[00:00.000 --> 00:01.060]  Day 1 of Day 3.
[00:01.340 --> 00:05.480]  We are anticipating changing a whole lot of lives and losing a whole lot of sleep over the upcoming weekend.
[00:05.620 --> 00:07.000]  Thank you in advance for your participation.
[00:07.700 --> 00:10.780]  A couple of quick announcements before we get started with owning your own phone.
[00:11.240 --> 00:12.920]  One is we have some live concerts.
[00:13.200 --> 00:14.600]  And I have some details on these.
[00:15.220 --> 00:18.560]  The concert series is called Beyond the Welding Hour.
[00:19.100 --> 00:22.640]  And it's music characterized as chiptunes and circuit bending.
[00:23.240 --> 00:26.560]  And basically this will be danceable music created on a variety of interesting devices.
[00:26.560 --> 00:29.760]  We have a couple of concerts going on tonight in the Video Temple area.
[00:29.840 --> 00:34.220]  So on the mezzanine area you can see the map in your program for the location of that.
[00:34.360 --> 00:38.320]  11.30pm going through probably until at least 2am.
[00:38.320 --> 00:41.720]  So if you're looking for something to do on the long overnights, that is a good choice.
[00:41.900 --> 00:46.260]  We're doing a couple of different artists tonight, a couple of different artists tomorrow night, Saturday.
[00:46.660 --> 00:51.380]  So that's circuit bending concerts, live performances down in the Video Temple area tonight.
[00:51.380 --> 00:56.600]  Also, a lot of you saw the lightning talks that happened after today's Dan Kaminsky keynote.
[00:56.880 --> 00:59.900]  We are going to do those again after tomorrow's keynote.
[01:00.400 --> 01:05.060]  And if you'd like to submit a lightning talk, email projects at hope.net.
[01:05.160 --> 01:06.100]  Projects at hope.net.
[01:06.220 --> 01:08.840]  And make the subject line include lightning.
[01:09.240 --> 01:11.580]  And we'll monitor that.
[01:11.720 --> 01:15.840]  You'll get a response back if your lightning talk has been accepted.
[01:19.790 --> 01:24.710]  Up next, we have the telecom informer himself, T Profit, talking about owning your own phone.
[01:29.510 --> 01:30.970]  Well, thank you.
[01:31.090 --> 01:34.770]  It's good to be back in New York City for the next hope.
[01:34.890 --> 01:39.670]  I thought the last one was the last one, but it turns out it was just the one before the next one.
[01:40.730 --> 01:52.350]  So, if you're left over from the last talk, this talk, unfortunately, doesn't have anything about sex or dongs or phone sex dongs or anything like that.
[01:52.610 --> 01:59.870]  It's kind of going to be a dry-ish sort of dry history lecture on phone stuff.
[01:59.870 --> 02:02.650]  But if you like phones, then you're in the right place.
[02:02.650 --> 02:04.590]  So, who am I?
[02:04.730 --> 02:05.610]  I'm T Profit.
[02:05.890 --> 02:06.730]  I'm a freak.
[02:07.410 --> 02:10.010]  That's the kind of person that likes to play with phones.
[02:10.490 --> 02:14.690]  I write a column for a 2600 magazine called the Telecom Informer.
[02:14.870 --> 02:20.570]  So, if you do read the magazine, it's not online, but it's printed on dead trees and stuff.
[02:20.690 --> 02:21.510]  You can buy it in the back.
[02:22.730 --> 02:29.530]  Every issue, I have this column I do in kind of a cranky persona of a nearly retired telephone employee.
[02:29.530 --> 02:35.470]  Obviously, I'm not quite there yet myself, but I try to be faithful to that.
[02:36.130 --> 02:39.710]  I believe technology gives people the power to change the world.
[02:39.870 --> 02:43.530]  I very strongly believe this, and that's a part of why we're all here.
[02:43.930 --> 02:48.510]  And I believe that people accomplish the most, really, when they build communities.
[02:48.890 --> 02:56.830]  And so, this talk is as much about phones as about communities, and the direction that I think that we, as a hacker culture, need to go.
[02:57.990 --> 03:04.870]  So, there's been a really incredible revolution that's happened in my lifetime, and in many of your lifetimes.
[03:05.150 --> 03:07.090]  It's been disruptive.
[03:07.590 --> 03:08.830]  It's been destabilizing.
[03:09.050 --> 03:11.250]  But for one, I wouldn't have it any other way.
[03:12.630 --> 03:29.250]  And what's happened is that we, as a result of having very cheap, very available communication technology available to us, by having resources like the Internet available, we've been able to communicate in ways that we weren't able to before.
[03:29.610 --> 03:33.510]  And it's led, in a very real way, to actual political revolution.
[03:34.150 --> 03:37.630]  Among them, the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine.
[03:37.910 --> 03:50.570]  The Rose Revolution in Georgia, which supplanted a very brutal dictatorship with an actual sort of mostly functional democracy, and not in the Bush administration sense.
[03:51.810 --> 04:01.910]  There's been, you know, you'll hear more tomorrow about WikiLeaks, and some of the things that that resource has made possible.
[04:01.910 --> 04:09.170]  And, of course, incredibly disruptive, at least in terms of how we deal with content.
[04:09.590 --> 04:21.030]  And, you know, being in the publishing industry ourselves at 2600, we've had to come to grips with things like BitTorrent and the Internet, as part of this communication digital revolution.
[04:23.270 --> 04:25.670]  So, it hasn't always been this way.
[04:25.830 --> 04:31.910]  And if government telecoms and Sarah Palin have their way, it might not always be this way.
[04:32.890 --> 04:36.650]  So, what we're going to get to is a little bit of, you know, a rewind.
[04:36.970 --> 04:41.590]  And I'll be talking about what things were like kind of when I was a kid.
[04:41.730 --> 04:46.670]  There's a big period in the middle that we're going to skip over, because it's kind of a lost decade, I think.
[04:46.830 --> 04:51.330]  And then we'll get to now, and a call to action as to where I think we need to go.
[04:52.270 --> 04:59.170]  So, 25 years ago, roughly, you could communicate with virtual anonymity in a way that is not possible now.
[04:59.170 --> 05:00.590]  And here's what I mean by that.
[05:01.250 --> 05:04.950]  When you made phone calls, there weren't things like class features.
[05:05.470 --> 05:10.610]  And a class feature is things like caller ID and call waiting and voicemail.
