04:25.180 --> 04:27.280]  So I started learning about phone systems.
[04:28.700 --> 04:31.580]  In the 90s, software was expensive.
[04:32.660 --> 04:34.560]  So I learned how to reverse things.
[04:34.840 --> 04:36.640]  I happened to work for some security companies.
[04:38.260 --> 04:43.720]  We had access to a lot of OS source code and other applications to test for compatibility.
[04:44.140 --> 04:47.240]  My specialty was removing the copy protection.
[04:48.020 --> 04:54.500]  But the thing that started me in this whole thing is one of my dad's friends had a deck writer.
[04:54.660 --> 04:59.300]  It was actually an AT&T line printer with a keyboard on it at their house.
[04:59.760 --> 05:04.600]  Their phone rang and it started putting caller ID information out.
[05:04.820 --> 05:09.740]  I mean, back then, we had the borough white books.
[05:09.740 --> 05:12.280]  They were huge for phone numbers and stuff.
[05:12.500 --> 05:14.300]  You never knew whoever called your house.
[05:15.940 --> 05:17.700]  That interests me in that.
[05:17.900 --> 05:20.620]  And then the school I went to had a deck writer.
[05:21.460 --> 05:24.900]  And the first system I logged into was an Amdall.
[05:25.100 --> 05:29.440]  They made super computers back in the day to play Star Trek.
[05:30.380 --> 05:31.800]  And I worked from that.
[05:31.960 --> 05:34.040]  And it's all the anti-graphics.
[05:34.200 --> 05:36.640]  But that evolved into a whole bunch of other things.
[05:36.820 --> 05:37.920]  So I went from that.
[05:38.980 --> 05:40.760]  I like to play with things.
[05:41.300 --> 05:43.760]  So it was a mixture of screwing around with electronics.
[05:44.780 --> 05:48.780]  Some of it may have been things that deal with the airwaves like Direct TV.
[05:49.620 --> 05:50.580]  Cable boxes.
[05:50.980 --> 05:51.680]  Not for money.
[05:51.780 --> 05:55.880]  But just for the challenge of seeing what I can get out of the device.
[05:56.460 --> 06:02.480]  But also learning how to and teaching others how to remove things.
[06:02.680 --> 06:05.840]  So software tools back in the day really didn't exist.
[06:06.840 --> 06:08.580]  Not for the stuff you wanted to do.
[06:08.880 --> 06:11.200]  So we're working with things like Periscope, Soft Ice.
[06:11.600 --> 06:12.620]  Those are expensive.
[06:14.140 --> 06:15.860]  So remove the copy protection.
[06:16.120 --> 06:16.900]  Pass those around.
[06:18.040 --> 06:22.920]  And also back in the day was you want to be like the first people that had particular wares.
[06:22.920 --> 06:24.600]  I never wanted my name on stuff.
[06:24.660 --> 06:26.540]  I just like the challenge of removing stuff.
[06:27.100 --> 06:31.980]  We used to distribute software by driving other people's places, putting them in the mailbox.
[06:32.980 --> 06:34.960]  So the BBSs were always the first ones that go out.
[06:35.040 --> 06:39.540]  My friend's brother is in one of the NC groups.
[06:39.540 --> 06:41.060]  He used to view the screens.
[06:43.000 --> 06:43.880]  Anubis or Inky.
[06:44.020 --> 06:45.140]  He was in two different groups.
[06:46.020 --> 06:46.820]  But the...
[06:46.820 --> 06:50.140]  I never wanted anything to come back to me on that part of it.
[06:50.300 --> 06:51.420]  But it was the challenge of doing it.
[06:51.740 --> 06:52.580]  2600 Magazine.
[06:52.760 --> 06:54.480]  The first time I got it, I got a P.O.
[06:54.480 --> 06:55.640]  box in another town.
[06:55.880 --> 06:58.160]  It still shows up on my background reports.
[06:58.300 --> 06:59.100]  I lived there.
[06:59.420 --> 07:02.780]  And I never lived in Sandy Hook, Connecticut.
[07:05.920 --> 07:08.900]  You go to the 2600 meetings in the early days.
[07:08.900 --> 07:10.340]  People were afraid to talk to each other.
[07:11.120 --> 07:13.300]  You didn't know if somebody was a phone employee.
[07:14.340 --> 07:16.960]  I was telling Skype and the rest of the crowd.
[07:17.060 --> 07:19.260]  When I grew up, I was afraid of the phone company.
[07:19.420 --> 07:20.760]  I was not afraid of law enforcement.
[07:21.400 --> 07:29.440]  I was afraid that AT&T, somebody's going to pull up in a van, kick my front door down, take all my possessions and separate me from my parents.
[07:30.400 --> 07:31.360]  That's changed now.
[07:31.480 --> 07:33.940]  People are afraid of the law side of things.
[07:34.180 --> 07:36.280]  I don't think many people are afraid of the phone company.
[07:39.140 --> 07:40.680]  I guess that's the start of it.
[07:41.660 --> 07:41.880]  Yeah, yeah.
[07:43.200 --> 07:45.620]  I'd like to say something about these phone companies.
[07:45.840 --> 07:53.560]  And for the younger generation who have grown up with the Internet, the phone companies back then, they were the major player.
[07:53.800 --> 07:57.160]  They decided who had access to information and who hadn't.
[07:57.440 --> 07:59.620]  You had to pay them to get access to information.
[07:59.880 --> 08:01.520]  Every ten minutes or so, you had to pay.
[08:02.200 --> 08:05.460]  And so, they were often seen as the enemies.
[08:05.600 --> 08:06.820]  They were the scary guys.
[08:07.640 --> 08:10.140]  They were the guys who tapped your phone lines.
[08:10.240 --> 08:13.240]  They were the guys who knew who you were communicating with.
[08:13.460 --> 08:15.260]  And so, we were paranoid.
[08:15.460 --> 08:16.580]  We were afraid of these guys.
[08:19.000 --> 08:23.780]  And I think that was very important to hear this because this is now forgotten.
[08:23.780 --> 08:25.440]  Like, phones are not really used anymore.
[08:25.500 --> 08:27.580]  Everybody used the Internet and WhatsApp and Signal, right?
[08:27.980 --> 08:29.620]  But back then, it was the phone companies.
[08:30.780 --> 08:40.740]  And another thing that I just realized when he was talking about is, how many of us from the 90s and early 2000s come from the where scene, from the cracking scene?
[08:41.620 --> 08:44.480]  This is where most of my friends learned their skills.
[08:44.840 --> 08:50.020]  And that then transferred them into exploit development and hacking and research.
[08:54.230 --> 08:57.910]  So, I grew up not too far from here in Suffolk County.
[08:59.610 --> 09:05.890]  And back then, I did not have a car or a license.
[09:05.890 --> 09:09.910]  And I grew up with the...
[09:09.910 --> 09:12.430]  Well, I mean, I remember the Internet coming around.
[09:12.750 --> 09:15.770]  And we didn't have a computer until like 97 or so.
[09:15.930 --> 09:21.810]  So, we got a computer for the family and I had to share this computer with my dad, which sucked.
[09:21.830 --> 09:23.270]  And I was like, well, this sucks.
[09:23.310 --> 09:25.890]  I want to get something for my own.
[09:26.150 --> 09:30.430]  And that's how I kind of got interested in systems building in general.
[09:31.650 --> 09:32.890]  Just kind of putting together.
[09:33.110 --> 09:38.690]  It was like, you know, like, oh, I didn't actually put the heat sink, you know, paste on correctly.
[09:38.690 --> 09:41.090]  So, it like burned out my processor and like, fuck.
[09:41.510 --> 09:42.550]  I need to do something else.
[09:42.650 --> 09:48.730]  And so, getting the systems building at first, and then this world opening to me.
[09:48.850 --> 09:51.050]  I was a pretty anti-social kid.
[09:51.210 --> 09:52.110]  I didn't have a lot of friends.
[09:52.210 --> 09:56.410]  So, what I did was find friends online in online communities.
[09:57.410 --> 10:00.930]  So, I went on IRC and found friends there.
[10:01.150 --> 10:03.430]  I went on mushes, muds, and muxes.
[10:03.630 --> 10:10.910]  And, you know, these are like the text-based adventure, you know, role-playing adventure fantasy worlds.
[10:11.350 --> 10:16.950]  And just kind of started exploring and meeting friends across the country.
[10:17.090 --> 10:22.670]  They like, oh, in Montreal or, you know, this person on IRC is from like, is somewhere completely different.
[10:22.670 --> 10:28.610]  And this world opening up to me that I didn't have, but I was, you know, because I was stuck in this one suburban context.
[10:29.830 --> 10:34.470]  But it presented to me this whole world through the screen.
[10:35.450 --> 10:40.150]  And so, it was from there that I started getting curious about what you could do.
[10:40.250 --> 10:40.870]  We had AOL.
[10:41.670 --> 10:45.210]  So, started looking into little like proggies and stuff.
[10:45.210 --> 11:02.550]  And these, those including like Sub7 and BackOrifice and those kind of things, which were, you know, kind of ScriptKitty-like tools that would modify certain configuration settings within the Internet service providers of the time, the big platforms Internet service providers of the time.
[11:04.390 --> 11:16.710]  So, those, you know, I remember changing my screen name on AOL to my dad's screen name, just to see like, oh, what happens when I like, like, change it back to my screen name and both of them change.
[11:16.950 --> 11:18.390]  And they're like, shit, I'm fucked up.
[11:21.210 --> 11:23.290]  Like, you know, having to explain that.
[11:23.290 --> 11:29.090]  And, you know, then slowly starting to get it.
[11:29.170 --> 11:40.250]  I remember going to CompUSA in like 98 or something and buying a disk of Red Hat Linux 5.2.
[11:40.810 --> 11:47.590]  And that was like first introduction to Linux and kind of that, the world of the command line, et cetera.
[11:48.730 --> 11:52.790]  And so that's where my, where that, where my journey started.
[11:55.510 --> 12:01.710]  And yeah, it kind of went on from there and I got involved in political activism and started sharing my knowledge there as well.
[12:02.930 --> 12:06.510]  So, so yeah, for me, I was like half grew up with the Internet.
[12:06.790 --> 12:12.830]  Like I didn't have the Internet when I was a kid, but like by the time I was 17 or 16, we had it.
[12:12.830 --> 12:21.710]  And, and I was kind of involved in that 90s slash early 2000s kind of early hacking scene.
[12:21.710 --> 12:31.950]  We talked a little bit about in preparation of this panel, things like the exploits markets back in the day, like, you know, full disclosure and millworm and things like that.
[12:31.950 --> 12:34.510]  And I think that'd be fun to go into.
[12:34.830 --> 12:35.250]  But yeah.
[12:39.610 --> 12:39.930]  Yeah.
[12:42.270 --> 12:42.890]  Computer underground.
[12:43.090 --> 12:48.910]  And when I was young, a little bit younger, I was born in 85, really the same birthday as a conscious of a hacker resonated immediately.
[12:49.210 --> 12:49.290]  Right.
[12:51.190 --> 12:54.390]  Coding and QBasic, Windows 3.1, DOS days, that's where I got up.
[12:54.990 --> 12:56.310]  And, you know, we didn't have the Internet either.
[12:56.310 --> 13:02.750]  You know, like we were just scrapping parts together to make computers and I had a $1 kickdown from my mom's work.
[13:02.890 --> 13:09.810]  I'd visit her every other week and use the Internet to download like the latest QB code and talk on Fnet and learn.
[13:09.950 --> 13:12.830]  I was learning by asking stupid questions and coding and stuff like that.
[13:12.890 --> 13:17.770]  And we make little websites and share our code and really push the boundaries, honestly, of what QBasic could do.
[13:17.770 --> 13:19.670]  I was stuck with it way too damn long, that's for sure.
[13:21.570 --> 13:26.950]  But yeah, I definitely resonated with the inherently anti-authoritarian nature of hackers.
[13:27.030 --> 13:28.290]  I'm not talking about software developers.
[13:28.450 --> 13:31.170]  I'm talking about those that realize that laws aren't real.
[13:31.450 --> 13:38.350]  That any wall is, there's a way within the cracks that you could exploit and find a way over or through.
[13:39.470 --> 13:48.130]  Or so, and I resonate with that because I was also like hanging out with like squatters and like train hoppers and, you know, just political activists and so forth.
[13:48.410 --> 13:50.150]  I grew up in Bush years, you know what I mean?
[13:50.230 --> 13:53.330]  Like, and that was eye-opening radicalizing experience, right?
[13:53.950 --> 13:56.090]  You realize that society is a lie, right?
[13:56.130 --> 14:08.830]  But the truth is there, like, that's why it alerted me to hacking and like, I pay homage to the greats, you know, like the reading text files coming up with others who had also had a lust for forbidden knowledge that was there.
[14:08.990 --> 14:12.950]  Like the sharing of, it just, like, it felt liberating.
[14:13.650 --> 14:19.270]  And it was kind of like, maybe an optimistic view of things at the time, considering we're right now.
[14:20.050 --> 14:24.370]  That there's like, utopian tech liberal vision, right?
[14:24.490 --> 14:27.390]  That like, if information be free, we'll all be free, all that stuff.
[14:27.390 --> 14:36.930]  But, but honestly, it took a lot of knocks to my head and learned the hard way that, you know, we're not all on the same team, really.
[14:37.530 --> 14:43.370]  You know, like, like hack the university computer science website just to show it'd be done, get kicked out of college, right?
[14:43.650 --> 14:48.510]  Okay, so maybe this whole full disclosure white hat shit is for the birds, you know what I mean?
[14:49.170 --> 14:52.330]  But, but I still, I know that the hacker spirit is bare, you know what I'm like?
[14:52.450 --> 14:57.610]  Because while they're the nine to five in it, like doing it for a paycheck, like, I know the hackers always find a way to crack that shit.
[14:57.710 --> 15:01.570]  Because we up all night doing it for fun or for the lulls or for freedom, you know?
[15:03.710 --> 15:04.550]  No regrets though.
[15:05.250 --> 15:05.830]  Prison back.
[15:06.050 --> 15:08.010]  So still out here to the best that we can.
[15:08.170 --> 15:09.510]  We're no longer underground.
[15:09.670 --> 15:10.370]  We're up here on the stage.
[15:10.570 --> 15:10.650]  Right.
[15:10.850 --> 15:14.570]  But like, so we're going to try to represent that we can.
[15:14.730 --> 15:15.310]  We're no longer anonymous.
[15:15.390 --> 15:19.110]  But like, we're actually wondering what y'all got to offer.
[15:19.230 --> 15:19.870]  But that's what I got right now.
[15:23.320 --> 15:27.340]  So I grew up in Brazil in the 90s and early 2000s.
[15:27.820 --> 15:32.160]  And I remember that my family got the first, you know, family computer.
[15:32.360 --> 15:33.480]  As many of you also had.
[15:35.220 --> 15:40.480]  Almost in the end of the 90s, we also had, you know, difficulties accessing Internet in Brazil.
[15:40.840 --> 15:43.080]  It was very expensive, dial-up only, obviously.
[15:44.520 --> 15:50.780]  So I started getting into computers by trying to, like, fix some of the problems that I had with the family computer.
[15:51.080 --> 16:00.340]  And my first real contact with the scene was with the local defacing group of Silverlords from Brazil.
[16:00.340 --> 16:03.200]  So I used to join the IRC.
[16:04.220 --> 16:06.660]  And I learned a lot back then.
[16:06.860 --> 16:11.560]  And they also introduced me to other Internet forums and other channels like Fnet.
[16:12.520 --> 16:14.800]  But my English skills were not so good back then.
[16:14.960 --> 16:20.600]  And as they got progressively better, I could also branch and try to, you know, understand other topics.
[16:20.600 --> 16:24.760]  And the thing that really fascinated me were computer virus back then.
[16:26.160 --> 16:31.960]  And I started to read and join the channels with people from 29A and related groups.
[16:32.780 --> 16:37.300]  And later, like VX7 forums, like I met a lot of people there.
[16:37.620 --> 16:43.920]  And, you know, at some point I was reinstalling Windows, my family computer, three, four times a day.
[16:44.160 --> 16:48.060]  Because, you know, I had to test my tiny recreations locally.
[16:48.060 --> 16:49.300]  There were no such things, a VM.
[16:49.500 --> 16:56.840]  So you have to reinstall the thing, put the floppy disk, do the little edits, assemble it, run it.
[16:57.580 --> 17:00.160]  We obviously saved the floppy disk before so you can continue.
[17:00.600 --> 17:05.800]  So, you know, days and days, like, wasted to write, like, five, six lines of code sometimes.
[17:07.460 --> 17:08.260]  And, yeah.
[17:08.460 --> 17:13.520]  And I also, again, as my English skills got better, I got involved with other things as well.
[17:13.740 --> 17:16.920]  I learned about the existence of Rack Magazine as well.
[17:17.860 --> 17:19.460]  And I've been reading ever since.
[17:20.020 --> 17:29.860]  And my first real, like, moment that everything kind of clicked in my mind was when I got, like, this magazine from my uncle that had a...
[17:30.720 --> 17:36.400]  It came with the CD that had, like, I think it was Zip Slack, like Slackware distribution built in.