[05:11.010 --> 05:14.730]  There was no communications assistance for law enforcement acts.
[05:14.950 --> 05:23.410]  So, if the government wanted to tap your phone or monitor your movements, it was actually, from a technology perspective, a very difficult thing to accomplish.
[05:23.410 --> 05:25.470]  They had to do real work.
[05:25.630 --> 05:31.470]  Send somebody somewhere to clip into the frame and have a reel-to-reel recorder going.
[05:32.130 --> 05:37.290]  Some areas even still used analog switches, including Seattle, where I grew up.
[05:37.390 --> 05:41.290]  When I was a little kid, I would call the Seattle Public Library storyline.
[05:41.290 --> 05:46.910]  And, you know, I would hear the unusual clicking and ringing and wonder what that was.
[05:47.190 --> 05:56.550]  And, you know, it was later, when I got toward the end of elementary school into middle school, that I really learned what those switches were and started to hear them go away.
[05:56.550 --> 06:00.430]  And in 1984, the Bell system was broken up.
[06:00.610 --> 06:09.770]  But one of the things that we really don't pay as much attention to as perhaps we should is at that time, there were a lot of independent phone companies.
[06:09.950 --> 06:11.710]  And they did innovate in interesting ways.
[06:12.570 --> 06:17.670]  You had, in Oregon, a number of telephone cooperatives that were community-owned.
[06:17.870 --> 06:24.870]  And they were actually way out in front of the Bell companies in terms of the features that were available to their customers.
[06:24.870 --> 06:28.950]  And, of course, there were other things going on in other parts of the world.
[06:29.170 --> 06:37.370]  France, in particular, with their groundbreaking Minitel, which in many ways is kind of the predecessor to what we now know as the Internet.
[06:39.190 --> 06:41.150]  So, there was an evolution.
[06:41.650 --> 06:44.450]  And that evolution was pretty significant.
[06:45.050 --> 06:50.830]  I think probably the most groundbreaking thing that happened was in the late 80s.
[06:50.950 --> 06:53.870]  Sprint built the first nationwide fiber optic network.
[06:53.870 --> 07:03.510]  And so, for the first time, it was possible over the same glass in the ground to merge voice data and video all over one network.
[07:04.170 --> 07:10.870]  We began to see, over the years, analog switches retired and replaced with digital, as I mentioned before.
[07:11.370 --> 07:14.230]  And also, as I mentioned before, class features were added in.
[07:14.350 --> 07:16.010]  But that became more or less universal.
[07:16.710 --> 07:25.530]  Party lines, which in some of the independents in the rural areas were still commonplace, even as late as the early 90s, began to be retired.
[07:26.230 --> 07:32.030]  We saw Touch-Tone service added, first as an extra cost service, and then standard.
[07:32.030 --> 07:36.350]  We saw voice messaging, and we saw centrics become available.
[07:36.750 --> 07:39.170]  And we began to see some long distance competition.
[07:39.510 --> 07:50.130]  And all of you know that anytime we have something new available, that's a lot of new things for freaks and hackers to start trying to figure out how to take apart and use in different ways.
[07:50.130 --> 08:03.470]  And so, this gets us into the 1990s, which I think were the most disruptively innovative decade in human communications, really since the invention of the telephone.
[08:03.770 --> 08:08.110]  We saw equal access, and we saw competitive local exchange carriers.
[08:08.110 --> 08:24.170]  So what this meant was instead of only using AT&T for your local and long distance, and you know, AT&T sold itself as Pacific Northwest Bell and Bell South and other regional Bell operating companies post the 1984 divestiture.
[08:24.690 --> 08:31.950]  But really, it was effectively one network still, even though there were different corporate management structures.
[08:31.950 --> 08:41.050]  When we got into the long distance space, there was a further break up, and AT&T had to allow competition for long distance.
[08:41.350 --> 08:56.090]  So we saw companies like MCI, companies like AllNet, companies like Sprint become available not just through dial around services, but actually you could presubscribe your home telephone to an alternate long distance carrier.
[08:56.090 --> 09:03.250]  We began to see, with the explosion of personal computers, an interest in BBSs.
[09:03.490 --> 09:13.090]  And like Minitel in France, BBSs in the US and much of the rest of the world became, to some degree, the predecessor of what we now consider the Internet.
[09:14.090 --> 09:21.170]  2600 Magazine was really at the forefront of this curve, and had a service called the 2600 Voice BBS.
[09:21.870 --> 09:27.330]  The 2600 Voice BBS was particularly interesting because you didn't even need a computer to call.
[09:27.630 --> 09:29.110]  Anybody with a telephone could.
[09:29.630 --> 09:33.550]  Anybody with a pay phone and a toll fraud device called a red box could.
[09:33.770 --> 09:41.410]  And so what you really ended up with was this amazing equalizing factor on the 2600 Voice BBS.
[09:41.410 --> 09:51.750]  There's a guy who would call in who was developmentally disabled, didn't own a computer, was from a poor family in upstate New York, named Mega Elite.
[09:52.050 --> 09:55.630]  One of the best freaks that I've ever talked to or dealt with.
[09:55.810 --> 09:57.970]  He was fantastic with social engineering.
[09:58.290 --> 10:05.310]  He knew a tremendous amount about how the phone system worked in the background, who to call to accomplish things.
[10:05.310 --> 10:10.810]  And this is somebody who most people would look at as retarded.
[10:11.050 --> 10:12.150]  Let's be frank.
[10:13.550 --> 10:25.950]  A service like the 2600 Voice BBS really allowed even somebody who nobody would take seriously, the ability to communicate with other like-minded people.
[10:25.950 --> 10:27.950]  We had cops.
[10:28.290 --> 10:33.150]  And I gave a talk a couple of years ago called Freaks, Cops, and Jail.
[10:33.390 --> 10:34.710]  I think it was here.
[10:35.310 --> 10:36.750]  So it's online.
[10:36.950 --> 10:41.170]  Feel free to refer to that if you want a more in-depth look at the cops scene.
[10:41.350 --> 10:46.090]  But this, I really think, was a very important part of freaking culture.
[10:46.270 --> 10:50.190]  And it even remains today to be a fairly important part of freaking culture.
[10:50.390 --> 10:53.930]  And this gets to the community piece, which I'll get into later.
[10:54.810 --> 10:58.770]  It was possible to perform newly elaborate prank calls.