[17:37.040 --> 17:41.340]  And I remember that I spent, like, almost two weeks trying to understand how to make that work.
[17:42.640 --> 17:49.500]  And after I got working, my focus shifted completely into Linux.
[17:49.900 --> 17:52.600]  But I still did some work with Windows.
[17:52.820 --> 18:01.540]  I wrote some packers and some encryptors to get better a little bit about encryption and polymorphic techniques and things like this.
[18:01.540 --> 18:07.700]  But my main drive for growing up was 100% computer viruses and infection techniques.
[18:12.060 --> 18:18.940]  So, for me, why I did these things in the past and was fascinated about this was...
[18:20.100 --> 18:27.280]  Most of the other children in my class and in my school, they were nice to hang out with, but they were also rather boring.
[18:27.280 --> 18:28.420]  They were...
[18:28.420 --> 18:33.200]  I really found people on the Internet or before the Internet, fire Internet and BBS.
[18:33.700 --> 18:35.540]  They were just interesting to talk to.
[18:35.720 --> 18:36.520]  They had...
[18:36.520 --> 18:38.080]  They had great knowledge.
[18:38.300 --> 18:39.460]  They wanted to find out.
[18:39.600 --> 18:40.560]  They were explorers.
[18:40.700 --> 18:41.980]  They wanted to figure shit out.
[18:42.080 --> 18:42.880]  And I liked that.
[18:43.000 --> 18:44.380]  I was fascinated by that.
[18:44.520 --> 18:45.560]  I was fascinated to...
[18:46.040 --> 18:51.080]  To speak to people from around the world that back then was not easily possible.
[18:52.500 --> 18:57.700]  And I was fascinated by, yeah, cracking games and figuring things out.
[18:57.980 --> 19:04.480]  I think, yeah, the research idea behind things that really drove me into this computer scene.
[19:04.860 --> 19:06.020]  Yeah, that did it for me.
[19:08.870 --> 19:10.910]  To speak on some of those cultural aspects.
[19:11.130 --> 19:27.050]  I think I remember like, you know, and a lot of panelists mentioned IRC as like one of their first experiences where I remember kind of the flooding of the channels where basically like a particular jerk or whatever would like enter the channel and then like flood it with like ASCII art of penises
[19:27.050 --> 19:27.790]  and like whatever.
[19:28.050 --> 19:32.950]  And like, then you had to like ban them based on their IP usually.
[19:33.090 --> 19:45.010]  And then they kind of like, oh, you can get around that by like, if you have a dynamic IP, just switch, like, you know, signing off, switching up and then reentering the channel or reentering with another base username.
[19:45.590 --> 19:47.370]  Not Nick, but like your username.
[19:47.750 --> 19:50.790]  And, you know, that kind of being like, oh, wow.
[19:50.970 --> 20:04.690]  Like there's, I actually is the, I think that that's kind of obviated a lot in the current day when you have online communication platforms, which you don't see things like your IP address, for instance.
[20:04.690 --> 20:09.770]  I remember playing Star Wars Jedi Knight, I think it was.
[20:10.250 --> 20:17.510]  And like, you have to enter your, oh, I'm serving up, you know, fighting as a Jedi server.
[20:17.910 --> 20:18.610]  And this is my IP.
[20:18.750 --> 20:23.070]  So I have to like directly connect to that IP on a certain port in order to play that game.
[20:23.210 --> 20:27.290]  And a lot of that is like obviated by, you know, the fact that we have steam or whatever now.
[20:27.290 --> 20:46.970]  Um, and just being interested in, oh, these are, you know, jerks are subverting the mechanisms by which they got banned from the IRC channel by switching their IP by these like clever technical techniques that that was like super interesting to me at a very early point on the onset of like,
[20:47.110 --> 20:51.090]  okay, you can like this, these technologies aren't perfect.
[20:51.090 --> 20:53.130]  You can just kind of get around them like cool.
[20:57.900 --> 21:01.540]  Um, yeah, this was how it was like.
[21:01.620 --> 21:03.020]  That's how, how we started.
[21:03.220 --> 21:06.040]  And there's some commonality in this somehow.
[21:06.520 --> 21:09.580]  Um, I think maybe we can have another question.
[21:09.980 --> 21:24.800]  Um, how it was in the olden days when, when it became a little bit more commercial, you know, when we transitioned to from companies publicly claiming we don't hire hackers to now we do.
[21:25.560 --> 21:33.520]  Um, and how full disclosure happened and how responsive disclosure happened and, um, how it was like.
[21:34.580 --> 21:36.700]  So who would like to start?
[21:37.820 --> 21:38.780]  Go for it.
[21:39.000 --> 21:40.180]  Can you hear me online?
[21:40.740 --> 21:41.740]  Can you hear me online?
[21:46.300 --> 21:46.840]  All right.
[21:47.100 --> 21:49.420]  Um, yeah, one second.
[21:49.420 --> 21:50.420]  Another question.
[21:50.920 --> 21:56.880]  So, um, my first job, I was hired at a college as a, uh, junior.
[21:58.200 --> 22:06.840]  The, uh, head of, uh, union carbides, head of cybersecurity was one of my professors on a night class at college.
[22:07.300 --> 22:13.780]  And he brought who would become my future boss and, and, uh, he owned a security company in Connecticut.
[22:15.200 --> 22:22.160]  And I was challenging him on some of the answers or some of the things statements he was making based on stuff he actually read in 2600.
[22:23.540 --> 22:27.260]  Um, as far as how factual the things were and what the techniques were.
[22:27.860 --> 22:32.440]  And after class, I got pulled aside and I figured this is when the professor is going to throw me out.
[22:32.580 --> 22:33.460]  Which is, I'm always late.
[22:33.540 --> 22:35.040]  We're out playing hack and sack in a ruby.
[22:36.220 --> 22:39.100]  And, um, the guy asked me, Hey, do you have a resume?
[22:39.100 --> 22:45.320]  So I had this crappy dot matrix printer looking resume jammed in a bag, pulled it out.
[22:45.480 --> 22:47.420]  It said that, Hey, I worked at UPS.
[22:47.580 --> 22:48.600]  I worked at a grocery store.
[22:48.940 --> 22:50.240]  Uh, please hire me.
[22:50.880 --> 22:52.640]  And I, they took a chance on me.
[22:52.760 --> 22:53.900]  They, they ended up hiring me.
[22:54.320 --> 22:56.400]  Um, moving forward.
[22:56.660 --> 23:00.820]  I ended up working for another company that came out of a military, uh, facility.
[23:01.000 --> 23:01.720]  Uh, we developed.
[23:01.940 --> 23:02.880]  So is it working?
[23:05.120 --> 23:05.680]  All right.
[23:06.460 --> 23:07.120]  How's that?
[23:08.160 --> 23:08.560]  Okay.
[23:08.740 --> 23:09.020]  Okay.
[23:09.200 --> 23:09.300]  Good.
[23:09.600 --> 23:09.860]  Sorry.
[23:10.480 --> 23:19.980]  Um, worked for a place that came out of a military, uh, facility, uh, developing software design, uh, uh, in flight weapon systems.
[23:20.540 --> 23:23.080]  And I was in charge of the security for that platform.
[23:23.220 --> 23:25.520]  While I was there, I was very active on, on VolDev.
[23:25.940 --> 23:28.860]  Um, full sec, um, full disclosure.
[23:29.420 --> 23:31.120]  When my name would be popping up everywhere.
[23:31.180 --> 23:34.180]  And then I made a comment on there using my work email address.
[23:34.280 --> 23:35.740]  Cause at that time I didn't really give a crap.
[23:35.740 --> 23:41.680]  Um, and I said, Hey, you know, I, I'd be willing to hire hackers and, and mid nineties.
[23:41.880 --> 23:45.800]  This was not something you'd, you'd publicly really say.
[23:46.280 --> 23:56.000]  Um, my next three job interviews through my career procession, uh, that email specifically was brought up in every one of my interviews.
[23:56.800 --> 23:58.660]  Uh, it still exists out there.
[23:59.380 --> 24:05.460]  Um, the, uh, was it track what I was saying?
[24:05.720 --> 24:11.840]  So, um, I did that, that, that, that, that exposed me, um, going forward.
[24:12.140 --> 24:22.540]  I've always been, uh, forthright in letting them know my background, because I, I don't want this to come back and haunt me late later as I, Hey, we found HR found this thing.
[24:23.040 --> 24:25.240]  We, we know so and so this thing happened.
[24:25.440 --> 24:27.920]  You may have ended up in D.C., blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
[24:28.480 --> 24:32.740]  Um, so that's that aspect of, of that.
[24:32.740 --> 24:40.000]  And in, in the current state, um, a more vocal, um, outside, um, I'm active in, uh, makerspace.
[24:41.080 --> 24:43.420]  There's a lot of people in security in there.
[24:43.660 --> 24:46.100]  Uh, there's a lot of hardware hackers, a lot of software developers.
[24:46.540 --> 24:48.500]  I started as a software developer.
[24:48.740 --> 24:53.060]  One of my big frustrations getting into real security.
[24:53.580 --> 25:01.800]  And when I left my first firm, my second firm, I left there because I thought there were too many corporate people in cybersecurity.
[25:02.440 --> 25:03.780]  This is the early nineties.
[25:04.200 --> 25:06.620]  Uh, a lot of people from ITG were popping in.
[25:06.820 --> 25:18.680]  Uh, some people from Nokia popping in Ericsson, um, some AT&T people, IT, uh, ITTG or ITT popping in, um, some UUNet people.
[25:19.340 --> 25:23.140]  And I thought it was polluted and I wanted to get out of it and look for something else.
[25:23.360 --> 25:27.440]  I'm still in cybersecurity today, no matter how much I try to stay out of it.
[25:27.440 --> 25:29.940]  Um, because it, it keeps following me.
[25:30.180 --> 25:38.000]  I think in this, in the thing to be a hacker or be in the cybersecurity space, you're, you're really gotta be passionate about it.
[25:38.240 --> 25:39.660]  It's not just about the money.
[25:40.460 --> 25:42.640]  I'm gonna, I'm gonna throw the political slant on here.
[25:42.820 --> 25:49.880]  I think the pandemic screwed this industry because I think too many people went out and bought, got certificates online and don't know what they're doing.
[25:50.480 --> 25:54.140]  And, and, and now flooded the industry cause salaries to increase.
[25:54.280 --> 25:55.740]  And there's a lot of layoffs going on.
[25:55.740 --> 25:58.120]  I think it's hurting people that have the skill sets.
[25:58.940 --> 26:00.340]  And I'll, I'll end it there.
[26:01.020 --> 26:01.420]  Yeah.
[26:01.780 --> 26:02.600]  Thank you very much.
[26:02.960 --> 26:04.900]  Um, so I had a very similar experience.
[26:05.480 --> 26:11.920]  Um, when, when I was young, I, I couldn't tell my employer that, that I was a hacker or even worked in the industry.
[26:12.040 --> 26:13.160]  That was like a big, no, no.
[26:13.380 --> 26:15.640]  I mean, no way that would happen.
[26:15.640 --> 26:22.260]  Um, and you, you couldn't tell anybody really beside your closest friends who you met online and who were hackers as well.
[26:22.460 --> 26:29.460]  Uh, it went to the, to the extreme that even my wife didn't know that I was into computer hacking.
[26:29.720 --> 26:34.980]  Um, I told her I was doing video editing and that's why I needed five screens and all the computers.
[26:35.560 --> 26:43.480]  And to the point that she told everybody else that I'm into video editing and, um, other parents were asking me, oh yeah, so I work in video editing too.
[26:43.640 --> 26:44.620]  Maybe we should talk about that.
[26:44.720 --> 26:49.020]  And it's like, oh, no, I, I actually, um, I don't know about anything about that.
[26:50.920 --> 26:56.740]  Um, but yeah, when it, when it came to, um, I, we, we, we, we talked about disclosure.
[26:57.420 --> 27:00.680]  Um, but it merged a little bit into, um, hackers.
[27:00.820 --> 27:01.160]  Are they good?
[27:01.260 --> 27:01.780]  Are they bad?
[27:02.040 --> 27:04.480]  I think that keeps changing every few years.
[27:04.940 --> 27:07.820]  Um, there are five years where hackers are seen as good.
[27:07.940 --> 27:08.020]  Yeah.
[27:08.080 --> 27:10.680]  We hire hackers and then it's again, hackers.
[27:10.940 --> 27:11.980]  No, thank you very much.
[27:12.400 --> 27:13.180]  You're out again.
[27:13.340 --> 27:14.340]  And then you're in again.
[27:14.920 --> 27:17.680]  Um, so that's how I see it just keeps coming around.
[27:21.130 --> 27:21.530]  Yeah.
[27:21.890 --> 27:22.430]  Oh, I see.
[27:23.450 --> 27:23.850]  Yeah.
[27:23.970 --> 27:24.210]  It's interesting.
[27:24.350 --> 27:33.870]  Cause, uh, you know, and also the word hackers in general has such a different meaning from what it had in the early days.
[27:33.870 --> 27:41.490]  Like a lot of, um, oh, I'm a node hacker, which means that like you're a node programmer, you're like scripting software, you're, you're making websites.
[27:41.490 --> 27:53.030]  I'm like, oh, I'm hacking on node or, uh, in, in node JS that that's like hacking has come to mean a little bit, just programming in general, uh, which is a weird turn of events.
[27:53.330 --> 28:03.030]  Um, and it doesn't necessarily have that same subversive kind of, uh, connotation in all contexts.
[28:03.670 --> 28:05.690]  Um, I think it does here.
[28:05.690 --> 28:22.110]  I think that people hear when they think of hacking, it's kind of that, a reasonable mindset of like trying to find loopholes in the security systems and in hacker job, like just kind of like information security in general, that's kind of how it's understood.
[28:22.530 --> 28:29.470]  But, um, or like just as a verb, I'm hacking on something, you know, um, just means I'm working on something.
[28:29.870 --> 28:34.470]  Uh, so it's kind of become the super term that doesn't necessarily mean anything anymore.
[28:34.950 --> 28:36.990]  Uh, for good and bad, I guess.
[28:38.410 --> 28:39.270]  Hacker thoughts.
[28:39.650 --> 28:39.970]  Right.
[28:40.170 --> 28:40.630]  Exactly.
[28:41.590 --> 28:46.270]  When, when you said that, I immediately thought of like from hacker spaces to maker spaces.
[28:46.550 --> 28:50.510]  Um, so I kind of kept a different perspective on this thing.
[28:50.790 --> 28:56.010]  Um, you know, when we was hacking stuff, uh, we were targeting white hats.
[28:56.010 --> 28:59.970]  The, the corporate security types were going after their emails.
[29:00.130 --> 29:01.730]  We're going after all their keys.
[29:01.910 --> 29:03.370]  Cause we saw it as selling out.
[29:03.670 --> 29:04.950]  And, uh, I still feel that way.
[29:05.370 --> 29:09.150]  Um, and I, and I say this because for example, like last week I was at Defcon.
[29:09.430 --> 29:09.550]  Right.
[29:09.770 --> 29:14.650]  Um, it actually still describes itself as the world's largest underground hacking conference.
[29:15.150 --> 29:18.570]  Listen, right.
[29:18.810 --> 29:26.050]  And so I, I, I feel similarly that like, for those who have a love for, for staying up all night hacking some shits.
[29:26.210 --> 29:26.290]  Right.
[29:26.670 --> 29:35.350]  Um, might feel a little bit distasteful, but then, you know, it's, we didn't choose this society or this economic, uh, nightmare, uh, economic model capitalism.
[29:35.670 --> 29:40.190]  Uh, so I feel like hackers have always tried to find a way to fit in which, you know, broadcast.
[29:40.490 --> 29:40.590]  Right.
[29:40.750 --> 29:45.810]  Um, and so, yeah, you know, we're criminalized and a lot of job people just, you know, look at us.
[29:45.930 --> 29:51.030]  Like I, I have had difficulty, you know, I work as a backend web dev, you know, in my previous years, not anymore.
[29:51.390 --> 29:53.530]  Uh, I haven't been able to get jobs since I've been out.
[29:53.730 --> 30:09.810]  Uh, you know, and so it still is, uh, very much, um, a harsh environment and, you know, to be, and I'm, and I'm not complaining because like, frankly, there's 2 million people, you know, in prison right now and, you know, something like 8 to 10 million with felony convictions and some form of
[30:09.810 --> 30:15.670]  carceral control that have, you know, there's no future that capitalism is providing a ways to make you live.
[30:15.670 --> 30:20.690]  And so I, I identify more with the scammers and the crooks, you know what I mean?
[30:20.790 --> 30:24.930]  Like more so than like these corporate security types or military contractors at Fedcon.
[30:26.210 --> 30:27.990]  Um, yeah.
[30:29.830 --> 30:31.110]  Make hacking a threat again.
[30:33.190 --> 30:52.070]  I think they said everything, but yeah, this, uh, edgy, uh, image from, you know, 80s and 90s that, uh, we all grew up with like seeing hackers being associated with, uh, it's, I guess it's still like, uh, a lot of people found the scene to be inclusive in a way.
[30:52.370 --> 30:56.210]  Uh, the underdogs and things like this, uh, they found the space there.