[10:58.890 --> 11:14.350]  It turns out that if you have all of these services that you can break into, like voicemail boxes, for example, and people trust those services, which they perhaps shouldn't, it became very easy to convince people to do things that they shouldn't necessarily do.
[11:14.550 --> 11:17.630]  And the more things change, the more they stay the same.
[11:17.990 --> 11:19.310]  And so we'll get to that later.
[11:19.310 --> 11:28.310]  And in the 1990s, one of the other disruptively innovative things that happened was on the government and regulatory side.
[11:28.530 --> 11:41.550]  And this actually was the predecessor to what we see a lot of governments around the world, no matter whether democracies or not, trying to do in terms of controlling content.
[11:41.550 --> 11:46.170]  CALEA was the foundation of the infrastructure to control communications.
[11:46.930 --> 11:49.070]  And it handed the government that control.
[11:49.410 --> 11:58.070]  The Communications for Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, and if you go to askcalea.com, that's run by the FBI.
[11:58.330 --> 12:03.670]  It's a site for carriers to understand how to implement this law.
[12:03.670 --> 12:13.730]  There is literally a back door built into every telecommunications network that offers public telecommunications services in the United States.
[12:14.290 --> 12:19.050]  This back door is built in fundamentally in the background.
[12:19.370 --> 12:22.770]  The government doesn't actually have to do any work to tap your phone anymore.
[12:22.950 --> 12:27.390]  They can do it all remotely through a remote monitoring in-dial.
[12:28.290 --> 12:36.030]  They just dial-up a voicemail box, enter a PIN, and they can enter the number they want to monitor and listen to what you are saying.
[12:36.650 --> 12:40.530]  And it goes even a step further than that now.
[12:40.770 --> 12:52.150]  Because with wireless communication networks, all you have to do to track the location of somebody, if you're law enforcement, the physical location of anybody, even sitting in this room, is log onto a webpage.
[12:52.150 --> 13:04.190]  And the true extent of this came out recently when it was discovered that Sprint had responded to literally over 100,000 requests for location data.
[13:04.410 --> 13:08.770]  And provided this on their website to law enforcement.
[13:09.350 --> 13:12.290]  This is infrastructure that's been implemented now.
[13:12.850 --> 13:16.230]  It is monitoring everybody potentially now.
[13:16.230 --> 13:18.450]  And the accountability is very limited.
[13:18.770 --> 13:21.970]  Because in the Bush administration, this dramatically got expanded.
[13:23.990 --> 13:26.190]  So, there's been an evolution.
[13:28.630 --> 13:37.090]  And there was also an evolution in the ways that hackers began to look at telecommunications networks and use them.
[13:37.390 --> 13:40.150]  So, we had things like BBSs.
[13:40.150 --> 13:48.410]  But if you wanted to call a BBS outside of your local calling area, and it was all through dial-up at the time, you would need to make a long-distance call.
[13:49.150 --> 13:51.230]  Obviously, this could be quite expensive.
[13:51.850 --> 13:57.470]  I don't know how many of you were around then, but just a quick show of hands.
[13:57.590 --> 14:00.010]  Who's ever gotten a long-distance bill more than $100?
[14:01.470 --> 14:01.990]  Okay.
[14:02.570 --> 14:04.310]  So, older audience, obviously.
[14:05.030 --> 14:15.370]  You know, for those of you who are younger, probably you'd be shocked that there wasn't such a thing as unlimited free long-distance from your landline that just came standard.
[14:16.370 --> 14:20.610]  It used to be you paid by the minute, and you could pay an awful lot by the minute.
[14:20.610 --> 14:29.750]  So, we as freaks would look at ways to get around how we would have to pay so much for these calls.
[14:29.990 --> 14:32.130]  And, you know, calling cops, similar story.
[14:32.910 --> 14:35.350]  So, blue boxes get a lot of press.
[14:35.590 --> 14:44.690]  And blue boxes toward the end of the 80s and the beginning of the 90s weren't in as broad use as they were in the 70s and early 80s.
[14:44.790 --> 14:47.550]  But you could still use them on C5 networks.
[14:47.550 --> 14:54.710]  And what that was is, if you could get, if you could hit a route that would go over a satellite and it didn't cost you anything.
[14:54.970 --> 14:56.550]  You know, this is a thumbnail sketch.
[14:56.730 --> 14:58.290]  It's really more complicated than this.
[14:58.470 --> 15:08.910]  But, if you could make a free call that hit a satellite in some way, and that satellite used C5 signaling, it was relatively easy then to seize a trunk and go out from the other end.
[15:09.210 --> 15:18.910]  And so, it was fairly popular to do this from, you know, certain countries in Asia and in Israel until they upgraded to a fiber optic link.
[15:19.870 --> 15:27.150]  But, that wasn't very practical for calling BBSs because you'd get so much line noise, you know, transiting through an international location.
[15:27.570 --> 15:29.570]  You know, there was no error correction at the time.
[15:30.210 --> 15:32.730]  That, really, it was only useful for voice.
[15:32.950 --> 15:35.090]  And even then, only if a delay was acceptable.
[15:37.030 --> 15:42.670]  So, around the time that I started getting active, the preferred way to commit toll fraud was codes.
[15:43.350 --> 15:46.490]  And, codes was written, you know, in code.
[15:48.110 --> 15:50.050]  K0D3Z or something along those lines.
[15:50.550 --> 15:58.630]  And, what a code was, was either an open D support on a PBX that maybe you found by scanning.
[15:59.050 --> 16:01.410]  Or, it was a stolen credit card.
[16:01.670 --> 16:03.150]  Or, a stolen calling card.
[16:03.450 --> 16:19.230]  Or, sometimes, long distance companies would use, they'd give you a discount if you didn't use equal access, if you dialed a local number and entered a code and then dialed the number that you wanted to call, you could get a cheaper rate if you did it that way.
[16:19.490 --> 16:24.890]  So, if that were to leak, well, you know, maybe it could be useful to freaks.
[16:25.210 --> 16:27.510]  And then, there was this entire where scene.
[16:27.650 --> 16:28.970]  There's a where scene today.
[16:29.650 --> 16:32.930]  Where is being pirated software if you're not in that scene.
[16:34.090 --> 16:36.770]  And, remember, back at the time, we didn't have the Internet.
[16:36.770 --> 16:43.410]  So, to move these things across the country, somebody had to call long distance to the next city over BBS to BBS.