[30:56.610 --> 31:00.670]  Uh, and it was obviously becoming more inclusive, uh, with recent times.
[31:00.670 --> 31:08.710]  But, um, I think the, the, the word has shifted as technology is more and more important than everywhere.
[31:09.130 --> 31:15.890]  The term, the edginess of the hackers starts to disappear a little bit, uh, in some of this, uh, more corporate environments, right?
[31:16.030 --> 31:31.470]  So the, the corporations that they, they shift this, uh, mindset of like looking at, uh, hackers purely as a criminal or like, uh, you know, people doing wrong things, uh, us trying to like recruit them as assets.
[31:31.790 --> 31:37.010]  Uh, and yeah, I guess looking at it now, it's, it's kind of an obvious shift.
[31:37.250 --> 31:39.690]  Uh, like I said, the technology is everywhere now.
[31:39.690 --> 31:45.850]  So the corporations really need, uh, this kind of, uh, individuals working for them.
[31:46.050 --> 31:54.990]  Uh, because if they don't, the ones that are not working for them, they're, you know, uh, most likely maybe attacking them instead.
[31:55.250 --> 31:55.710]  So, yeah.
[31:56.330 --> 31:56.770]  Yeah.
[31:56.890 --> 31:59.630]  I can see, I, you know, that's kind of interesting from the perspective of that.
[31:59.710 --> 32:08.850]  The fact that there is an exploits market now, like an exploits market that didn't exist when we were kids and just kind of growing up and seeing that, oh, people are breaking into systems.
[32:08.870 --> 32:16.090]  People are developing remote code, uh, exploitation and, um, you know, uh, you know, buffer overflows and things like that.
[32:16.230 --> 32:19.890]  And then releasing them on lists like full disclosure.
[32:19.890 --> 32:27.290]  And, um, that being the prevalent way that people, that, that, that vulnerability with an application is discovered.
[32:28.570 --> 32:36.070]  And, uh, I, you know, in 2008, I took, uh, this, um, uh, offensive security, uh, one on one course.
[32:36.710 --> 32:44.370]  Um, usually called hacking with backtrack or exploitation with backtrack, which is then turned into Kali Linux, um, in a later date.
[32:44.370 --> 32:58.230]  But, um, but like now you have, and then that, that kind of, uh, was a way to lead you through the, um, methodology of doing a buffer overflow attack, for instance, on x86 at the time.
[32:58.510 --> 33:13.030]  Um, and now there's this vulnerabilities market that you can see on like zero perodium, um, and gives you like the running rates for a zero click RCE within iOS.
[33:13.770 --> 33:23.690]  Um, and those vulnerabilities are hoarded by governments and corporations that sell the governments usually probably, uh, like celebrate, like gray key, fuck them.
[33:24.250 --> 33:41.470]  Um, and there's this, um, hoarding of vulnerabilities and then, uh, conditional release to, you know, for instance, in the government, um, you have these, uh, vulnerabilities, uh, uh, equities program, VEP, um, it says, okay, we're going to keep most of vulnerabilities.
[33:41.650 --> 33:43.750]  We're going to selectively give out those.
[33:43.910 --> 33:50.170]  Oh, you know, um, uh, you know, Fortinet, you've had an exploit, um, here, take this.
[33:50.390 --> 33:58.030]  We, we know this exploit and, you know, you get to fix it because of the, our good graces, this being the kind of dynamic at play now.
[33:58.330 --> 34:19.310]  Um, and I think it goes to the detriment of us all because it means that, uh, those, uh, are not being fixed, not, you know, we are, we are as, as people, as citizens, as hackers, as users, uh, not, uh, actually helping to, to, to, to, to, to, we're, we're not getting our systems fixed ourselves.
[34:19.670 --> 34:30.790]  Um, and then we're just, um, selectively, okay, this, uh, selective targeting can be done by, you know, a particular individual instead of, um, having us all better protected.
[34:31.430 --> 34:37.310]  Um, so I think that's kind of a, a threat that right now didn't necessarily exist back then.
[34:38.510 --> 34:38.990]  Yeah.
[34:39.070 --> 34:40.650]  I, I think that's very interesting.
[34:40.790 --> 34:43.810]  And, and we're moving slowly on from the past and coming to the present.
[34:43.970 --> 34:47.730]  And then we're focusing on the future where we really want to spend more time on later.
[34:47.730 --> 34:55.750]  Um, but I, I think at the turn of the century, it all started, there was a lot of full disclosure happening.
[34:56.230 --> 34:58.130]  And this has completely disappeared.
[34:58.450 --> 35:00.450]  Right now, there's a lot of money involved.
[35:00.890 --> 35:02.330]  Exploits have been weaponized.
[35:02.690 --> 35:05.630]  You get paid good money for exploit development.
[35:06.010 --> 35:08.130]  And corporates like to keep it secret.
[35:08.330 --> 35:09.490]  And there's a responsible disclosure.
[35:09.710 --> 35:13.750]  So there was a huge shift from full disclosure to where we are now.
[35:14.250 --> 35:20.110]  Um, and as Bill just said, some vulnerabilities are not fixed because they don't want them to be fixed.
[35:20.770 --> 35:24.750]  Um, so perhaps some part of full disclosure was not such a bad idea.
[35:24.910 --> 35:26.130]  At least shit got fixed.
[35:26.830 --> 35:28.530]  Um, yeah.
[35:29.770 --> 35:32.190]  If anyone, any questions for the past?
[35:33.970 --> 35:34.390]  Yeah.
[35:34.430 --> 35:34.710]  Hit it.
[35:34.910 --> 35:35.310]  Come here.
[35:35.410 --> 35:37.690]  Get a microphone or shout very loudly.
[35:41.790 --> 35:42.550]  For questions.
[35:42.670 --> 35:42.730]  Yeah.
[35:42.830 --> 35:43.490]  Come on over here.
[35:43.490 --> 35:47.550]  Um, and I have, uh, I have like four questions online.
[35:48.170 --> 35:48.230]  Awesome.
[35:48.410 --> 35:48.470]  Yeah.
[35:48.550 --> 35:52.610]  Do you guys want to, do you guys take a couple of questions now?
[35:52.770 --> 35:53.350]  Yeah, absolutely.
[35:53.630 --> 35:53.750]  Yeah.
[35:53.870 --> 35:53.930]  Yeah.
[35:54.070 --> 35:54.430]  Anytime.
[35:54.710 --> 35:54.790]  Yeah.
[35:54.930 --> 35:55.110]  Cool.
[35:55.550 --> 35:56.650]  Let's do a couple of rounds of questions.
[35:57.110 --> 35:57.230]  Sorry.
[35:58.050 --> 35:59.030]  I had to take that mic.
[35:59.230 --> 35:59.750]  So over here.
[36:05.080 --> 36:08.220]  Uh, thank you so much for this, um, wonderful panel.
[36:08.980 --> 36:11.780]  Um, I have a two part question.
[36:12.860 --> 36:14.620]  Uh, Jeremy, I apologize.
[36:14.760 --> 36:15.840]  I've already asked you the second one.
[36:15.840 --> 36:32.120]  Um, but, um, so there's a lot of reason right now in the world to be reflecting on, um, what, what, what squashes radical insurgent social movements.
[36:32.120 --> 36:50.620]  Um, and in this particular, um, case, uh, what has squashed and kind of led to the demise of any forms of productive insurgent, um, political forms of hacking that coalesce and works within a social movement.
[36:51.080 --> 36:55.300]  Um, uh, and I think that there's a lot of factors to that.
[36:55.300 --> 37:04.510]  Uh, obviously one glaringly being repression, um, in the ass nine laws towards, um, hackers and other political insurgents.
[37:04.980 --> 37:14.100]  Um, as well as, um, uh, recuperation, um, but also, uh, internal conflict and harm and abuse.
[37:14.100 --> 37:33.560]  Um, and so I'm curious about how you reflect on internal conflict and, like, drama and abuse and harm and divisions between hacking communities that have, um, have shaped how collective and community organizing, both in things that maybe are more explicitly political,
[37:33.760 --> 37:47.720]  but also kind of on a more, you know, everyday kind of way has shaped how hacker communities kind of come about and, and actually end up losing its potency as, um, a creative political, like, actor.
[37:48.020 --> 37:51.840]  Um, uh, and you know, how do you reflect on that in the past?
[37:51.940 --> 37:58.020]  How has that impacted you and your relationship to hacking community and what can be learned for the future?
[37:58.020 --> 37:59.400]  Has, has that changed?
[38:00.160 --> 38:04.180]  Um, so that's my, my question, my, my, a related question.
[38:04.180 --> 38:12.360]  That's a little bit more, um, blunt is, uh, very related is when was the first time that you saw, uh, doxing happen?
[38:12.820 --> 38:17.620]  And, um, both the actual practice of it and also like the phrase dropping dox.
[38:18.100 --> 38:19.980]  Um, so two related questions.
[38:20.220 --> 38:21.820]  One's kind of deeper than the other.
[38:22.280 --> 38:22.700]  All right.
[38:22.800 --> 38:30.900]  Thank you very much for this question, because I feel this is a question where, uh, we may have different opinions and this is wonderful to figure out here on stage.
[38:31.340 --> 38:43.700]  Uh, so if you ask me, um, about, um, conflicts inside the community and, um, how some hackers went after other hackers, I'm, I'm strongly against this.
[38:43.820 --> 38:45.800]  For me, this is hacker cannibalism.
[38:46.180 --> 38:53.020]  Um, I think there are, there are much larger problems in the world than hacker hacking other hackers.
[38:53.580 --> 38:58.040]  Um, and I think that it's, it's, it's just a waste of, of time.
[38:58.220 --> 39:06.900]  I would much prefer to, to fix the big problems in the world than the little foids between hacking groups and who's the better hacker and who's the less white hat and who's the most black hat.
[39:07.300 --> 39:09.780]  I, I, uh, it's really not interesting to me.
[39:09.840 --> 39:11.460]  I think it's a waste of good resources.
[39:11.800 --> 39:14.680]  Um, but maybe we have some other opinions on that.
[39:16.700 --> 39:20.900]  Maybe Bill, Jeremy or Panther or teams that hit it.
[39:21.320 --> 39:21.400]  Yeah.
[39:21.560 --> 39:23.860]  So I grew up in the, you can hear this, right?
[39:24.360 --> 39:24.720]  Okay.
[39:24.960 --> 39:26.960]  So, um, I grew up in the eighties.
[39:27.440 --> 39:31.940]  Uh, the division between hacking, even just individual hackers was pretty extreme.
[39:32.780 --> 39:41.780]  So, um, I don't think it's any different than, you know, somebody picking on somebody in a playground back in the day, but the people didn't share information.
[39:42.080 --> 39:43.900]  Uh, it was very, very tenuous.
[39:44.300 --> 39:48.200]  Uh, the first DEF CON I, I attended was either three or five.
[39:48.380 --> 39:49.060]  I think it's five.
[39:49.200 --> 39:50.740]  Other people are saying I was there for three.
[39:50.900 --> 39:56.440]  I don't think that was the case, but even when I went there, I knew people, but I had never actually met them in person before.
[39:57.380 --> 40:01.760]  Um, and you're, you're, you're kind of reserved at first.
[40:01.960 --> 40:13.160]  Like if you went to your first 2600 meeting and you're new on the, in the, in the, in the scene, you're probably not really telling people what you're doing or what your capabilities are.
[40:13.320 --> 40:14.720]  You're trying to learn from it.
[40:14.900 --> 40:17.040]  And in the eighties, it really wasn't like that.
[40:17.480 --> 40:20.940]  Um, in my first job, I got to work with a guy named Captain Zap.
[40:21.520 --> 40:27.280]  Uh, we were hacking some MBS systems for a client and, um, he went and doxxed his girlfriend.
[40:29.420 --> 40:32.320]  So, um, he, he, uh, it was a combination.
[40:33.700 --> 40:38.660]  Not to get into the legal part of it, but he got, it was stalking and he was scurring out some information on her.
[40:39.240 --> 40:39.680]  What's that?
[40:39.740 --> 40:40.160]  What year?
[40:40.880 --> 40:42.940]  Oh, this would have been 1986.
[40:44.880 --> 40:45.900]  So yeah, I'm old.
[40:46.640 --> 40:49.280]  Um, I was, I was still in college, but I was working for these guys.
[40:49.600 --> 40:51.580]  Um, I was hired as a penetration tester.
[40:52.440 --> 40:58.320]  So, um, for me, it was VMS and, and, um, uh, MVS, uh, back in that day.
[40:59.220 --> 41:02.700]  So, um, that was the first time I'd seen things get doxxed.
[41:02.700 --> 41:07.700]  I know, um, fighter got doxxed out in San Francisco, uh, a few years ago.
[41:09.300 --> 41:12.860]  And the, and I know a bunch of people have recently got doxxed.
[41:12.960 --> 41:19.960]  I know there's somebody here who's probably doxxed about five times that I'm aware of, uh, for some conversations, conversations that's happened last week in Vegas.
[41:20.560 --> 41:25.140]  Um, but I, I think there was an apprehension of sharing information.
[41:25.140 --> 41:29.700]  So, um, we were a group that used to throw parties at the Alexis Park.
[41:29.860 --> 41:33.820]  And we would invite, we would purposely invite groups that we knew didn't get along.
[41:35.120 --> 41:38.260]  Cause they knew that if they came in, we'd never invite them back.
[41:38.860 --> 41:40.520]  And I think we got known for that.
[41:40.600 --> 41:46.080]  Nobody really actually knew who we were, but we, we, we always had the suite that we were throwing these crazy parties on.
[41:46.440 --> 41:48.480]  But we were purposely bringing people on.
[41:48.600 --> 41:51.060]  So we had LOD, MOD members and stuff in there.
[41:51.360 --> 41:53.060]  We knew, we knew what the past was.
[41:53.520 --> 41:57.100]  Um, the level of stuff that went on like an operation, some double.
[41:58.080 --> 42:01.560]  That predates that that's after my early days.
[42:01.860 --> 42:03.960]  Um, there weren't a lot of laws in the eighties.
[42:04.300 --> 42:07.400]  It was really around the phone company and credit cards.
[42:09.300 --> 42:13.960]  So what would happen, what I would occasionally see happen is awareness boards would get taken down.
[42:14.100 --> 42:21.260]  Cause people would throw, if I wanted, like, if I wanted to take your awareness board down, I'd put credit card numbers up there, whether they're valid or not.
[42:21.260 --> 42:24.840]  And then just say, hey, credit card numbers are up there and they come after you.
[42:25.780 --> 42:25.840]  So.
[42:29.910 --> 42:30.690]  Great questions.
[42:31.030 --> 42:32.610]  Um, some deep stuff.
[42:33.350 --> 42:44.550]  Uh, if I may, to start off with a really relevant George Jackson quote, um, you might've heard it, settle your quarrels, come together and understand the reality of our situation.
[42:44.810 --> 42:47.070]  Understand that fascism is already here.
[42:47.970 --> 42:49.950]  That the people are already dying.
[42:50.070 --> 42:50.850]  Who could be saved?
[42:50.990 --> 42:54.150]  That generations and more will live poor, butchered half lives.
[42:54.310 --> 42:59.210]  If you fail to act, do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love for the revolution.
[42:59.730 --> 43:03.850]  Um, now a lot of stuff there.
[43:03.990 --> 43:11.490]  Um, as far as when we were anonymous, we were actually very deliberately trying to, I think the words were like, unite all allied battleships, some shit like that.
[43:11.610 --> 43:11.670]  Right.
[43:11.990 --> 43:15.390]  Um, that everybody could like, anybody could claim the anonymous banner or whatever like that.
[43:15.790 --> 43:21.270]  Um, but the reality is also that, yeah, no, it's, it's a, it's a vicious scene that does eat itself at times.
[43:21.270 --> 43:26.450]  And that there is high levels of burnout, both in like hacker scenes and of course, social justice scenes.
[43:26.790 --> 43:33.070]  Um, and so, um, I, I like to think, uh, something that's relevant here that I brought up at a different panel.
[43:33.310 --> 43:49.450]  Uh, you know, every time there's like these large protests, like at the Republican national convention or J 20 or, you know, uh, the G eight type stuff, there's a multitude of different coalitions of groups protesting against a common enemy, but not, we're on that all the same necessarily.
[43:49.450 --> 43:51.230]  And we certainly don't always agree on their tactics.
[43:51.390 --> 43:51.470]  Right.
[43:51.870 --> 44:04.910]  But, uh, some folks put together the St. Paul principles to as like, uh, some, uh, mutually agreed upon principles about, um, embracing a diversity of tactics that we won't issue like public condemnations of like certain tactics.
[44:04.910 --> 44:13.570]  Uh, but we'll try to also maintain a separation of time and space so that everybody can feel comfortable to act in the way that they feel, uh, they could take the risk levels that they're comfortable with.
[44:13.870 --> 44:15.450]  Um, and so I think that's actually kind of relevant.
[44:15.450 --> 44:31.870]  Um, now, as far as the doxing, like, uh, no, that, that is like, listen, um, like famously, like, uh, uh, uh, Sabu, uh, the informant of my case was supposedly caught by like backtrace security who had like tried to de-anonymize anonymous and like, because it was like petty rivalries or political
[44:31.870 --> 44:35.250]  differences would try to de-identify, uh, or de-anonymize people.
[44:35.350 --> 44:36.510]  And that, yeah, that's not cool at all.
[44:36.510 --> 44:47.230]  Um, the person who ran, um, one of the low sec line, Ryan Cleary, actually just out of pettiness and bitterness, um, dropped the IP addresses of everybody who's on those servers, like publicly.
[44:47.470 --> 44:47.630]  Right.
[44:47.810 --> 44:48.210]  Thanks.
[44:48.610 --> 44:48.970]  No, thanks.
[44:49.070 --> 44:49.870]  Actually, that is not cool.
[44:50.010 --> 44:50.130]  Right.
[44:50.410 --> 44:54.630]  Um, because then you're, you know, given information to the enemy to sell out your own comrades and so forth.
[44:54.850 --> 44:57.990]  Um, that being said, I was actually a prolific troll.
[44:59.010 --> 45:10.710]  Um, IRC 2600 specifically, you know, listen for years, I was getting G line, but like, like you said, like, uh, and so I think that there actually is a tradition of critique, which actually can inform and advance.
[45:11.010 --> 45:19.190]  Uh, and I read nothing, but, uh, about the, the 2600 thing that, um, years later, I think, um, uh, we were like, we don't have a server.
[45:19.350 --> 45:19.570]  Fuck it.
[45:19.630 --> 45:21.550]  Let's just take over 2600 service.
[45:21.670 --> 45:23.150]  We just had thousands of people just joined twice.
[45:23.290 --> 45:24.830]  You know, it's all in good fun.
[45:24.830 --> 45:26.210]  But like, I think there are some guiding principles.
[45:26.290 --> 45:27.330]  You don't sell your comrades out.
[45:27.330 --> 45:29.270]  You don't give up information on the enemy and stuff like that.
[45:29.350 --> 45:34.230]  And doxing itself is in of itself, but tactic that is very useful, uh, against.
[45:34.630 --> 45:38.610]  Um, but you got to punch up, you know, you got to go after those in power.
[45:38.790 --> 45:43.650]  Like, uh, like what someone say, like transparency for the powerful privacy for the powerless.
[45:43.830 --> 45:49.590]  Like, uh, so go after CEOs this year, Luigi, you know, like, you know, or the fash.
[45:49.750 --> 45:55.410]  Like they got names and faces, these ice people, you know, like we could still tell that they're pigs, even though they're wearing masks, you know?
[45:55.410 --> 45:57.110]  So that's all I got around.
[46:01.670 --> 46:09.970]  So like a kind of a, just a timeline of interaction of networked communication systems with social movements in general.
[46:09.970 --> 46:21.750]  The first thing that I can think of is, uh, Harry Cleaver and his work in Southern Mexico, uh, during the, uh, Zapatista uprising in 94.
[46:22.250 --> 46:40.230]  Um, this kind of synergistic, uh, moment where a lot of, uh, indigenous folks in Southern Mexico came together, um, to, uh, in communication with the broader world in this kind of poetic language that communicated with the rest of the world about their struggles.
[46:40.230 --> 46:49.290]  And, uh, Harry Cleaver, uh, being, uh, international solidarity person that kind of, uh, communicated those, um, with the rest of the world.
[46:49.510 --> 46:59.510]  Um, there, uh, then I personal story was on indie media's IRC channel back in the day.
[46:59.510 --> 47:11.070]  And that was how the, uh, news of the brutalizations in Genoa, uh, during the G8 in Genoa in 2001 were communicated.
[47:11.510 --> 47:14.030]  Like there wasn't any like news covering it.
[47:14.150 --> 47:26.530]  Uh, but the IRC, uh, social, the social media center was across the street from where the Cabanieri were literally beating people, uh, almost to death.
[47:26.530 --> 47:34.450]  And across the street, they were saying on the IRC channel, Hey, this is happening.
[47:34.770 --> 47:41.510]  People are being dragged out, uh, bloodied, uh, and dragged into cars, get the word out.
[47:41.690 --> 47:44.830]  And at that moment for me was very important.
[47:44.970 --> 47:51.210]  I realized that like, no one else is going to get this news out and the, it's being communicated on IRC.
[47:51.210 --> 47:55.410]  And if I am this, I am this person that can do something about it.
[47:55.590 --> 47:55.690]  Right.
[47:55.950 --> 47:57.690]  I can actually like let people know about it.
[47:58.130 --> 48:03.750]  Um, so that was something that was really powerful for me and my political development.
[48:04.350 --> 48:22.650]  Um, and I think that, you know, another great example of, uh, the influencing of network communication systems on social movements is of course, uh, often brought up now is, is, is era spring and Twitter, uh, early, uh, you know, getting the, you know,
[48:22.750 --> 48:34.610]  being able to communicate with the world, uh, about the struggles, uh, that, uh, people in the air world were facing, uh, with their governments and kind of a range of political contexts.
[48:34.610 --> 48:48.810]  And that being, and so I think that like, sometimes these network communication systems formalize and hierarchical eyes in a way that doesn't allow that cuts off that possibility.
[48:49.010 --> 49:10.110]  But I think that, uh, even, you know, I'm just using this kind of term network communication system, uh, as a, as a, as a kind of more abstract way to, to say Internet, but there are also interesting things that are happening now with non-Internet network communication systems like long range
[49:10.110 --> 49:13.210]  radios, um, that can be used in protest context.
[49:13.510 --> 49:19.810]  You know, for instance, um, you know, I, I, I, everyone talks about, uh, in that context, met, uh, meshtastic reticulum.
[49:19.990 --> 49:22.850]  These are like technologies that could really have liberatory effects.
[49:22.850 --> 49:43.550]  And I think that are, uh, are exciting, uh, and, and could, um, you know, have, uh, don't have these like centralized, um, focal points that can be used for surveillance or, uh, or, uh, spoofing or because it's, because it's a, you know, everyone shares the connection kind of network.
[49:44.050 --> 49:44.490]  Yeah.
[49:44.510 --> 49:57.330]  We want to talk about, especially as meshtastic and, um, other communication platforms in the second part of the talk as well, where we need your help to, to see how we can make this better and more accessible to people and, you know, just help them with technology.
[49:57.870 --> 49:59.410]  There was another question or so.
[49:59.550 --> 49:59.690]  Yes.
[49:59.990 --> 50:00.150]  Awesome.
[50:01.010 --> 50:03.250]  Um, I want to make a comment too.
[50:03.310 --> 50:05.830]  I sort of came of age in the, in the eighties also.
[50:05.870 --> 50:07.610]  And I remember Steven Levy's book.
[50:08.250 --> 50:12.450]  Um, and don't forget the subtitle, Heroes of the Computer Revolution.
[50:12.770 --> 50:17.270]  We led a revolution, you know, computers everywhere, Internet everywhere.
[50:17.610 --> 50:19.870]  Sometimes we forget how far we've come.
[50:20.410 --> 50:20.770]  Yeah.
[50:20.910 --> 50:28.270]  And we, we did it, I did it working with, you know, working with my friends, you know, and that the thought of us turning on each other was kind of unthinkable.
[50:28.690 --> 50:41.330]  You know, even as, as, as, as far back as a junior high, we were on a sort of oppressive mini computer that they carefully regulated our use and, uh, the storage and, and CPU.
[50:41.910 --> 50:44.610]  So, uh, it was a county-based system.
[50:44.810 --> 50:45.790]  So we, we cheated.
[50:45.970 --> 50:47.530]  We created a fake high school.
[50:48.030 --> 50:51.430]  We named it Millard Fillmore High School, the most forgettable president.
[50:52.130 --> 50:55.390]  And that way everyone had all the resources they needed.
[50:56.110 --> 51:02.090]  And then, uh, we, we just, we jointly decided to, uh, shut it down at the end of the school year.
[51:02.490 --> 51:04.830]  And they thought, oh man, they're, they're letting us all go.
[51:04.950 --> 51:07.430]  And I said, no, no, they're unleashing us on the world.
[51:07.430 --> 51:08.070]  Yeah.
[51:09.070 --> 51:09.790]  That's wonderful.
[51:10.310 --> 51:12.010]  You wouldn't turn your back on those people, huh?
[51:12.570 --> 51:12.970]  Yeah.
[51:13.910 --> 51:16.110]  But that's, you know, don't, don't forget how far we've come.
[51:16.270 --> 51:18.450]  And, and yeah, there's a lot of work to be done still.
[51:18.650 --> 51:23.910]  There probably always will be, but, you know, uh, remember how, how well we work together.
[51:24.390 --> 51:25.150]  Yeah, definitely.
[51:25.330 --> 51:26.810]  The strength is in the, in the collective.
[51:28.330 --> 51:28.730]  Yeah.
[51:28.830 --> 51:29.310]  Thank you very much.
[51:29.430 --> 51:36.770]  I think the greatest achievement that the, the IT underground or the hackers have done is when they were working together as a, as one big team.
[51:36.770 --> 51:41.630]  Um, I have a question from the Internet.
[51:42.010 --> 51:46.270]  Uh, first off, uh, oh goodness, pronouncing handles is hard.
[51:46.470 --> 51:51.430]  Uh, aesthetics, I believe is how this is, uh, says, uh, hi to both Bill and Jeremy.
[51:52.110 --> 51:56.050]  And then, uh, has a very direct question for our friend Jeremy here.
[51:56.810 --> 51:58.330]  What happened at Defcon this year?
[52:00.190 --> 52:01.890]  Yes, Jeremy, what happened to Defcon?
[52:03.130 --> 52:04.710]  Well, I wasn't really going to get into it.
[52:04.710 --> 52:08.730]  Um, but yeah, I mean, I spoke at Defcon like 20 years ago.
[52:09.290 --> 52:09.930]  First time.
[52:10.170 --> 52:11.750]  I was like 18 young and dumb, right?
[52:11.970 --> 52:12.710]  Running my mouse.
[52:13.130 --> 52:15.410]  Um, the, how far we've come.
[52:15.530 --> 52:15.570]  Right.
[52:15.810 --> 52:19.170]  But, uh, this year, uh, I did go, I was excited about it.
[52:19.310 --> 52:23.370]  Um, more or less like, uh, I mean, we all knew, like, I don't pretend to be naive.
[52:23.370 --> 52:24.590]  I knew what I was walking into.
[52:24.750 --> 52:24.950]  Of course.
[52:25.030 --> 52:25.110]  Right.
[52:25.590 --> 52:33.430]  But, um, I was just very disturbed by like how deeply enmeshed, like with the military industrial complex, like it was literally like sponsored by Anudril.
[52:33.690 --> 52:39.750]  Like this company that, that, um, you know, makes those AI century draw a drone towers and stuff on the border.
[52:40.010 --> 52:40.210]  Right.
[52:40.310 --> 52:43.390]  Criminalizing, targeting people about drone, literal AI weaponized imperialism.
[52:44.330 --> 52:44.510]  Right.
[52:44.510 --> 52:44.570]  Right.
[52:44.910 --> 52:50.930]  And to see like literally the NSA director, a literal foresight general with blood, blood on your hands.
[52:51.110 --> 52:51.330]  Right.
[52:51.450 --> 52:52.370]  And you're a part of it.
[52:52.470 --> 53:02.910]  And I'm literally, I felt like I was in the nexus of tech fascism, which is everything that like hackers right now, especially right now in this moment, like should be fighting against, um, free Palestine.
[53:04.110 --> 53:08.510]  And for that, just saying that I gave them the benefit of the doubt of letting them finish the damn speech.
[53:08.630 --> 53:08.710]  Right.
[53:09.610 --> 53:11.030]  Like it wasn't even a disruption.
[53:11.030 --> 53:12.670]  It was like, but they can't take the heat, I guess.
[53:12.990 --> 53:17.090]  Like, but you know, when it took the final shots and literally said go army, that was enough for me, man.
[53:17.210 --> 53:19.410]  Like right now, no, we ain't doing all that shit, man.
[53:19.470 --> 53:21.930]  At least don't call yourself an underground hacking conference.
[53:22.050 --> 53:28.150]  But so, yeah, I mean, like, it was also pretty cowardly too, because the, the goons at first, they were just like, Oh, you're actually fine.
[53:28.250 --> 53:29.190]  But you know, just stick around though.
[53:29.330 --> 53:32.170]  You know, they had no official message from goons or DEFCON.
[53:32.270 --> 53:32.310]  Right.
[53:32.330 --> 53:34.690]  We were just chilling for like a whole nother hour, just going about our day.
[53:34.950 --> 53:40.110]  I was there for about two hours total before they had like armed security badges and stuff like that.
[53:40.110 --> 53:43.850]  Like whatever, like, I reached out to them too.
[53:44.010 --> 53:48.890]  It was like trying to even like say, look, whatever, man, let me come back to the conference.
[53:49.030 --> 53:50.330]  You know, it was $1,500 tickets.
[53:50.470 --> 53:50.670]  You know what I mean?
[53:50.750 --> 53:53.990]  Like, but anyways, that I regret nothing though.
[53:54.110 --> 53:56.030]  You know, I think it's a point of Fisher.
[53:56.030 --> 53:58.230]  I mean, like thinking about the Anderil dude, you know what I mean?
[53:58.350 --> 53:59.450]  And the Elon Musk's of the world.
[53:59.550 --> 54:04.910]  But the Anderil dude, particularly like, you might even see at like DEFCON or these hacker conferences and stuff like that.
[54:04.990 --> 54:06.430]  He's quote, like us, right?
[54:06.490 --> 54:14.450]  He's also making like N64 mods and retro Game Boy shits on the side while he's literally developing Skynet.
[54:14.590 --> 54:14.990]  You know what I mean?
[54:15.050 --> 54:17.790]  Like, so no, we, we got to draw a line in the sand.
[54:17.790 --> 54:20.130]  Uh, what side are you on in the hacker class war?
[54:26.260 --> 54:33.320]  So I wanted to thank you for sharing your stories and talking about how you've evolved your relationship to working with technology.
[54:33.660 --> 54:42.160]  Um, I'm reminded in the question about doxing about the fact that what's okay and not okay is not a fixed thing.
[54:42.300 --> 54:45.280]  It's not from tablets that Moses brought down or something.
[54:45.420 --> 54:46.980]  It's continually evolving.
[54:46.980 --> 54:55.080]  And what who the people who come to hope I think form a community and we share with each other values that are evolving.
[54:55.580 --> 55:09.660]  And I was reminded of an event that happened 13 years ago at HOPE 10 because that year, um, they invited Adrian Lamo to come onto the stage, which was the HOPE stage exactly like this one.
[55:09.980 --> 55:20.900]  And, uh, Greg Newby and Emmanuel Goldstein invited him to come up because he was the asshole who turned in Chelsea Manning, but he was a well-known hacker in the community.
[55:21.140 --> 55:30.500]  And because he had standing and had done prison time for hacking in New York times and all these other things, they brought this hacker on stage and they said, Adrian, what do you have to say for yourself?
[55:32.060 --> 55:40.580]  And he had this incredibly awkward description about how he thought it was important to turn in Chelsea Manning because he was going to save lives or something like that.
[55:40.580 --> 55:46.320]  And there was a long line of people lined up for the microphone who one after another said, you're a fucking asshole.
[55:46.740 --> 55:52.200]  And it was like people just like established a sense of what's okay and what kind of behavior is okay.
[55:52.360 --> 55:57.360]  And the fact that that person turned Chelsea Manning over to the feds was not anything that anybody in the room agreed with.
[55:57.400 --> 56:04.300]  It was like, it was like giving a morality check on this person who was a kind of revered hacker who was on the stage.
[56:04.800 --> 56:10.580]  And I was reliving it because it was just like this, only it was at the Pennsylvania, the Hotel Pennsylvania for HOPE 10.
[56:12.040 --> 56:14.760]  And I was also thinking about the way HOPE was back then.
[56:15.460 --> 56:20.420]  And the sexism and other kinds of like gendered stuff was terrible back then.
[56:20.560 --> 56:22.120]  I don't even want to think about it.
[56:22.200 --> 56:30.280]  But as a community, HOPE has actually evolved and the participation that has broadened and the numbers of people who feel like they can come and participate has gotten better.
[56:30.720 --> 56:40.680]  And so I just wanted to say thank you and just bring up that reminder of that historic event because sometimes this conference really does play a role in hacker history.
[56:42.980 --> 56:46.780]  And also thank the people who are participating this year because it was difficult.
[56:46.980 --> 56:51.860]  They hardly were able to pull it off because we lost so many attendees because they couldn't come from Canada or Latin America.
[56:53.040 --> 56:54.400]  And people still did it.
[56:54.480 --> 56:58.420]  I was inspired when they had the opening thing and they said it was impossible.
[56:58.420 --> 56:59.820]  And then we did it.
[57:00.400 --> 57:06.260]  And so when you think of things you're about to do that you would just you think of and people tell you they're impossible, then just remember HOPE.
[57:12.540 --> 57:13.760]  Thank you for saying that.
[57:14.240 --> 57:19.060]  I think that hacker culture in general has gotten better in terms of being socially aware.
[57:20.420 --> 57:21.260]  Gender balance.