[16:43.830 --> 16:45.850]  And, these guys were called where's couriers.
[16:46.250 --> 16:52.130]  And, where's couriers were always looking for codes because they didn't want to pay the long distance bill to upload all the where's.
[16:52.690 --> 16:58.990]  So, if you were a freak, you could have all the where's you wanted, really, just by supplying where's couriers with code.
[16:59.170 --> 17:00.310]  And, this is something that was common.
[17:00.310 --> 17:08.550]  So, in addition to just outright stealing other people's information, you know, some freaks were more ethical than others.
[17:08.890 --> 17:13.650]  And, I would put myself in this category at the time.
[17:13.850 --> 17:20.890]  And, you know, hopefully the statute of limitations is up, having been, you know, 20 some odd years ago at this point.
[17:20.890 --> 17:30.590]  But, I thought at the time that if somebody got a bill as a result of something I did, then I wasn't being a very good freak.
[17:30.850 --> 17:38.230]  I wasn't being very good from the perspective of, number one, somebody getting a horrible bill that I ran up was probably going to be pretty mad.
[17:38.570 --> 17:42.730]  And, the phone company involved would probably be pretty mad as well.
[17:42.730 --> 17:46.450]  And, also, you know, these things didn't tend to last very long.
[17:46.670 --> 17:57.850]  So, what many freaks would try to do is we'd obtain service in a way that it would only generate phone billing internally to a phone company.
[17:58.450 --> 18:01.550]  Or, it would be just an outright subscription fraud.
[18:01.950 --> 18:05.610]  So, there would never be a real bill that went to a real person.
[18:07.090 --> 18:14.190]  So, one example of something that wasn't that was, you know, identity theft is a very common thing today.
[18:14.710 --> 18:20.110]  And, you know, it tends to be drug addicts that are doing it now because it's a relatively easy thing to do.
[18:20.630 --> 18:27.170]  But, you know, ten years before that became commonplace, freaks were committing identity theft of corporations.
[18:27.850 --> 18:30.650]  And so, one such number was 1-800-JAIL-BOND.
[18:30.730 --> 18:33.050]  That got routed to a COF.
[18:33.050 --> 18:37.650]  And what that was, was an attachment to an existing account.
[18:37.930 --> 18:41.230]  So, some company had a very large account with a lot of 800 numbers.
[18:41.850 --> 18:49.550]  And a phone call went in to the telephone company serving them, ordered a new number to be added to that same bulk account.
[18:50.170 --> 18:54.650]  And, you know, just like that, a new number was nailed up to a COF.
[18:54.770 --> 18:57.790]  And this was, you know, that's one of the more memorable numbers.
[18:57.790 --> 19:00.710]  But there were lots and lots and lots of these things that happened.
[19:00.710 --> 19:03.910]  Another example of a subscription fraud.
[19:04.450 --> 19:09.430]  How many of you would take an order from a company called Scam Modeling?
[19:11.070 --> 19:11.710]  Nobody?
[19:12.770 --> 19:15.650]  Well, with a name like that, how could you go wrong?
[19:17.690 --> 19:23.850]  Unfortunately for Sprint, they did accept an order from a company called Scam Modeling.
[19:24.910 --> 19:29.430]  There's a certain freak that wasn't me that set this up.
[19:29.710 --> 19:31.230]  I'd never do anything that obvious.
[19:31.810 --> 19:44.890]  But, anyhow, the story apparently went that Scam Modeling had a whole bunch of Russian models that frequently needed to call home to Russia.
[19:44.890 --> 19:48.250]  And so they needed calling cards to do this.
[19:48.490 --> 19:54.290]  And, you know, because they'd be traveling all over the place, the bill might not be paid exactly on time.
[19:54.490 --> 19:58.690]  And so, you know, the cards would need to stay on for long periods in between billing.
[19:58.870 --> 20:09.490]  And somehow, you know, the person that set this up managed to negotiate 10 calling cards being sent for a large, large number, you know, thousands of dollars worth of calls to Russia.
[20:10.330 --> 20:12.210]  And the bill just never being paid.
[20:12.370 --> 20:17.410]  And eventually, a few months later, Sprint caught on and shut down Scam Modeling.
[20:17.670 --> 20:22.090]  But for whatever reason, they accepted the order.
[20:22.270 --> 20:23.230]  I don't get it.
[20:23.390 --> 20:28.270]  But these are some methods that freaks would use to get around billing.
[20:28.270 --> 20:41.590]  And, you know, the real point here is that until the Internet came along and really became popular, people still found ways to communicate, and they still found ways to communicate for free.
[20:41.970 --> 20:47.710]  And things happen as a result of free communication that are pretty important.
[20:48.570 --> 20:52.890]  And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on.
[20:53.030 --> 20:53.850]  It's not a big truck.
[20:54.190 --> 20:55.650]  It's a series of tubes.
[20:55.650 --> 20:59.470]  So, along came the Internet.
[21:04.840 --> 21:12.520]  And there was sometimes a bit of muddled understanding from certain Alaskan politicians like Ted Stevens.
[21:14.460 --> 21:16.560]  Understanding what the potential was.
[21:17.640 --> 21:19.320]  It's not like a truck.
[21:19.580 --> 21:25.260]  But, okay, so this is the one thing that sort of parallels the previous talk.
[21:25.260 --> 21:31.420]  Porn companies really had no trouble at all understanding the potential of the Internet.
[21:32.160 --> 21:43.700]  And so, when you look at any technology that gets driven, and it happens to be around media, if the porn industry isn't behind it, typically it doesn't happen.
[21:43.700 --> 21:46.900]  So, we began to see a lot of streaming video.
[21:47.260 --> 21:52.660]  And really, what got us from dial-up, I think, to broadband is streaming porn.
[21:53.400 --> 21:57.200]  Suddenly, free instant worldwide communication became possible.
[21:57.620 --> 22:02.640]  And a guy named Bernie Eppers envisioned integrated voice data and video.
[22:02.920 --> 22:04.680]  And Bernie is a really interesting story.
[22:04.680 --> 22:08.160]  He started a company called WorldCom.
[22:08.400 --> 22:14.700]  He had this vision of voice data and video actually being an integrated service that he'd offer.
[22:14.960 --> 22:20.300]  And he literally went and made a whole bunch of acquisitions in order to put a company together that would do this.
[22:20.620 --> 22:21.880]  There was only one problem.