[57:21.440 --> 57:26.460]  But as the composition of this panel itself might show, we have some way to go.
[57:26.460 --> 57:34.080]  That's not to neg on the panel because we had someone who was a woman that wasn't unfortunately able to come.
[57:34.260 --> 57:46.260]  But yeah, I think that that's true generally that the sexism in hacker culture has...
[57:47.380 --> 57:50.180]  It's still there and there's still transphobia.
[57:50.320 --> 57:51.560]  There's still racism.
[57:51.840 --> 57:53.260]  There's still all these factors.
[57:54.200 --> 58:00.940]  But I think that we have shown as a general hacker culture that it's not acceptable.
[58:01.220 --> 58:04.440]  And I hope that I hope that that's successful that we've shown that.
[58:06.400 --> 58:07.640]  Yeah, that's all I have to say about it.
[58:07.720 --> 58:07.780]  I guess.
[58:08.200 --> 58:09.420]  Yeah, I agree.
[58:09.540 --> 58:10.660]  I mean, everybody's welcome here.
[58:17.480 --> 58:18.460]  You ready for more?
[58:20.420 --> 58:20.920]  Okay.
[58:21.160 --> 58:26.580]  Aesthetics also asks, how has big tech changed the underground, if at all?
[58:27.080 --> 58:29.620]  Feeling the last part might be a little tongue in cheek.
[58:33.080 --> 58:34.440]  Quite a lot to say.
[58:37.440 --> 58:46.660]  Well, they are definitely sponsoring like a lot of projects and touring and things like this and events, let's say.
[58:48.660 --> 58:58.800]  I think the shift on the industry of the hacker being also like an asset to the corporations, they kind of develop this like...
[58:58.800 --> 59:01.140]  I don't know if it's a technique or whatever.
[59:01.440 --> 59:14.920]  It's just something that it's much more attractive to a person to pursue this career in technology in big corporations and work for them instead of like dedicate time for the hobbies.
[59:14.920 --> 59:34.860]  I think people nowadays, if there are fewer people that join the underground scene for the particular hobby or whatever, except that they try to get into it for more for the money and for a career path, which was not a thing back then.
[59:34.860 --> 59:35.820]  This thing didn't exist.
[59:37.460 --> 59:39.800]  Working computers or something kind of new-ish.
[59:40.340 --> 59:41.920]  And it was not really like big corporations.
[59:42.200 --> 59:45.100]  Of course, you know, there were tech corporations before as well.
[59:45.260 --> 59:52.180]  But like we said before, they didn't have the will to hire the hackers.
[59:52.180 --> 59:57.340]  So their place was, you know, their place was the underground somehow.
[59:57.580 --> 01:00:03.020]  And now they're like shifting towards the surface.
[01:00:04.320 --> 01:00:14.620]  I'd like to add to that, that in my opinion, big tech has made the Internet and communication more accessible to many people.
[01:00:15.720 --> 01:00:18.240]  Without big tech, we would still be using RSC.
[01:00:18.560 --> 01:00:20.780]  And good luck teaching my mother how to use RSC.
[01:00:21.000 --> 01:00:21.880]  It's not going to happen.
[01:00:22.520 --> 01:00:34.460]  So I think with all the bad things that big tech has done, they also have done an incredibly good thing to make it accessible to many, many people who otherwise couldn't join the communication and do all these things.
[01:00:36.540 --> 01:00:42.740]  I think the accessibility was driven by the profit as well, which is, in some cases, is the win, yeah.
[01:00:44.500 --> 01:00:47.340]  So what do you see as the future of education for hackers?
[01:00:48.620 --> 01:00:53.640]  Meaning, like, there's some training tools available.
[01:00:53.980 --> 01:00:58.100]  Like, back in the early 2000s, there was HackThisSite.org.
[01:00:58.260 --> 01:01:03.640]  And then recently, I heard of a project in Arizona State University called Pond College.
[01:01:04.840 --> 01:01:08.920]  So what do you see as the future of education for hackers?
[01:01:09.580 --> 01:01:11.000]  It's a very good question.
[01:01:11.220 --> 01:01:15.520]  And before I answer the question, I like to go back that...
[01:01:16.520 --> 01:01:20.860]  Back then, we had a certain motivation to become a hacker because we were driven by curiosity.
[01:01:21.300 --> 01:01:23.140]  But this now, of course, has changed.
[01:01:23.300 --> 01:01:27.780]  Now, if you want to become a hacker, you really have three paths.
[01:01:27.780 --> 01:01:32.640]  It's to either do ransomware or you do state actor and APT.
[01:01:33.120 --> 01:01:38.340]  Or you do just hacking for the fun and for the artistic point of view element of it.
[01:01:39.420 --> 01:01:48.220]  And so growing up now as a newcomer, it's very different to when I was young.
[01:01:49.100 --> 01:01:51.720]  So how we educate these people now?
[01:01:52.180 --> 01:02:03.240]  I pass that question to somebody else because how I got educated was by reading Phrack and working together with other people, forming small groups and just trying things out.
[01:02:03.640 --> 01:02:08.940]  But that might not work anymore these days because everything moves just much faster.
[01:02:08.940 --> 01:02:15.760]  Maybe you need an educational program and get educated with hack the system or other platforms.
[01:02:15.960 --> 01:02:16.960]  So, yes, please, somebody.
[01:02:19.240 --> 01:02:19.920]  Sorry, quick.
[01:02:20.600 --> 01:02:21.040]  Yeah.
[01:02:21.940 --> 01:02:22.360]  Yeah.
[01:02:22.580 --> 01:02:31.200]  Similarly, like when I was young and learning the stuff, learn by doing, asking stupid questions on IRC, like hack the site that made that shit in like 2001.
[01:02:31.380 --> 01:02:35.220]  I just learned about SQL injection and made the first challenge.
[01:02:35.220 --> 01:02:38.540]  And it was like a million hits then like a month later.
[01:02:38.640 --> 01:02:41.360]  It's like, damn, I actually don't know what I'm doing at all really for real.
[01:02:41.460 --> 01:02:44.260]  It's like, but, uh, so, um, what is it now though?
[01:02:44.360 --> 01:02:49.520]  Yeah, there's certainly like certificates and classes and, you know, whole career passing degrees and stuff like that.
[01:02:49.680 --> 01:02:54.080]  Um, and, and, and one hand, like the technical knowledge is similar.
[01:02:54.080 --> 01:02:55.940]  Like maybe you'll for the love of the code.
[01:02:56.120 --> 01:02:57.800]  Um, but the motivations are different.
[01:02:57.960 --> 01:03:01.860]  Like, like you had said, like you might be doing it for curiosity, but now people are doing it for the paycheck.
[01:03:01.860 --> 01:03:06.520]  But I do think that like, we really should, uh, credit ourselves for developing the infrastructure.
[01:03:06.820 --> 01:03:07.920]  Like, like, look where we are now.
[01:03:07.920 --> 01:03:11.100]  We have almost every city in town has like a hacker space.
[01:03:11.220 --> 01:03:14.020]  We can go and meet someone and like, learn by doing.
[01:03:14.280 --> 01:03:18.080]  That's not like a class that's designed to shift you to a career.
[01:03:18.480 --> 01:03:20.080]  Um, so it's still, it's still there.
[01:03:20.160 --> 01:03:21.280]  If you look for it, I would say.
[01:03:21.860 --> 01:03:27.340]  I also think that the most efficient method like before is the, the, the, the hands-on approach.
[01:03:27.980 --> 01:03:34.320]  Um, back in the day, the scene was not as inclusive as it is today, which was a terrible thing, obviously.
[01:03:34.620 --> 01:03:45.140]  Um, you, sometimes you had to earn some sort of respect by doing something or whatever, um, to get somebody to even consider like mentoring you or helping you with something.
[01:03:45.140 --> 01:03:53.920]  Uh, so a lot of these learnings also came like, you know, getting closer to somebody else that was already like, you know, level that you wanted to achieve or something like this.
[01:03:54.600 --> 01:04:02.280]  Um, and learning by watching this person or participating and like, you know, uh, with luck, this person will be nice to you.
[01:04:02.560 --> 01:04:03.400]  I guess it depends.
[01:04:04.220 --> 01:04:13.880]  Um, but I don't think even with the, the, it's nice, of course, to have these portals with, uh, all sorts of like, uh, teachings and et cetera.
[01:04:13.880 --> 01:04:15.420]  Whether we have YouTube videos and all those things.
[01:04:15.720 --> 01:04:20.380]  Um, naturally not all of the content is good, but the, the good content does exist.
[01:04:21.040 --> 01:04:35.560]  Um, but I still, at least personally, I also believe that is a thing that you can kind of only get full, the full extent of the, the, the experience by doing yourself.
[01:04:39.560 --> 01:05:02.100]  I'll also add just like the opportunities for being an autodidact now are so much more vast than we had in the past where you'd have to dial into a PBS system that you knew the number Or you had to ask someone on IRC to DDC, or was it DCC?
[01:05:02.160 --> 01:05:04.980]  No, DCC, the file.
[01:05:05.360 --> 01:05:12.020]  Or you go on Napster or something and you download something directly from somebody else's computer.
[01:05:13.960 --> 01:05:38.860]  I think that just YouTube resources, just for instance, are just so vast and the ability to gain knowledge that is just openly published on a vast area of blogs, just telling about the methodology and how that's all available at people's fingertips and is able to be explored by someone who's
[01:05:38.860 --> 01:05:39.240]  curious.
[01:05:39.700 --> 01:05:44.040]  And there's less impediments to access, I feel like, in some significant ways.
[01:05:45.660 --> 01:05:56.340]  So someone who is curious and exploratory could really teach themselves a lot just based on that drive to learn more.
[01:05:58.120 --> 01:05:59.680]  I'm going to add to this too.
[01:05:59.900 --> 01:06:00.980]  So I have two kids.
[01:06:01.220 --> 01:06:07.760]  And between my nieces, nephews, brother-in-laws, sister-in-laws, everybody wants me to teach them how to hack.
[01:06:08.440 --> 01:06:12.980]  So when one of my kids had asked me, hey, Dad, can you teach me how to hack?
[01:06:14.500 --> 01:06:17.700]  I said, well, let's first learn how to build a box.
[01:06:18.160 --> 01:06:19.760]  So we built a Linux box.
[01:06:20.520 --> 01:06:28.500]  Had them put the thing together, put the motherboard in, put the chips, et cetera, et cetera, load up Linux on it and learn the OS.
[01:06:29.200 --> 01:06:31.920]  I said, and then I said, what's the next thing we're going to do?
[01:06:32.900 --> 01:06:34.160]  We'll load some tools.
[01:06:34.160 --> 01:06:35.880]  What kind of tools are going to load?
[01:06:36.680 --> 01:06:39.280]  And the first response I got from them was Metasploit.
[01:06:39.840 --> 01:06:42.260]  I'm like, well, that's not really what we're here for.
[01:06:42.300 --> 01:06:43.740]  We're going to understand the OS.
[01:06:44.320 --> 01:06:52.000]  And if you go to, I know Shmoocon just ended, but the theme of Shmoocon was build it, break it, belay it.
[01:06:52.420 --> 01:06:54.820]  And I think that's really the pattern you want to follow.
[01:06:55.000 --> 01:06:57.580]  And it gets back to, I think, the industry's included.
[01:06:58.640 --> 01:07:01.960]  But you really want people in here that want to do things.
[01:07:02.100 --> 01:07:03.240]  They want to understand things.
[01:07:03.240 --> 01:07:08.660]  In the early days, and even now, you want to be the less noisy person on a system that you're on.
[01:07:09.560 --> 01:07:14.600]  So if these guys are all breaking into something, and I'm in there too, I don't want them to know that I'm there either.
[01:07:15.940 --> 01:07:16.300]  So...
[01:07:17.180 --> 01:07:17.540]  Well...
[01:07:18.860 --> 01:07:20.400]  I think it's important to do that.
[01:07:20.580 --> 01:07:23.660]  So on that note, there's a group called Pros vs. Joes.
[01:07:24.620 --> 01:07:25.380]  That's at...
[01:07:25.380 --> 01:07:27.500]  Both at B-Sides.
[01:07:29.040 --> 01:07:30.720]  They do the B-Sides Las Vegas.
[01:07:30.900 --> 01:07:32.120]  I don't know if they're doing it in other places.
[01:07:32.700 --> 01:07:35.040]  I know a bunch of people that have joined the team this year.
[01:07:35.380 --> 01:07:40.320]  But it's professionals, red teamers, against Joes.
[01:07:40.620 --> 01:07:43.640]  So there were men and women who've never done this before.
[01:07:43.900 --> 01:07:44.680]  I think it's a...
[01:07:44.680 --> 01:07:48.660]  If you Google search it, you can get all the contact info, sign up for it.
[01:07:49.300 --> 01:07:59.320]  I think it's very, very worthwhile to have a hands-on experience of red teams actively attacking you while you're trying to figure out what's going on in your systems.
[01:08:00.160 --> 01:08:02.780]  And there's no mercy in the environment.
[01:08:03.080 --> 01:08:10.100]  Because I'll tell you right now, one of the guys on the note that's very, very capable was on the team and wanted to flip tables the first night he was there.
[01:08:10.920 --> 01:08:12.000]  He was that frustrated.
[01:08:12.380 --> 01:08:15.900]  But I think that's a really good experience, is the hands-on approach.
[01:08:17.140 --> 01:08:21.720]  Like, you don't want a brain surgeon working on your car, and you don't want an auto mechanic working on your brain.
[01:08:22.140 --> 01:08:23.440]  So, anyway.
[01:08:24.920 --> 01:08:25.520]  Yeah, wonderful.
[01:08:25.700 --> 01:08:30.200]  So I think we're taking a few more questions for this first section, and then we would like to move into the future.
[01:08:30.640 --> 01:08:34.980]  And I think with you guys, what we can use technology to make a better place.
[01:08:35.480 --> 01:08:40.840]  And just think about it, that often it is harder to identify the problem than finding a solution.
[01:08:41.300 --> 01:08:45.440]  Like all of us, we didn't know how much taxis suck until Uber came along.
[01:08:45.440 --> 01:08:49.480]  All of us didn't know how much hotels suck until Airbnb came along.
[01:08:49.900 --> 01:08:54.740]  So once you have identified the problem, the solution is often easier to find.
[01:08:54.860 --> 01:08:56.140]  So let's identify the problem later.
[01:08:56.280 --> 01:08:58.540]  But yeah, more questions to this topic.
[01:08:58.540 --> 01:09:03.440]  So kind of building in the education space, I am a teacher.
[01:09:03.680 --> 01:09:10.760]  And so I'm kind of working within a fairly big system that has a lot of guardrails around what I can do.
[01:09:11.820 --> 01:09:23.500]  But I teach computer science, and I find a lot of students don't really have the kind of exploratory and like, let's try and figure this out kind of approach.
[01:09:23.500 --> 01:09:36.580]  And so I'm curious about your thoughts on how to build that, and maybe how to like, I guess the impact of things being so very closed off.
[01:09:36.760 --> 01:09:44.320]  It seems like right now, everything is like trying to put a million walls between the user and what's actually going on.
[01:09:44.320 --> 01:09:53.960]  And so my kids don't know about like file systems or like folder structures, because everything has always been in Google Drive.
[01:09:54.020 --> 01:09:57.860]  And they've never had to interact with stuff in that kind of sense.
[01:09:59.240 --> 01:10:02.280]  Like they don't know how to save something.
[01:10:02.520 --> 01:10:04.880]  They don't know that you have to save things.
[01:10:05.780 --> 01:10:22.720]  And so I'm curious about like building both a really exploratory kind of mindset and then also how to engage students who just are really, really far removed from the actual meat of what's going on on a computing system.
[01:10:22.720 --> 01:10:29.340]  Yeah, so I think for most of us to get into this exploring was because there was a necessity.
[01:10:29.580 --> 01:10:31.140]  We had to save costs.
[01:10:31.440 --> 01:10:33.100]  We didn't have free phone calls.
[01:10:33.100 --> 01:10:34.800]  We needed to correct the software.
[01:10:35.420 --> 01:10:43.120]  And perhaps there's a way how you can recreate this necessity that they have to break out to the system to get access to certain things.
[01:10:43.540 --> 01:10:46.000]  And, you know, make it fun for them and gamify it.
[01:10:46.720 --> 01:10:54.880]  And perhaps also show them the glimpse of what they can do if they do understand what the file system is like.
[01:10:56.000 --> 01:11:01.540]  The power that knowledge gives you when you know these things.
[01:11:01.840 --> 01:11:04.120]  Understanding every single bit of a writing system.
[01:11:04.260 --> 01:11:06.400]  How it all beautifully falls together.
[01:11:06.640 --> 01:11:12.040]  And you can just explore and do more things than not having that knowledge.
[01:11:12.420 --> 01:11:13.880]  But maybe someone else has.
[01:11:15.460 --> 01:11:20.200]  So we're currently dealing with a situation in a lot of schools.
[01:11:20.200 --> 01:11:33.620]  They have contracts with school surveillance software installed on public systems on the school issue devices like GoGuardian and Gaggle are two of those companies.
[01:11:34.180 --> 01:11:37.520]  And they will monitor everything that is student types.
[01:11:38.420 --> 01:11:44.520]  There was a case, I think, in the Southwest, where a student was getting a bad grade from the teacher.
[01:11:44.680 --> 01:11:48.780]  And they were like, this teacher sucks, whatever.
[01:11:49.720 --> 01:11:55.340]  And they were just typing this in to an email that were typing their thoughts, flow of consciousness kind of thing.
[01:11:55.340 --> 01:11:59.540]  And they're like, ah, like, you know, want to go like a shoot up?
[01:11:59.720 --> 01:12:00.320]  Ha ha ha.
[01:12:00.460 --> 01:12:00.900]  Like the school?
[01:12:01.040 --> 01:12:01.400]  Ha ha ha.
[01:12:01.640 --> 01:12:02.760]  And then they deleted it.
[01:12:02.760 --> 01:12:04.760]  And they didn't even go into drafts.
[01:12:05.720 --> 01:12:09.760]  They were just like kind of just roll off the top of their tongues, kind of like being a kid.
[01:12:09.860 --> 01:12:09.940]  Right?
[01:12:10.280 --> 01:12:11.460]  Sane, sane, stupid things.
[01:12:12.160 --> 01:12:22.000]  And that kid got that day in school suspension, I think, or out of school suspension, suspended, basically.
[01:12:22.000 --> 01:12:29.420]  And this huge punitive system really, because of surveillance, fell down on their shoulders.
[01:12:29.860 --> 01:12:44.000]  And I think that, on the one hand, that hampers the creativity because they're just like, whoa, we have this sense that there's always eyes watching us above us just kind of looking at what we do.
[01:12:45.060 --> 01:12:56.100]  And perhaps on a more hopeful note, maybe there are those creative students that are trying to disable the software too, and get around those locks.
[01:12:57.060 --> 01:13:04.060]  Not that I, as an EFF employee, can encourage that, but that's a possibility that that's happening.
[01:13:05.900 --> 01:13:13.740]  So I think that that's the whole dynamic of like the surveillance over watching you.
[01:13:13.960 --> 01:13:20.340]  But maybe we do need to, and that necessity is there to fully explore what we actually want to explore.
[01:13:21.500 --> 01:13:26.560]  I think one thing that might help is don't outlaw hacking in school.
[01:13:27.120 --> 01:13:31.620]  Encourage these guys to hack every single system that's there.
[01:13:31.620 --> 01:13:34.900]  As long as they don't cause damage and they're reported, allow them.
[01:13:35.380 --> 01:13:38.760]  And I think it's true, but I'm not going to name the country.
[01:13:38.920 --> 01:13:40.240]  They're all going to hack the country.
[01:13:40.340 --> 01:13:44.460]  But I think there's a country in this world which allows you to hack any of the system.
[01:13:44.800 --> 01:13:46.680]  As long as you don't cause any damage.
[01:13:46.800 --> 01:13:49.320]  As long as you report it, everything is in scope.
[01:13:49.920 --> 01:13:56.120]  And I think that really motivates hackers or new guys to just try it out on the real target.
[01:13:57.040 --> 01:13:58.080]  And why not?
[01:13:58.300 --> 01:13:59.980]  They don't cause any damage, right?
[01:13:59.980 --> 01:14:00.760]  They found a vulnerability.
[01:14:01.000 --> 01:14:01.660]  They report it.
[01:14:01.680 --> 01:14:02.260]  It's all cool.
[01:14:02.460 --> 01:14:03.320]  Everything is in scope.
[01:14:03.800 --> 01:14:04.900]  And replicate that in school.
[01:14:05.120 --> 01:14:06.280]  Replicate that with the students.
[01:14:06.480 --> 01:14:08.520]  And say, you know, if you want to hack a teacher, go for it.
[01:14:08.680 --> 01:14:11.920]  As long as you report it and you don't cause any damage, do it.
[01:14:15.620 --> 01:14:20.040]  We're going to pause questions and let you guys get back to your normal prepared remarks for a little while.
[01:14:20.100 --> 01:14:21.160]  And then we'll get back to questions later.
[01:14:24.180 --> 01:14:25.820]  They're going to hold on the questions right now.
[01:14:26.020 --> 01:14:26.580]  And let us start.
[01:14:26.740 --> 01:14:27.360]  Okay, cool.
[01:14:27.540 --> 01:14:28.480]  We'll start the next section.
[01:14:28.640 --> 01:14:30.400]  So, welcome to part number two.
[01:14:30.540 --> 01:14:32.080]  Welcome to part number two of our talk.
[01:14:32.640 --> 01:14:34.280]  And this is really about the future.
[01:14:34.420 --> 01:14:35.980]  We want to work together with you guys.
[01:14:36.100 --> 01:14:41.380]  We hope you engage with us and table some ideas, table some topics, what we want to do.
[01:14:41.880 --> 01:14:47.580]  Before we had this meeting here today, we actually met up for an hour and we were brainstorming ourselves.
[01:14:47.620 --> 01:14:48.700]  What do you want to do?
[01:14:48.900 --> 01:14:50.960]  And we came up with two or three topics.
[01:14:51.120 --> 01:14:53.140]  And I just summarize them now.
[01:14:53.300 --> 01:14:57.900]  And then we can together decide which one we'd like to explore a little bit further.
[01:14:58.080 --> 01:15:03.940]  Or perhaps there's another topic that we should discuss with all these great people who have great ideas.
[01:15:03.940 --> 01:15:15.540]  And so, one problem that we have identified earlier today is that we really like to give power back to the people when it comes to passing laws.
[01:15:15.840 --> 01:15:20.920]  Because at the moment, the way how laws are being passed is by lobbying, really.
[01:15:21.060 --> 01:15:21.920]  You pay politicians.
[01:15:23.040 --> 01:15:25.960]  And politicians pass laws for two reasons.
[01:15:26.100 --> 01:15:30.980]  Either they're getting paid for it by lobbying companies or because they want to please the voters.
[01:15:31.480 --> 01:15:35.040]  Now, they can please us because they want our votes.
[01:15:35.060 --> 01:15:36.740]  But that's honestly not enough.
[01:15:36.860 --> 01:15:40.120]  You need to engage with lobbying companies.
[01:15:40.280 --> 01:15:49.640]  And perhaps we can do something where we have crowdfunding a law where people can put in $1 or $10.
[01:15:50.300 --> 01:15:52.900]  And if a certain law is being passed, then you pay.
[01:15:53.120 --> 01:15:55.280]  But if it's not passed, then you don't have to pay anything.
[01:15:55.280 --> 01:15:56.200]  So you don't lose anything.
[01:15:56.720 --> 01:15:58.400]  So it's like, yeah, crowdfunding laws.
[01:15:58.400 --> 01:15:59.280]  That was one of the ideas.
[01:15:59.280 --> 01:16:06.240]  The other one was incentivizing whistleblowers.
[01:16:06.920 --> 01:16:17.000]  And the idea is that there's so much bullshit in the world, so much lying and so much fake out there, that it would be just nice to know the truth.
[01:16:17.760 --> 01:16:19.840]  And somebody out there knows the truth.
[01:16:20.600 --> 01:16:23.020]  Somebody out there knows what's in the Epstein files.
[01:16:23.860 --> 01:16:25.700]  Somebody could leak it, but he doesn't.
[01:16:25.780 --> 01:16:30.680]  Because morality on its own is not enough to do the right thing.
[01:16:32.320 --> 01:16:33.840]  So we could incentivize them.
[01:16:33.980 --> 01:16:38.280]  We could, again, do crowdfunding and say everybody puts in $10.
[01:16:38.480 --> 01:16:42.000]  And if the Epstein files are being released, we will pay.
[01:16:42.100 --> 01:16:43.560]  If not, no one has to pay.
[01:16:44.560 --> 01:16:46.800]  And you could do this with any kind of topic.
[01:16:46.980 --> 01:16:51.400]  You know, there are secrets out there that we should know the truth about that we don't.
[01:16:51.440 --> 01:16:57.460]  And we don't know the truth because a few individuals who know the truth, they don't want to share it because they take a risk.
[01:16:57.940 --> 01:17:00.540]  And they don't want to take the risk for nothing.
[01:17:01.220 --> 01:17:03.220]  So, yeah, we could incentivize that.
[01:17:03.760 --> 01:17:06.200]  So how can we use technology to implement that?
[01:17:06.420 --> 01:17:09.000]  There's a legal challenge as well, but we can ignore that for now.
[01:17:09.200 --> 01:17:12.360]  We can solve it maybe with technology.
[01:17:13.720 --> 01:17:16.080]  Another idea, Bill mentioned that earlier.
[01:17:16.580 --> 01:17:29.820]  How can we use Meshtastic and other communication platforms to help people who rebel against their governments or want to protest when their networks are being shut down?
[01:17:29.820 --> 01:17:31.080]  And how can we make this better?
[01:17:32.160 --> 01:17:37.160]  And then the last idea that we talked about is how can we mentor a new generation of hackers?
[01:17:38.400 --> 01:17:40.280]  And so, yeah, these were our ideas.
[01:17:40.480 --> 01:17:49.720]  But perhaps you have some ideas that you like to be discussed here with us, with the community, that you think are important.
[01:17:50.020 --> 01:17:52.580]  So, please do say.
[01:17:56.800 --> 01:17:57.760]  Would you like more questions?
[01:17:58.140 --> 01:17:58.660]  Yes, of course.
[01:17:58.780 --> 01:17:59.020]  Yes, please.
[01:18:03.000 --> 01:18:04.880]  This was a question from before.
[01:18:05.180 --> 01:18:05.720]  Yeah, of course.
[01:18:06.040 --> 01:18:12.180]  But it was, I guess, where do you see that kind of the pirate scene fitting into kind of the overall hacker space?
[01:18:12.380 --> 01:18:21.700]  And it's like, it seems that's kind of interesting that now we're almost in this, what the AI people want to be, a post-copyright world after all this.
[01:18:21.840 --> 01:18:30.340]  But simultaneously, there's a lot of attacks going on, especially in Europe, where people have gotten some pretty harsh jail sentences for old things.
[01:18:30.820 --> 01:18:39.700]  But there's also not really a legitimate use for the pirate scene, where it's like, you know, computer security is a real thing, but there's not really a use for that.
[01:18:40.060 --> 01:18:44.500]  I guess, do you see that fitting into the same area, or is it kind of separate?
[01:18:45.260 --> 01:19:04.500]  I think piracy, it's probably coming back strong recently, especially like when we talk about like movies and TV shows, this decentralization of streaming services and all those things, something that came to be as something that will make our lives easier somehow for consumers,
[01:19:04.640 --> 01:19:06.600]  like a fixed price for like content.
[01:19:06.600 --> 01:19:11.260]  And now you have to have like seven subscriptions, seasons, and set that all spread around.
[01:19:11.960 --> 01:19:21.660]  We also have this problem, like the gaming industry, where you kind of buying like a right to play a game for a full price for, you know, arbitrary amount of time.
[01:19:23.020 --> 01:19:24.020]  So what did they say?
[01:19:24.120 --> 01:19:28.460]  Like if buying is in owning, so piracy is in stealing, right?
[01:19:28.620 --> 01:19:37.120]  So I think the companies, they're doing things, they don't really understanding what the customers want, I think.
[01:19:38.800 --> 01:19:40.940]  And they're trying all the wrong things.
[01:19:42.600 --> 01:19:47.720]  I feel like everybody thinks it would be fair to pay a specific price for like a fair product, right?
[01:19:47.820 --> 01:19:49.320]  So a fair price for a fair product.
[01:19:51.180 --> 01:19:54.900]  And everybody that is able to, of course, like I was not able to when I was a kid.
[01:19:55.080 --> 01:19:57.820]  So, but now, I mean, I do.
[01:19:57.980 --> 01:20:00.320]  So, and I'm happy that I can contribute to this.
[01:20:00.320 --> 01:20:10.800]  But I still don't think this is like, is respectful to the customers, the way that these corporations are approaching the content delivery, regardless of the content.
[01:20:13.200 --> 01:20:16.560]  So, in my opinion, this is just going to continue to grow.
[01:20:16.840 --> 01:20:21.840]  The population is going to get more angry about it if things continue to stay like this.
[01:20:22.180 --> 01:20:25.520]  And this is a big opportunity, I guess, for hackers everywhere.
[01:20:27.980 --> 01:20:33.020]  Because it kind of reminds me a little bit of the wire scenes from the previous times.
[01:20:33.940 --> 01:20:36.040]  It just seems like it's kind of coming back a little bit.
[01:20:36.220 --> 01:20:38.120]  So, yeah, just reminiscing a little bit about it.
[01:20:42.060 --> 01:20:43.440]  Yeah, great question.
[01:20:45.260 --> 01:20:50.960]  And also not just consumers, how these big platforms are, you know, gouging consumers, but also creators, right?
[01:20:51.080 --> 01:20:51.560]  Content creators.
[01:20:51.940 --> 01:20:52.780]  More important than even that.
[01:20:52.940 --> 01:20:55.100]  Yeah, like, you know, the Spotify's and stuff like that.
[01:20:56.000 --> 01:21:07.380]  But as relevance to it, I think it's practically speaking, like how useful hacking could be to everyday people is beyond just like, you know, consuming corporate media and stuff like that, which is cool.
[01:21:07.500 --> 01:21:08.940]  You know, better than paying for it, right?
[01:21:09.080 --> 01:21:12.200]  But I also love getting stuff for free, right?
[01:21:12.260 --> 01:21:15.440]  And that's something that's useful and relevant to people who otherwise couldn't afford it.
[01:21:15.440 --> 01:21:17.540]  Like you were saying, like, why did we get into this?
[01:21:17.660 --> 01:21:19.680]  It's because we couldn't afford dialogue or whatever.
[01:21:19.820 --> 01:21:22.380]  We couldn't afford to... so we had to crack our way through.
[01:21:23.300 --> 01:21:27.440]  And so I'm thinking about how do we, like, contend with the laws like you were speaking.
[01:21:27.560 --> 01:21:29.800]  It's just... and the question earlier about...
[01:21:30.460 --> 01:21:40.120]  It's just harder for people to commit crimes these days because of the advance of facial recognition and the AI multiplex and the NSA prisms and so forth, right?
[01:21:40.120 --> 01:21:42.240]  So when we were younger, we could experiment.
[01:21:42.240 --> 01:21:45.200]  We could have a little bit more freedom and get away with stuff.
[01:21:45.300 --> 01:21:46.240]  Right now, it's not so much.
[01:21:47.440 --> 01:21:59.820]  And I do think maybe one way around that actually is to overcome the fear that repression causes you to not act is to generalize it to more.
[01:21:59.960 --> 01:22:00.780]  More crime, right?
[01:22:00.900 --> 01:22:04.840]  But one example, though, is turnstile hopping, right?
[01:22:04.840 --> 01:22:07.660]  It's just like kind of a collective agreement amongst everybody.
[01:22:07.660 --> 01:22:12.400]  It's like, yo, we're just going to get one over on them and we're all going to work together.
[01:22:12.520 --> 01:22:13.220]  We're going to open the door.
[01:22:13.380 --> 01:22:16.280]  And if you see someone shoplifting, no, you didn't, you know?
[01:22:17.640 --> 01:22:28.560]  And so, but ultimately, though, I think that there is an inherent contradiction with the law, like the forces of power and money are going to rely on the police.
[01:22:28.560 --> 01:22:34.120]  And if you become a threat beyond just mere survival, if you like start to question, they're going to repress you.
[01:22:34.220 --> 01:22:37.800]  So I think the only path to freedom is through the police, ultimately.
[01:22:40.300 --> 01:22:45.240]  Oh, and one more, one more thing, too, also, is to defend those facing charges, right?
[01:22:45.320 --> 01:22:51.680]  And those, those who are pushing the envelope, like beyond, like, like the tornado cash developer, right?
[01:22:51.780 --> 01:22:56.180]  Like is being prosecuted for just simply running this, this mixer, right?
[01:22:56.260 --> 01:22:57.140]  Mixing service and stuff like that.
[01:22:57.220 --> 01:22:59.520]  Not even implicated in any particular credit card crimes.
[01:22:59.580 --> 01:23:04.480]  But now he's charged with like facilitating terrorism and drug transactions just for creating this mixing platform.
[01:23:04.480 --> 01:23:05.960]  Something that we got to defend people like that.
[01:23:06.360 --> 01:23:06.620]  You know what I mean?
[01:23:06.660 --> 01:23:07.400]  We got to up.
[01:23:07.900 --> 01:23:17.280]  And ultimately, beyond just fighting the police, I think hackers have been pretty good at moving past the law, like developing in such a way that they can't even criminalize it, right?
[01:23:17.340 --> 01:23:21.780]  Like, okay, like they, you know, printed a book with the code for cryptography, right?
[01:23:21.780 --> 01:23:22.380]  It's like, what are you gonna do?
[01:23:22.440 --> 01:23:23.320]  Ban books, right?
[01:23:23.420 --> 01:23:25.080]  Like, so you kind of make the laws irrelevant.
[01:23:25.140 --> 01:23:28.820]  So if you could outsmart the law, but the only way through is through.