[22:22.060 --> 22:26.460]  And that was, in order to make the acquisitions, he committed massive accounting fraud.
[22:27.920 --> 22:35.660]  And, you know, that resulted in Mr. Eppers landing in a federal penitentiary where he still lives.
[22:36.000 --> 22:38.680]  But the vision was good and real.
[22:38.880 --> 22:54.220]  And it actually is, you know, where we sort of more or less are today, where if you look at something like the Comcast Triple Play, for example, you can get an integrated voice data and video package all from one provider.
[22:54.220 --> 22:57.980]  Bernie Eppers saw that ten years before you could buy it.
[22:58.540 --> 23:06.800]  And it's really because of ground breaking, pioneering work by people like him that we are able to enjoy some of the services that we are today.
[23:08.660 --> 23:13.940]  I think of 2000 to 2010 largely as a lost decade.
[23:14.620 --> 23:24.900]  And so that's why I haven't focused a great deal in this talk on anything except, you know, 1990 to 2000 and then where we are today.
[23:25.700 --> 23:30.780]  The tech crash caused a serious pullback in innovation.
[23:30.980 --> 23:33.760]  Around 1999, things got very frothy.
[23:34.460 --> 23:43.680]  We saw a very large amount of investment in companies that should never have been started selling products that shouldn't have existed.
[23:44.540 --> 23:53.260]  And, you know, we all saw the logical conclusion of the pullback was more severe than it should have been.
[23:53.420 --> 24:01.480]  And so the amount of innovation that I think that we've seen really in the last ten years hasn't been too substantial.
[24:01.760 --> 24:05.040]  It's mostly been evolutionary, except for surveillance.
[24:05.040 --> 24:19.500]  And we've built this crazy massive surveillance infrastructure without really even thinking through what the social implications or the long-term implications are of this radical societal shift that's happened.
[24:20.060 --> 24:22.400]  But there were some things that happened.
[24:22.600 --> 24:25.660]  We do now have a GSM deployment in North America.
[24:26.200 --> 24:30.400]  And it more or less covers the majority of the population.
[24:30.400 --> 24:31.740]  We didn't have this before.
[24:31.740 --> 24:37.380]  We saw AMPS retired toward the end of the lost decade.
[24:38.020 --> 24:41.900]  AMPS was the old crackly analog cellular network.
[24:42.020 --> 24:43.300]  We no longer have that.
[24:43.640 --> 24:45.840]  We saw growth in VoIP services.
[24:46.160 --> 24:59.080]  But the interesting thing with VoIP, if you'd asked me three years ago what the most exciting, groundbreaking, trendsetting thing would be in telecommunications, you know, in that decade, I would say VoIP.
[24:59.080 --> 25:03.480]  And the reason why was there was a lot of really exciting things happening around VoIP.
[25:03.820 --> 25:12.280]  It was possible for us as geeks and tinkerers to get access to some very, very, very cheap VoIP services.
[25:12.480 --> 25:19.340]  And even today, there's things like MagicJack, where you can call anywhere in the country for basically for free, with certain limitations.
[25:19.340 --> 25:22.420]  And I did write a column on MagicJack a few issues back.
[25:22.940 --> 25:25.440]  And I believe the back issue is for sale.
[25:25.640 --> 25:33.820]  So if you're interested in, you know, some MagicJack tricks and a little more information on that product, feel free to pick up the issue.
[25:34.140 --> 25:39.820]  But if you'd asked me a few years ago, I would have thought that that's the direction we all would have been going.
[25:39.820 --> 25:45.380]  And I would have thought that probably that would be the most exciting thing.
[25:45.540 --> 25:46.680]  Today, I don't think so.
[25:46.820 --> 25:55.740]  Because really what's happened with VoIP is what we used to do on circuit switch networks on the backend is now being done with VoIP on the backend.
[25:56.020 --> 25:58.920]  But it's all been transparent to you and me as consumers.
[25:59.720 --> 26:01.460]  And the billing hasn't changed.
[26:01.740 --> 26:06.060]  It's gotten cheaper for carriers to provide the service, but they're still billing you the same or more.
[26:06.500 --> 26:08.000]  It's kind of funny how that works.
[26:09.460 --> 26:11.220]  So there's been growth in VoIP.
[26:11.340 --> 26:12.060]  It's exciting.
[26:12.300 --> 26:16.260]  It allows us to make better use of the existing infrastructure we have now.
[26:16.560 --> 26:20.600]  But we haven't really grown that infrastructure in the last 10 years.
[26:20.600 --> 26:23.540]  At a real level beyond incremental.
[26:24.480 --> 26:27.520]  There's been broadband adoption at a pretty wide scale.
[26:28.120 --> 26:33.760]  We're now seeing the majority of people who have Internet access in the US now have broadband.
[26:34.160 --> 26:38.460]  But it's fairly small in terms of majority.
[26:38.900 --> 26:42.200]  It's something like 64% the last set of numbers I saw.
[26:42.500 --> 26:49.860]  This tremendously lags behind other developed countries like South Korea.
[26:49.860 --> 26:52.940]  where broadband adoption runs in the 90s.
[26:53.720 --> 26:55.380]  And we've seen a lot of...
[26:55.380 --> 27:02.760]  Anybody who has an iPhone knows that there's been a lot of new and creative ways to bill for the exact same service you've been enjoying.
[27:03.700 --> 27:08.080]  And those creative ways always seem to be more expensive.
[27:08.080 --> 27:20.720]  But we haven't seen a tremendous amount really at the network level fundamentally of innovation in really since 2001 to today.
[27:26.080 --> 27:37.900]  So where we are though is this interesting place where it's possible now to communicate virtually anywhere in the world for little or nothing.
[27:38.600 --> 27:40.960]  And that is a Pandora's box.
[27:41.840 --> 27:44.570]  Governments want to control online speech and content.
[27:45.180 --> 27:53.440]  And if you believe there's a First Amendment that's still meaningful, I have a bridge over there to sell you.
[27:53.880 --> 27:59.340]  The United States government is just as guilty of governments that are more overt in these efforts.
[27:59.340 --> 28:00.760]  It's just behind the scenes.
[28:01.320 --> 28:10.740]  For example, there is a strong desire in the cyber security community within the United States federal government for what they call a kill switch.
[28:11.120 --> 28:18.360]  Where somebody in Washington DC decides to flip a switch and we don't have Internet access anymore in the United States.