[01:23:33.220 --> 01:23:46.540]  Yeah, I think it's a testament to resilience of piracy, how much, like even now the Pirate Bay still exists after 20 years or whatever.
[01:23:46.900 --> 01:23:54.160]  And the way they have developed it makes it kind of impossible for it to take down.
[01:23:54.160 --> 01:23:56.880]  And that's something that's like really interesting.
[01:23:56.880 --> 01:24:14.270]  And I think of like, as a kind of common technological principle of like, how do we circumvent censorship in a way, in a way that creates resilience, like in a way that, and I think like, yeah, mirror sites are great also.
[01:24:14.270 --> 01:24:27.590]  And what we were mentioning kind of the like long range networks that are, or those that kind of configure, are configured to work with Laura.
[01:24:29.270 --> 01:24:54.050]  Like, you know, I mentioned in my talk yesterday, reticulum and reticulum is kind of this interesting concept that works over long range, you know, radios, but also works over any arbitrary network layer and very easily kind of the network converges and allows people to communicate with very low
[01:24:54.050 --> 01:24:58.370]  bandwidth, but with enough to get a signal out and to communicate with each other.
[01:24:58.370 --> 01:25:07.370]  And, and those kind of resilient networks that are able to get that signal out, even in adverse conditions are so important.
[01:25:07.550 --> 01:25:25.750]  Dave, I'm thinking, you know, with, with, you know, mesh, mesh networks, it might be adverse topographical conditions or, or physical conditions, but, you know, adverse conditions can also apply to like legal or, you know, adversarial conditions that are,
[01:25:25.750 --> 01:25:26.950]  that are trying to shut you down.
[01:25:26.950 --> 01:25:27.570]  Right.
[01:25:27.750 --> 01:25:34.270]  And so resilience, uh, that's built into the fact that bits are easy to copy.
[01:25:34.550 --> 01:25:39.170]  Um, and, uh, and I think that's one of our big strengths, right.
[01:25:39.330 --> 01:25:51.950]  That we were able to, um, you know, uh, that, that increasingly over the past 20 years, store space has become way cheaper than like, like exponentialism.
[01:25:51.950 --> 01:26:11.590]  That was a Moore's law, uh, that like you have, uh, an increase, uh, twofold over, uh, I don't ever get the time span, but it's, um, it means that there's more information being able to be shared more readily.
[01:26:11.590 --> 01:26:17.270]  And that makes our communications networks more resilient in some respects.
[01:26:17.450 --> 01:26:17.570]  Right.
[01:26:17.730 --> 01:26:30.690]  But like, also you have this archiving problem where, Hey, any disc that you have is extremely volatile and will expire over like, you know, uh, the course of 10 years or whatever.
[01:26:30.970 --> 01:26:34.170]  And unless you copy, unless you're actively backing things up.
[01:26:34.170 --> 01:26:38.410]  So that's more, more and less resilient in a way that we, oh yeah.
[01:26:38.450 --> 01:26:46.970]  If you had paper photographs, you know, 50 years ago or whatever, then they are, um, going to be there come the apocalypse 200 years.
[01:26:47.290 --> 01:26:51.750]  Um, we're, and now we have, uh, disc spinning.
[01:26:52.050 --> 01:26:54.590]  We're not first spinning this now in solid state.
[01:26:54.730 --> 01:26:59.890]  That like also is, is easily copyable, but extremely volatile.
[01:26:59.890 --> 01:27:07.010]  We might have this situation where, Hey, this, uh, weird blip that we develop technology.
[01:27:07.270 --> 01:27:16.130]  And then we, we, we like looking historians of 200 years, looking back and be like, why can't we see anything into the, into this, into this period of time?
[01:27:16.590 --> 01:27:19.590]  Because, you know, storage media is so volatile.
[01:27:20.230 --> 01:27:24.190]  Uh, anyway, maybe that's, that's, uh, too futuristic.
[01:27:27.130 --> 01:27:31.790]  But yeah, um, well, I actually have a question for this, for this panel.
[01:27:31.970 --> 01:27:40.330]  And, um, it is where, where does everybody here see the computer underground computer scene, cybersecurity and 10, 20, maybe 50 years?
[01:27:40.450 --> 01:27:41.150]  Where will we be?
[01:27:41.190 --> 01:27:43.010]  Will conferences like this still exist?
[01:27:43.130 --> 01:27:44.410]  Or will we all be corporate?
[01:27:45.070 --> 01:27:48.890]  Or will we be, um, overtake my ransomware groups?
[01:27:48.890 --> 01:27:54.610]  Or is everybody moving into the APTs or where will we be in 10, 20 or 50 years?
[01:27:56.910 --> 01:27:57.650]  What do you think?
[01:27:59.070 --> 01:28:03.550]  So in, at DEFCON 10, uh, the last day I left, I turned around to Caesar.
[01:28:03.890 --> 01:28:06.010]  Um, I hadn't, I hadn't met bats at the time.
[01:28:06.190 --> 01:28:07.450]  We were just leaving the Caesar's challenge.
[01:28:07.690 --> 01:28:09.730]  I said, I'm not coming back to DEFCON ever.
[01:28:10.010 --> 01:28:10.950]  It was too big.
[01:28:10.950 --> 01:28:14.330]  It was probably about 3,000 people at the Lexus Park-ish.
[01:28:14.850 --> 01:28:17.810]  And to me, it became, to me, it became way too mainstream.
[01:28:18.050 --> 01:28:19.510]  And now it's 30,000, I believe.
[01:28:20.470 --> 01:28:22.050]  Yeah, it's, it's up in those numbers.
[01:28:22.230 --> 01:28:24.910]  So my, my nephew, uh, used to stay with us.
[01:28:24.990 --> 01:28:27.610]  He was like 14 when we first took him to DEFCON, was at the AP.
[01:28:28.030 --> 01:28:30.210]  And, um, he became a, a goon there.
[01:28:30.410 --> 01:28:31.590]  He was part of Shmoo group.
[01:28:31.910 --> 01:28:34.510]  And, uh, he is now, he now runs pen testing team.
[01:28:34.630 --> 01:28:35.470]  He runs run teams.
[01:28:37.010 --> 01:28:40.330]  The, I had told him if there was ever a DEFCON 20, I'd come back.
[01:28:41.410 --> 01:28:44.710]  My phone was ringing off the hook between 19 and 20.
[01:28:45.330 --> 01:28:47.150]  And I was like, I'm not coming back.
[01:28:47.350 --> 01:28:48.890]  And I came back in 22.
[01:28:49.190 --> 01:28:49.770]  It was at the Rio.
[01:28:50.030 --> 01:28:51.910]  There were 18,000 people there.
[01:28:52.970 --> 01:28:55.110]  First day I was there, I wanted a cup of coffee.
[01:28:55.350 --> 01:28:57.630]  I waited in line for black coffee over an hour.
[01:28:58.790 --> 01:29:01.330]  And at that point I was like, I'm never coming back.
[01:29:01.890 --> 01:29:03.430]  They, they eventually moved it.
[01:29:03.970 --> 01:29:06.010]  Um, B side started popping up.
[01:29:06.410 --> 01:29:07.990]  So we started attending that.
[01:29:08.170 --> 01:29:09.950]  And then DEFCON was kind of like the side thing.
[01:29:09.950 --> 01:29:13.470]  And then black hat was the, the corporate for work thing.
[01:29:14.070 --> 01:29:17.510]  But I thought, I thought the place, I thought everything was way too big.
[01:29:17.790 --> 01:29:23.290]  Uh, one of the guys that travels with us, uh, to these cons started pump con way back in the day.
[01:29:24.070 --> 01:29:27.010]  Um, that I liked cause it was small.
[01:29:27.130 --> 01:29:27.990]  It was very intimate.
[01:29:28.430 --> 01:29:30.270]  Uh, there was a lot of talent there.
[01:29:30.810 --> 01:29:32.930]  Um, not saying people here are not talented.
[01:29:33.150 --> 01:29:36.990]  Uh, I think it was like different vibe than you do at DEFCON.
[01:29:37.190 --> 01:29:40.010]  I feel like, and I'm not ripping on Jeff or anything.
[01:29:40.130 --> 01:29:41.490]  I understand the thing grew big.
[01:29:42.010 --> 01:29:47.730]  But for me, the last couple of years, DEFCON is like, you pay a lot of money to go in and buy t-shirts and collect stickers.
[01:29:49.890 --> 01:29:51.970]  And, and you, and waiting in lines.
[01:29:52.470 --> 01:29:54.390]  Um, something like this, something intimate.
[01:29:54.750 --> 01:29:58.670]  Uh, people around you, you probably have makers faces that are around you.
[01:29:58.930 --> 01:30:01.210]  There are security groups within those.
[01:30:01.390 --> 01:30:03.030]  Uh, we have, we have one up in Connecticut.
[01:30:03.770 --> 01:30:07.330]  Um, there, there are a lot of groups through there.
[01:30:07.490 --> 01:30:13.110]  Um, there are a lot of us in wall street, a lot of us working on different things.
[01:30:13.110 --> 01:30:14.210]  Cause we like to tinker.
[01:30:14.550 --> 01:30:26.810]  It's not that we're, we're, we're printing money and making, making millions, but it's, we, we have access to technologies that we couldn't get in other, uh, higher end companies, which is why we left the software industry.
[01:30:27.690 --> 01:30:29.870]  Uh, we get to play with all kinds of electronics.
[01:30:29.870 --> 01:30:36.870]  We get to build custom networks to other areas in the U.S. overseas, uh, places that didn't have connectivity before.
[01:30:37.330 --> 01:30:43.050]  Um, dealing with microwaves, dealing with lasers, all those kinds of things are out there.
[01:30:43.410 --> 01:30:49.450]  But, um, back onto the, onto the, uh, con scene, I'm more in favor of the smaller cons like this.
[01:30:49.710 --> 01:30:53.010]  Uh, I love ShmooCon cause they limited it to 3000 people.
[01:30:54.050 --> 01:30:59.790]  The, I think Defcon is good because I hook up with a lot of people that I won't normally see cause they're traveling.
[01:30:59.790 --> 01:31:08.250]  And internationally, but the, I don't know, I'm more, I'm more for the smaller groups.
[01:31:08.370 --> 01:31:09.810]  I think you're going to get more out of it.
[01:31:10.090 --> 01:31:12.830]  But the other thing too, is I know there's a bunch of people watching online.
[01:31:13.350 --> 01:31:21.630]  Uh, chances are people either in this room or people online may one day breach your network, or they may help you, uh, recover from a breach.
[01:31:21.630 --> 01:31:29.610]  Uh, so I would say go out network with people, take time, introduce yourself, not in a creepy way.
[01:31:30.290 --> 01:31:32.390]  Um, and, and, and learn.
[01:31:32.730 --> 01:31:37.590]  Uh, I, uh, I'm, I'm friends with a lot of people from the older conferences.
[01:31:38.290 --> 01:31:45.430]  Uh, we had 12 of, 12 of the 15 original people that I've been to the conferences with, were with us in Vegas last week.
[01:31:46.190 --> 01:31:51.330]  And we've been friends for over 30 years, uh, because of that, of this particular scene.
[01:31:51.330 --> 01:31:55.270]  So if you don't have contacts here, uh, make them while you're here.
[01:31:55.470 --> 01:32:03.350]  I know it's Sunday, but anything else that you attend, uh, reach out, ask questions, tell people things that you would be interested in learning.
[01:32:03.610 --> 01:32:07.770]  The other thing I'm gonna, I would say is don't ever let anybody tell you that you can't do something.
[01:32:08.570 --> 01:32:12.790]  That that's really, that's your limit, that you decide what your limits are.
[01:32:13.810 --> 01:32:14.290]  Yeah.
[01:32:14.590 --> 01:32:14.770]  Wonderful.
[01:32:15.030 --> 01:32:21.210]  So I have, I've noticed the same thing happening in the community for the last three or five years.
[01:32:21.210 --> 01:32:32.090]  There's a bit of a renaissance happening, uh, where, where smaller conferences are cool again, where there are now conferences that are limited to 100 or 200 people only.
[01:32:32.490 --> 01:32:33.970]  Uh, some of them are invite only.
[01:32:34.470 --> 01:32:40.610]  Uh, some of them, they don't tell you where the conference is happening or they tell you the city, but they don't tell you where they tell you in the morning.
[01:32:41.250 --> 01:32:43.990]  And, uh, you're, you're not allowed to record anything.
[01:32:44.190 --> 01:32:45.730]  You're not allowed to take any notes.
[01:32:45.850 --> 01:32:49.290]  You're not allowed to take any photos and you don't get paid for speaking there.
[01:32:49.290 --> 01:32:56.370]  You just go there and you talk because you like talking about the topic that you are excited about, that you feel passionate about.
[01:32:56.530 --> 01:32:59.110]  And I like to see many more conferences like this.
[01:32:59.230 --> 01:33:01.590]  I love the community to build more conferences like this.
[01:33:01.730 --> 01:33:06.890]  But it's not just about the money, but just about the art of the hacking and figuring things out.
[01:33:07.870 --> 01:33:15.410]  So yeah, back to the question about where do people see the community in 10, 20, 50 years or where do you want it to be?
[01:33:18.510 --> 01:33:25.270]  So I like to think that the community is going to continue to grow in different ways.
[01:33:25.570 --> 01:33:32.770]  And I think also like the necessity that we or you had to start hacking back in the day.
[01:33:32.950 --> 01:33:35.650]  I think the society is creating new types of necessity nowadays.
[01:33:36.070 --> 01:33:41.410]  So it's going to be the people that are going to be joining at the scene, they're going to join for different reasons.
[01:33:41.630 --> 01:33:54.270]  And aside for monetary reasons, obviously, they're going to be drawn to the scene, hopefully, by like nice, interesting reasons.
[01:33:54.830 --> 01:34:00.370]  And I also think that the smaller conventions are also nice, of course.
[01:34:00.510 --> 01:34:07.470]  And I'll prefer if more people focus on those or also create their own more niche conventions as well.
[01:34:07.470 --> 01:34:08.370]  I think this is pretty cool.
[01:34:10.650 --> 01:34:15.190]  And I think, yeah, I don't know.
[01:34:15.510 --> 01:34:33.650]  I'm just thinking like if we're able to do what we're doing now, make the younger generation relate to what we're doing now, pass this along like because every year we're passing something along somehow in a way that attracts this younger generation that speaks more of their language because their
[01:34:33.650 --> 01:34:34.690]  brains are also evolving.
[01:34:34.690 --> 01:34:37.030]  They think different than us.
[01:34:39.030 --> 01:34:52.370]  They grew up with different technology, with different influences, and we need to make this accessible for them and to spark this interest for them to carry this over as well.
[01:34:58.380 --> 01:34:59.360]  Yeah, good question.
[01:34:59.500 --> 01:35:02.180]  I don't know that I could really speak about the future of the cybersecurity industry.
[01:35:02.320 --> 01:35:03.520]  I'm kind of not really in it.
[01:35:04.820 --> 01:35:06.800]  But I do like these conferences.
[01:35:07.000 --> 01:35:09.360]  First of all, mad respect to HOPE and 2600 despite everything.
[01:35:09.520 --> 01:35:13.260]  I love this and I've met everybody here as great people and you all have enabled a lot, right?
[01:35:13.400 --> 01:35:18.000]  I do agree with what everybody else has said about like smaller, decentralized, start your own.
[01:35:19.560 --> 01:35:20.380]  More of that, right?
[01:35:20.600 --> 01:35:22.320]  Because the multi-headed hydra is strong.
[01:35:23.000 --> 01:35:25.300]  Generally, like, yeah, we are hidden sometimes.
[01:35:25.560 --> 01:35:26.740]  Repression breeds resistance.
[01:35:26.900 --> 01:35:28.300]  So there's going to be more necessity.
[01:35:28.520 --> 01:35:35.020]  As they build up these systems of control, people are always going to find the need to try to find a way to survive through it or destroy it.
[01:35:35.980 --> 01:35:36.800]  And so how do we do that?
[01:35:36.840 --> 01:35:38.280]  How do we pass on this knowledge, right?
[01:35:38.580 --> 01:35:39.200]  Through these conferences?
[01:35:39.360 --> 01:35:39.480]  Yes.
[01:35:40.180 --> 01:35:47.520]  But one thing we hadn't really mentioned terribly much, but it is a continuation between the old and the new, is zines, right?
[01:35:47.560 --> 01:35:49.820]  That is the medium of the scene scene, right?
[01:35:49.820 --> 01:35:52.100]  That's how we define, that's how we share, that's how we explain.
[01:35:53.340 --> 01:35:54.800]  And, and just...
[01:35:56.280 --> 01:35:57.340]  Oh, and zines, yeah.
[01:35:57.700 --> 01:36:06.220]  And that could be text file zines, like a magazine, a self-published pamphlet, you know, and there's, the thirst is there.
[01:36:06.500 --> 01:36:12.320]  And there are so many parallels between like, for example, like activist zine scenes and like hacker zine scenes.
[01:36:13.140 --> 01:36:21.320]  For one, the method of distribution, or also even like, I remember in like, the aughts and something, people have like a public zine, but then there would be like, a little secret section, right?
[01:36:21.860 --> 01:36:24.160]  You had to get invited to it, or whatever.
[01:36:25.260 --> 01:36:31.380]  Or like now, like we have zines, and some of them are put on blast, like we just handed out like, 200 pounds of zines this, this weekend, right?
[01:36:31.500 --> 01:36:32.220]  So the thirst is there.
[01:36:34.320 --> 01:36:38.660]  But also, there's also offline zines, zines that you can't find the PDF online, right?
[01:36:39.640 --> 01:36:42.180]  Or that you, someone's got to share with you a physical hard copy.
[01:36:42.340 --> 01:36:45.760]  So I do think that people are exploring alternative networks that aren't on the clear net.
[01:36:47.020 --> 01:36:53.380]  Like one thing I remember, like growing up and stuff, we got people were talking about the crew change guide, for those who are like, hopping trains and stuff like that, right?
[01:36:53.480 --> 01:37:01.800]  But I mean, we're talking about people who are like, and people do this for hundreds of years, you know, the hobos riding freight trains for migrant labor, or just living in the cracks of the system.
[01:37:01.800 --> 01:37:02.780]  People are still doing it.
[01:37:02.920 --> 01:37:13.740]  A hand-to-hand zine that you can't even find online that'll tell you like, what every train yard is in every city, and what time the bull cops are like, going to be out doing their patrols, or what train goes where, and stuff like that.
[01:37:13.800 --> 01:37:20.520]  That's the type of, like, inside knowledge that people have just accrued with time, and experience, and sharing directly, but not putting it out there.
[01:37:20.620 --> 01:37:26.600]  Because, of course, if you share a trick with the world and post it, the trick might not work anymore for everybody, right?
[01:37:26.660 --> 01:37:31.180]  And so we do got to look out after those who really do need these techniques, depend on them to survive.
[01:37:32.480 --> 01:37:34.580]  to, you know, as they used to say, keep it private, right?
[01:37:35.540 --> 01:37:36.120]  Or just not.
[01:37:36.200 --> 01:37:40.480]  But so, I guess it's a combination of above-ground and below-ground, underground organizing, right?
[01:37:40.600 --> 01:37:41.920]  Like, that is a hell of a tension.
[01:37:43.840 --> 01:37:47.160]  We need people, we need people like the EFF out there, right?
[01:37:47.280 --> 01:37:52.680]  You know, technologists who are just, like, doing the advocacy work, who are, so that there's a path for that, right?
[01:37:52.720 --> 01:37:56.860]  But we also need those who are up all night, you know, you already know.
[01:38:03.740 --> 01:38:18.700]  On a more somber note, I think that the ecological systems of the world are starting to collapse, and I think that we are going to see a greater bulk realization of the Internet as a result of that.
[01:38:18.700 --> 01:38:35.300]  And so, I think that we need better ways to bridge long-distance gaps when they emerge because of some of those impending crises.
[01:38:35.880 --> 01:38:41.640]  And I think those crises are going to start cascading in a way that we haven't seen before.
[01:38:42.220 --> 01:38:49.800]  That is not a hacking commentary, that is a kind of what we're going to start dealing with commentary, I think.
[01:38:51.440 --> 01:39:08.700]  So we need to start thinking about how we will respond in response to that, and just how we want to structure networks because our world is going to become more volatile in a lot of ways.
[01:39:10.280 --> 01:39:14.720]  So I realize time flies, and we only have 10 minutes or so, five minutes.
[01:39:16.180 --> 01:39:24.060]  So I think maybe we can all think about it, what our experience was, and then we can maybe take a few more questions.
[01:39:24.240 --> 01:39:27.800]  So I tell you my three tips how to become a successful hacker.
[01:39:28.740 --> 01:39:32.940]  And there's this tip number one is understand the system.
[01:39:33.180 --> 01:39:36.320]  Any system that you want to hack, understand it fully.
[01:39:36.500 --> 01:39:39.840]  And I mean read every book out there about that system.
[01:39:40.240 --> 01:39:42.320]  Even if it's a similar book, read it.
[01:39:42.320 --> 01:39:46.960]  First, try to identify differences and mistakes that the author made.
[01:39:47.600 --> 01:39:50.380]  How the systems are working differently.
[01:39:51.520 --> 01:39:52.820]  So really understand the system.
[01:39:52.940 --> 01:39:54.140]  Learn everything about the system.
[01:39:55.080 --> 01:39:57.040]  Second one is group together.
[01:39:57.920 --> 01:39:59.580]  Find somebody who's like-minded.
[01:40:00.140 --> 01:40:00.740]  Work together.
[01:40:01.800 --> 01:40:05.140]  And then third is, don't be afraid to ask stupid questions.
[01:40:05.460 --> 01:40:06.920]  There are no stupid questions.
[01:40:07.500 --> 01:40:09.180]  There's only a question that you don't ask.
[01:40:09.220 --> 01:40:10.560]  That's the most stupid thing you can do.
[01:40:10.940 --> 01:40:14.100]  Just keep asking questions in your group and develop things together.
[01:40:14.260 --> 01:40:17.020]  It really helped us in the many groups that I've participated in.
[01:40:17.420 --> 01:40:19.980]  So these are my three tips how to become a good hacker.
[01:40:21.320 --> 01:40:21.720]  Yeah.
[01:40:25.320 --> 01:40:26.980]  I'm gonna throw something random in here.
[01:40:28.520 --> 01:40:31.700]  So it's just a quick story I was telling these guys earlier.
[01:40:35.360 --> 01:40:40.620]  So my dad had a friend that every time I wanted to learn something new he'd throw a manual at me.
[01:40:40.740 --> 01:40:41.500]  It was like, read.
[01:40:41.500 --> 01:40:43.600]  So that covers that piece of it.
[01:40:43.720 --> 01:40:44.960]  But here's the story.
[01:40:45.440 --> 01:40:56.820]  So last week, I reached out to somebody who was in the AT&T Alliance security team that happens to live in Vegas now, who used to hunt us down when we were younger.
[01:40:57.700 --> 01:40:59.460]  And we invited him out for lunch.
[01:40:59.600 --> 01:41:03.320]  So it's not his first time because I've introduced some other people a couple of years ago.
[01:41:03.420 --> 01:41:04.740]  We had to come out to Caesars.
[01:41:06.560 --> 01:41:07.880]  He was telling us stories.
[01:41:08.420 --> 01:41:09.260]  He's older now.
[01:41:09.260 --> 01:41:10.420]  He's in his 80s and stuff.
[01:41:10.420 --> 01:41:13.640]  So we've been programming for stories each year.
[01:41:13.860 --> 01:41:15.080]  He was telling us a story.
[01:41:15.260 --> 01:41:17.660]  How many people here know what Alliance teleconferencing is?
[01:41:20.160 --> 01:41:21.900]  So he was involved in that.
[01:41:22.100 --> 01:41:24.420]  There was a woman that was a manager of Alliance teleconferencing.
[01:41:25.120 --> 01:41:28.860]  And every time she picked up the phone, the Alliance call would go dead.
[01:41:29.760 --> 01:41:32.440]  It took them six months to figure out what was going on.
[01:41:32.580 --> 01:41:33.540]  They had engineers in there.
[01:41:33.620 --> 01:41:35.520]  Anybody went into her office, picked up the phone.
[01:41:35.640 --> 01:41:36.660]  The phone worked fine.
[01:41:37.000 --> 01:41:43.780]  The way her nasal cavity was, she was actually making a 2600 hertz phone and dropping the line when she talked.
[01:41:45.200 --> 01:41:45.640]  So.
[01:41:49.640 --> 01:41:51.540]  Yeah, that must have been funny debugging that.
[01:41:52.880 --> 01:41:53.220]  Yeah.
[01:41:53.260 --> 01:41:54.100]  Do we have any more questions?
[01:41:54.200 --> 01:42:01.680]  Does anyone else want to maybe give some tips about the future community or so, or where we're heading, or any tips that we can share with these guys?
[01:42:02.580 --> 01:42:04.380]  Just what gives me hope is solar punk.
[01:42:04.580 --> 01:42:05.000]  It's kind of rad.
[01:42:05.200 --> 01:42:05.340]  Right?
[01:42:07.200 --> 01:42:10.740]  It's like a anti-dystopian vision, like that encourages, I guess.
[01:42:13.520 --> 01:42:14.360]  It's solar punk?
[01:42:14.540 --> 01:42:15.220]  Solar punk, yeah.
[01:42:16.840 --> 01:42:17.600]  What about that?
[01:42:20.660 --> 01:42:24.740]  I don't know if I'm the one to define it on the spot, to be honest, but definitely check it out.
[01:42:24.740 --> 01:42:29.340]  But it's kind of like a chaos camp a couple of years ago.
[01:42:29.460 --> 01:42:29.720]  It was awesome.
[01:42:30.200 --> 01:42:30.780]  Highly recommend.
[01:42:33.040 --> 01:42:39.140]  And they were talking about how, like in a previous chaos, that one of the projects that'd be like, we're going to have hackers go to the moon.
[01:42:39.240 --> 01:42:39.360]  Right?
[01:42:40.300 --> 01:42:42.580]  Was like a project that they had, you know, wanted to do.
[01:42:42.760 --> 01:42:49.080]  And then they kind of like, after a couple of years, they realized like how kind of foolhardy or how it doesn't like reflect the actual needs.
[01:42:49.220 --> 01:43:02.120]  There's a lot of other reasons that I'm not quite representing, but then they came back, like the next conference and said, we actually revised our vision entirely that like you had said, like we made this world into a hellscape asphalt, you know, factory.
[01:43:03.280 --> 01:43:05.960]  That maybe what we don't need is like hackers on the moon.
[01:43:06.200 --> 01:43:16.480]  You know, maybe what we need is to like repurpose, like the shells and the carcasses of industrial and find a way to live that is economically and I'm sorry, environmentally sustainable and so forth.
[01:43:16.620 --> 01:43:21.140]  So it's something that does give me hope because I like watch a lot of sci-fi dystopias and stuff like that.
[01:43:21.240 --> 01:43:26.660]  But I like, don't let that like discourage me from acting and solar punk, I think is a positive vision for the future.
[01:43:26.700 --> 01:43:30.540]  But I'm also more interested if anybody else has some future stuff because they're a bunch of old fucks.
[01:43:30.600 --> 01:43:30.800]  You know what I mean?
[01:43:30.860 --> 01:43:33.300]  Like if anybody has some vision of the future too, they want to share it, please do.
[01:43:34.340 --> 01:43:34.700]  Absolutely.
[01:43:34.900 --> 01:43:37.060]  I did want to dovetail off of that.
[01:43:37.220 --> 01:43:48.820]  And again, we're on the like kind of Laura angle, long range radios are low power too, so that you can have like a little solar node powering a long range repeater.
[01:43:49.280 --> 01:43:56.320]  And it's basically a router and you put it up in a tree somewhere and forget about it.
[01:43:56.420 --> 01:43:58.200]  And it's not drawing power from the grid.
[01:43:58.360 --> 01:44:02.860]  It's not contributing to ecological destruction or anything like that.
[01:44:02.860 --> 01:44:04.940]  It's just kind of repeating the signal.
[01:44:05.320 --> 01:44:16.840]  And you have some of these like integration between ecological and technical mindset that power something new and creative and fun.
[01:44:17.560 --> 01:44:19.020]  And I think that's really fucking cool.
[01:44:28.460 --> 01:44:28.980]  All right.
[01:44:29.160 --> 01:44:33.480]  While I wait to see if we have a hot mic, we have one last question that I'd like to question
[01:44:36.670 --> 01:44:47.830]  because I think that it boils down to the essence of how does the panel think that we can pass on the knowledge, skills and mindsets to younger generations who may not even be aware of bonds like hope?
[01:44:50.150 --> 01:44:52.670]  How to get the word out there that hackers still exist?
[01:44:53.510 --> 01:44:54.730]  Specifically the younger people.
[01:44:54.950 --> 01:44:55.970]  The younger people, yeah, of course.
[01:44:56.290 --> 01:44:56.930]  Good question.
[01:44:57.270 --> 01:44:58.310]  Who knows the answer?
[01:44:58.610 --> 01:45:02.350]  Maybe one of our people here in the audience knows the answer how we do that.
[01:45:03.490 --> 01:45:04.870]  It's a tricky problem.
[01:45:06.290 --> 01:45:09.450]  I can mention a few things that we're trying to do with Phrack.
[01:45:09.450 --> 01:45:16.750]  We're trying to relate more with the tools that the younger generation are using.
[01:45:17.050 --> 01:45:25.490]  We're trying to be seen on places where we expect them to be present, like social media.
[01:45:26.070 --> 01:45:42.910]  We're trying to build a community and a safe community for people that want to participate, to join and talk with any kind of level of member with different levels, different areas of expertise.
[01:45:43.750 --> 01:45:48.630]  And I think creating this kind of relationship and safe environment, it's nice.
[01:45:48.930 --> 01:45:49.710]  It's a start.
[01:45:50.850 --> 01:45:53.710]  And I think the visibility also helps a little bit.
[01:45:55.270 --> 01:45:58.830]  Kind of going out more or less of the underground.
[01:45:59.170 --> 01:45:59.710]  Not so much.
[01:45:59.910 --> 01:46:13.790]  But, you know, I think that we learned this with Tmp.out as well, that there's a lot of young people that are interested in this, and they really knew where to go to until we showed up somehow.
[01:46:15.690 --> 01:46:20.230]  So I don't know if this is the answer, but it seems like there's some effect somehow.
[01:46:20.770 --> 01:46:22.590]  So something could be a start.
[01:46:22.610 --> 01:46:23.410]  I'm not sure.
[01:46:24.470 --> 01:46:24.950]  Yeah.
[01:46:25.030 --> 01:46:27.290]  Invite your friends along to come to conferences like this.
[01:46:27.510 --> 01:46:30.570]  Invite your friends along to publish in magazines.
[01:46:30.570 --> 01:46:36.490]  And just, you know, keep the spirit alive and explore and hack and tinker.
[01:46:37.230 --> 01:46:37.290]  Yeah.
[01:46:37.410 --> 01:46:44.150]  One more final comment is that there's these iFixit clinics that are popping up in, you know, local context.
[01:46:44.390 --> 01:46:49.910]  And basically people bring their appliances, and then people collaborate to fix those appliances that have been broken.
[01:46:50.310 --> 01:47:02.750]  And it's an easy way for people that may not be economically advantaged to actually keep things running and also to start thinking about how hardware hacking works.
[01:47:02.950 --> 01:47:11.550]  I think that might be something that youth can get involved in to help their neighbors, but also to help their own knowledge and build out that knowledge.
[01:47:12.210 --> 01:47:12.690]  Cool.
[01:47:13.110 --> 01:47:18.550]  I think the other thing that needs to be done is needs to be education between a hackathon and a hacker conference.
[01:47:19.210 --> 01:47:24.650]  Because people that go to hackathons for the first time and are expecting cybersecurity discussions are very disappointed.
[01:47:25.410 --> 01:47:27.030]  and kind of drop out.
[01:47:27.770 --> 01:47:31.450]  So, because we were battling with this last year up in our area.
[01:47:31.690 --> 01:47:36.250]  So we campaigned to have B-Sides move to the city that we're in last year.
[01:47:36.710 --> 01:47:40.170]  We had also one of the universities, but we reached out to all the local schools.
[01:47:42.530 --> 01:47:50.070]  So regular colleges, universities, et cetera, but also community colleges, high schools, to let them know that we were having it.
[01:47:50.210 --> 01:47:53.790]  And the attendance was significant compared to the prior year.
[01:47:55.490 --> 01:47:58.190]  So I think it's got to work both ways.
[01:47:58.410 --> 01:47:58.810]  Right?
[01:47:58.990 --> 01:48:01.390]  So I'm the guy saying, hey, don't make the conference too big.
[01:48:01.870 --> 01:48:08.290]  But if you're trying to get that community engagement, I think that's a good way to feed that in.
[01:48:10.110 --> 01:48:14.190]  Take advantage of makerspaces, hackerspaces that are in the areas.
[01:48:14.630 --> 01:48:17.910]  Talk to them and say, hey, listen, I know there was a teacher in here before.
[01:48:18.450 --> 01:48:23.430]  But reach out to them and say, hey, listen, you know, I'd like to get some security thing going on.
[01:48:23.570 --> 01:48:24.790]  Doesn't need to be something big.
[01:48:25.090 --> 01:48:27.550]  They can easily host it at no cost.
[01:48:28.190 --> 01:48:32.490]  And I think that's another challenge is DEFCON was originally 75 bucks.
[01:48:32.750 --> 01:48:36.670]  We used to go and we were told all the way up to 10 that would never go above 75.
[01:48:36.910 --> 01:48:38.410]  I understand the cost increase.
[01:48:38.610 --> 01:48:44.770]  But if you're a kid, you can't go to a lot of these conferences because you can't afford it.
[01:48:45.790 --> 01:48:50.270]  Because now their conferences are approaching what the original blackout prices used to be.
[01:48:50.890 --> 01:48:51.410]  Yeah.
[01:48:52.210 --> 01:48:52.690]  All right.
[01:48:53.030 --> 01:48:55.810]  Everybody, let's give our friends a warm thank you.