[28:18.360 --> 28:24.240]  And we've already built this in to the telephone system with CALEA.
[28:24.440 --> 28:28.820]  It's possible to kill telephone communications.
[28:29.180 --> 28:38.100]  It's not yet possible because there isn't yet code in the routers that are the core routers of our Internet infrastructure to do this.
[28:38.280 --> 28:42.040]  But one regulatory change and we have an Internet kill switch.
[28:42.480 --> 28:43.800]  And the United States has that.
[28:43.800 --> 28:54.160]  And anytime they say that they need to stop terrorism or political dissent that could be terrorism, somebody in Washington could anonymously decide to flip the kill switch.
[28:54.940 --> 29:06.880]  Even in the U.S., if you want to look at a more real and current example and get some people might call conspiracy theories, YouTube is frequently censored.
[29:07.060 --> 29:09.720]  We have Internet censorship today in the U.S. with DMCA takedown notices.
[29:12.960 --> 29:18.280]  Carriers want to slow innovation that they can't control by defeating net neutrality initiatives.
[29:18.760 --> 29:21.820]  And this is a very important debate that's happening right now.
[29:22.500 --> 29:35.460]  Should carriers be able to prioritize some traffic over others or charge you more for certain types of traffic than other types of traffic, thereby discouraging innovation in a particular direction?
[29:35.940 --> 29:40.780]  Many people like me believe that carriers should treat all traffic equally.
[29:40.780 --> 29:43.580]  A common carrier should be just that.
[29:44.420 --> 30:02.400]  Other people, largely with companies like Comcast and AT&T, believe that they should be able to control content that traverses their networks and thereby slow innovation that they can't figure out a way to bill you extra for or control.
[30:03.660 --> 30:07.920]  And innovation chokehold, I think, is an American competitiveness issue.
[30:08.020 --> 30:14.700]  Now, I don't normally stand up on stage and wave the patriotic flag and wear a red, white, and blue bikini.
[30:15.980 --> 30:20.720]  But we do, most of us, live in the free world and the United States.
[30:21.680 --> 30:23.700]  We're from all over the world, obviously.
[30:23.900 --> 30:26.500]  I would say the audience here is majority American.
[30:26.880 --> 30:31.040]  And believe me, South Korea isn't standing still.
[30:31.300 --> 30:33.060]  Japan isn't standing still.
[30:34.140 --> 30:37.820]  Countries that we compete with are not standing still.
[30:37.820 --> 30:59.280]  And so if we allow American corporations to decide what our policy is going to be as a nation, and they're allowed to decide this in the best interest of next quarter's earnings, what happens is the long-term investments that need to be made may not actually be made to keep America competitive in this space.
[30:59.280 --> 31:04.280]  So I normally don't encourage many people to become politically active.
[31:04.940 --> 31:07.880]  I think that sometimes it does more harm than good.
[31:08.100 --> 31:09.420]  But this is a mainstream issue.
[31:09.600 --> 31:19.540]  And if you feel like this Pandora's box should not be closed, then please make your views known to your representatives and senators.
[31:20.980 --> 31:23.960]  There are two exceptions to the lost decade.
[31:23.960 --> 31:30.500]  There were things that happened that I think were actually disruptive.
[31:30.960 --> 31:35.600]  And I think actually do open a lot of interesting possibilities.
[31:35.980 --> 31:37.940]  The first is social networking.
[31:38.640 --> 31:48.060]  And that actually now, because emails become so useless and choked with spam, for many people has become the default way to interact with friends and sometimes even family.
[31:48.560 --> 31:51.700]  And smartphones really began to take off.
[31:51.700 --> 31:55.260]  And so let's have a little fun.
[31:56.200 --> 31:57.640]  A quick show of hands.
[31:57.920 --> 32:00.080]  Who in this room has a smartphone?
[32:00.400 --> 32:04.240]  And by that I define a Blackberry, an Android device, or an iPhone.
[32:05.860 --> 32:06.500]  Okay.
[32:07.000 --> 32:10.860]  So I think there were maybe four people that don't.
[32:13.700 --> 32:15.760]  So leave your hands up.
[32:15.760 --> 32:17.240]  Leave your hands up.
[32:18.360 --> 32:18.820]  Okay.
[32:19.060 --> 32:21.160]  Because I want to see where this goes.
[32:21.460 --> 32:28.600]  And if we've got anybody here with a camera, I'd like to see a video of this later, because it's hard for me to see from the stage.
[32:30.060 --> 32:34.260]  Leave your hand up if you know exactly how that phone works.
[32:35.800 --> 32:36.260]  Okay.
[32:36.260 --> 32:38.320]  I'm taking mine down because I don't.
[32:39.220 --> 32:43.260]  Do you completely trust AT&T and Apple if you have an iPhone?
[32:45.140 --> 32:45.740]  No?
[32:46.260 --> 32:46.860]  Okay.
[32:47.440 --> 32:56.300]  Do you trust the vendor of every application that you have installed on your phone, such as Google or Facebook or MySpace or any of those things?
[32:56.300 --> 33:01.980]  Or does anybody have ifart, like that thing where you press the button and your iPhone farts?
[33:02.440 --> 33:03.600]  Like, do you trust that guy?
[33:04.020 --> 33:04.800]  I don't know.
[33:05.060 --> 33:05.220]  Okay.
[33:05.500 --> 33:08.300]  So we've still got a couple hands up.
[33:08.780 --> 33:11.400]  Do you trust that caller ID is reliable?
[33:13.640 --> 33:14.160]  No?
[33:14.720 --> 33:17.380]  Does anybody do any SMS banking?
[33:17.720 --> 33:18.700]  Do you trust SMS?
[33:21.100 --> 33:21.620]  Okay.
[33:21.620 --> 33:26.800]  If anybody's hand is still up, would you trust me with your phone?
[33:29.500 --> 33:29.900]  Okay.
[33:30.440 --> 33:32.880]  So if you trust me with your phone, bring it up here.
[33:33.000 --> 33:34.560]  I'll have it back to you in a couple of days.
[33:36.620 --> 33:43.400]  But I think that if it's gone the direction that at least from the front that I can see, that's a pretty powerful exercise.
[33:43.700 --> 33:43.780]  Right?
[33:44.260 --> 33:49.200]  We have these computers in our pockets, and we don't know how they work.
[33:49.200 --> 33:53.760]  And we don't trust who wrote the software that runs on them.
[33:53.980 --> 33:58.100]  And we don't trust the network that they're using.
[33:58.900 --> 34:04.360]  And we don't necessarily even trust the calls that are coming in.
[34:04.700 --> 34:08.240]  That they're really from who we think they are.
[34:08.380 --> 34:13.860]  And we don't necessarily need, you know, trust that the SMSs that we're getting are real.
[34:13.860 --> 34:17.740]  And so, you know, there's some really interesting things here.
[34:18.320 --> 34:22.920]  And, you know, I'd kind of like to run through a couple of scenarios.
[34:26.220 --> 34:31.020]  So, SMS is a really interesting piece.
[34:31.660 --> 34:34.560]  So who here uses text messages frequently?
[34:37.320 --> 34:40.260]  And that would probably be the majority of you.
[34:40.400 --> 34:43.620]  I know for myself, I text more than I talk now.
[34:44.540 --> 34:51.940]  And do you know where your SMS messages actually go when you send them?
[34:53.560 --> 34:55.440]  Are there copies of them anywhere?
[34:56.480 --> 34:58.920]  Is there a privacy policy associated?
[34:59.380 --> 35:01.080]  And, you know, I'm asking these rhetorically.
[35:01.220 --> 35:03.900]  We can get into, you know, into this a little more in Q&A.
[35:04.140 --> 35:19.540]  But my friend Broker who's here in the audience and myself, you know, we actually went through an exercise a few months ago where we tried to figure out just based on what SMS volumes are that are public, how much storage it would take.
[35:19.540 --> 35:23.460]  Because kind of one of the things that I do professionally is I deal with large scale storage.
[35:23.700 --> 35:32.980]  How much storage it would take to just archive every SMS message that's sent, you know, to, from, or through the United States on any given day.
[35:34.520 --> 35:40.000]  And, you know, it's a trivial amount of storage, particularly if you're using a technology like deduplication.
[35:40.300 --> 35:46.840]  Now, I don't have any reason to believe that things are being archived when they shouldn't be or that anybody in particular is doing it.
[35:48.540 --> 35:50.860]  But do you know that that's not the case?
[35:51.600 --> 36:00.220]  And have you ever sent anything in SMS that maybe you wouldn't want, you know, posted to a Twitter feed somewhere?
[36:01.540 --> 36:04.640]  And so, you know, this is an interesting question.
[36:04.840 --> 36:09.220]  And I really just, you know, I'm bringing this up not to make you especially paranoid.
[36:09.220 --> 36:22.140]  Although I probably should make you paranoid by pointing out that some of the surveillance infrastructure that's been implemented does allow the government to track your GPS coordinates at any given time, even if your phone's off.
[36:22.700 --> 36:30.280]  And some phones are able to turn themselves on and listen to what's going on around them when the appropriate command is sent to them.
[36:30.280 --> 36:39.780]  And, you know, all of this, the government or somebody using these commands who shouldn't would have to do.
[36:40.100 --> 36:44.400]  But, you know, the technology is built in to your device.
[36:44.720 --> 36:51.940]  And there aren't people really looking at these things and seeing whether they're secure and seeing whether they're really being used the way that they should.
[36:51.940 --> 36:59.600]  And there doesn't seem to be a lot of accountability for things like national security letters, which can activate all this technology.
[37:00.340 --> 37:09.080]  So, in the name of stopping terrorism, world governments have created a massive surveillance infrastructure, the likes of which have never really existed in human history.
[37:09.440 --> 37:16.240]  But in the name of being more popular, you have probably given even more personal information to Facebook and Google.
[37:17.060 --> 37:21.320]  And your privacy really is for sale when you use social networks.
[37:21.320 --> 37:24.660]  You are not a customer of Facebook, Google, or Twitter.
[37:24.980 --> 37:28.540]  You are the product that they sell to their customers.
[37:29.120 --> 37:33.100]  And if you feel like deleting your account after all this, well, don't bother.
[37:33.300 --> 37:34.480]  Because they still own your data.
[37:35.160 --> 37:39.920]  Have any of you actually read the privacy policy for Facebook, if you're a Facebook user?
[37:41.060 --> 37:41.540]  Okay.
[37:41.940 --> 37:44.560]  Which one is what I would ask?
[37:44.900 --> 37:48.360]  Because it changes every other week, roughly.
[37:49.300 --> 37:55.760]  And this is part of the danger with trusting privacy policies to actually secure our privacy.
[37:55.960 --> 38:00.560]  When the interests of services you use are opposed to your own interests.
[38:00.800 --> 38:06.120]  And when the operator of the service can change the privacy policy anytime they like.
[38:06.600 --> 38:09.540]  Effectively, all your base belong to them.
[38:12.460 --> 38:15.260]  So, your freedom really is at risk.
[38:15.820 --> 38:18.320]  And this actually has gotten fairly serious.
[38:18.640 --> 38:24.940]  You know, what if this guy on the screen were one of your Facebook friends and decided that you were probably a terrorist?
[38:26.120 --> 38:28.060]  That could end very badly for you.
[38:28.520 --> 38:31.360]  It ended very badly for somebody recently.
[38:31.960 --> 38:37.040]  Now, I don't know whether the guy that's alleged to be a terrorist is or isn't.
[38:37.200 --> 38:38.600]  I don't have that information.
[38:39.220 --> 38:43.640]  All I can look at is, well, there were some social networks involved.
[38:43.880 --> 38:46.600]  There were some lax privacy policies in place.
[38:46.840 --> 38:51.000]  There were some trust relationships that maybe shouldn't have been there that were there.
[38:51.000 --> 38:54.420]  And what that resulted in is somebody sitting in jail right now.
[38:54.900 --> 39:01.300]  And, you know, whether or not he belongs there, I'm not really qualified to comment.
[39:01.600 --> 39:16.140]  But, what I can comment on is that if all of these tools weren't there, and if they weren't being blindly trusted in ways that shouldn't be, then maybe that sequence of events would have not happened the same way that it did.
[39:17.520 --> 39:19.440]  So, here's a call to action.
[39:20.080 --> 39:25.700]  And, really, why we're all here is this is a social event.
[39:25.880 --> 39:29.000]  We're coming together as hackers to bounce ideas off each other.
[39:29.220 --> 39:37.380]  We're coming together to learn things that we don't already know and share things that we do know that other people might be able to drive even further.
[39:37.780 --> 39:40.280]  We're more connected than we've ever been before.
[39:40.660 --> 39:43.280]  And we're less connected than we've ever been before.
[39:43.280 --> 39:45.240]  Online communities are useful.
[39:46.040 --> 39:48.620]  But they're really no substitute for direct human interaction.
[39:48.960 --> 39:53.160]  So much more happens when we come together in communities like 2600 meetings.
[39:53.760 --> 39:55.840]  Like Metrics CreateSpace in Seattle.
[39:56.280 --> 39:59.680]  Or like conferences such as HOPE or DEFCON.
[40:00.300 --> 40:09.000]  With the rapid advances in smart phones and social media, we're inventing new technologies technologies at a faster pace than any time since the 1990s.
[40:09.200 --> 40:11.320]  And this has really gotten out of hand.
[40:11.500 --> 40:15.440]  I mean, we have a different, you know, iPhone application every hour practically.
[40:16.360 --> 40:18.420]  Android applications are ramping up.
[40:18.520 --> 40:22.160]  We're going to be having a new smart phone platform launch that I expect will get popular.
[40:23.400 --> 40:27.580]  I think these technologies are largely not secure.
[40:28.240 --> 40:31.140]  And they put way too much personal data in the hands of corporations.
[40:32.220 --> 40:34.680]  You guys need to be taking this stuff apart.
[40:35.420 --> 40:43.480]  You guys need to be showing the world that, you know, did you know in your phone that your GPS coordinates are readily available and could be misused?
[40:43.480 --> 40:48.720]  People taking this stuff apart is what's going to make the technology better.
[40:49.700 --> 40:57.020]  And the last piece is really think through the social implications when you're either inventing or consuming new technologies.
[40:58.280 --> 41:05.440]  There could be additional dimensions that, in the focus to get a product out the door, you don't necessarily consider.
[41:05.680 --> 41:09.200]  And we are innovating at a very rapid pace.
[41:09.200 --> 41:14.780]  So, I understand that it's necessary sometimes to be first to market with a product.
[41:15.020 --> 41:26.700]  But when you do that, if you haven't thought through what the implications really could be, you know, two or three degrees out, then possibly it could come back to bite you.
[41:27.440 --> 41:32.040]  And so, with that, I'll open up the floor to questions.
[41:32.620 --> 41:35.440]  Just one piece, I live in Beijing.
[41:35.440 --> 41:44.100]  So, any discussion of China or Chinese government policy in any of these areas, unfortunately, I can't address.
[41:44.560 --> 41:47.260]  But anything else, particularly the U.S.
[41:47.280 --> 41:49.200]  or anywhere else in the world, is fair game.
[41:49.380 --> 41:52.320]  So, I'd love to hear any questions you may have.
[41:57.320 --> 41:59.660]  And thank you for being such an awesome audience.
[42:13.160 --> 42:16.320]  There's, yeah, so there are some microphones in the aisleways.
[42:17.040 --> 42:21.120]  So, if you line up at the mics, I'm sure the...
[42:22.340 --> 42:24.620]  There's, yeah, there's some up in the front as well, I guess.
[42:24.920 --> 42:27.760]  I can't really see, you know, I got these bright lights in my eyes.
[42:27.960 --> 42:30.300]  So, maybe if the people with the hope...
[42:30.300 --> 42:30.800]  This on?
[42:30.860 --> 42:31.540]  Security goon.
[42:31.660 --> 42:32.160]  Yeah, there we go.
[42:33.540 --> 42:34.620]  Whoever asked, is this on?
[42:34.720 --> 42:35.000]  It's on.
[42:35.000 --> 42:37.020]  I got an infrastructure question.
[42:37.420 --> 42:38.340]  Yeah, yeah, what's up?
[42:38.620 --> 42:40.620]  How much fiber is still dark?
[42:41.940 --> 42:43.680]  How much fiber is still dark?
[42:43.780 --> 42:44.700]  That's a great question.
[42:45.000 --> 42:52.580]  So, fiber optic cable, when it gets laid, basically has inside of it a number of strands.
[42:53.460 --> 42:57.600]  And so, in order... laying fiber isn't a very interesting thing to do.
[42:57.780 --> 43:01.840]  I mean, you dig a trench and you drop the cable in it and it's, you know, a few dollars a foot.
[43:03.720 --> 43:09.140]  What's the hard part is getting that fiber what we call lit in the telecommunications industry.
[43:09.340 --> 43:15.720]  And that's where you have a whole bunch of equipment that's very expensive that pulls data along that fiber.
[43:15.880 --> 43:20.980]  And it uses a technology, the most popular one currently is called DWDM.
[43:21.560 --> 43:28.200]  So, typically what will happen is a carrier that's laying a fiber optic network, they won't necessarily...
[43:28.680 --> 43:32.760]  You know, this technology can be changed out relatively easily with line cards.
[43:33.140 --> 43:43.620]  So, as we come up with new and better ways to transfer data faster, you just pull out, you know, every couple of miles, one card and drop another in.
[43:43.620 --> 43:46.140]  And, you know, this can be done in a redundant way.
[43:46.380 --> 43:50.220]  But there's so much fiber in the ground that isn't lit.
[43:50.460 --> 43:53.620]  Because typically what you're only doing is lighting one strand in a cable.
[43:54.040 --> 43:57.140]  And you may be leasing other strands to other companies.
[43:57.420 --> 43:59.900]  So, there's a tremendous amount of dark fiber.
[44:01.120 --> 44:03.560]  Dark fiber, though, isn't a very useful thing.
[44:03.920 --> 44:05.200]  You can't do much with it.
[44:05.320 --> 44:06.640]  You can run some, you know...
[44:06.640 --> 44:12.680]  We've got technology where you can run some metropolitan area networks at relatively low speed without lighting it up.
[44:12.680 --> 44:22.620]  But until we come up with a way to use dark fiber across long distances without this very expensive equipment, it doesn't do a whole lot of good.
[44:24.900 --> 44:26.300]  You didn't answer my question.
[44:26.460 --> 44:27.420]  Yeah, your question...
[44:27.420 --> 44:28.700]  So, the question is...
[44:28.700 --> 44:33.680]  So, for every mile of fiber that we have, and for...
[44:33.680 --> 44:35.720]  You know, it's like basically you've got to have...
[44:35.720 --> 44:37.360]  You need to know for each...
[44:38.200 --> 44:42.960]  Each trunk, how many carriers are using that fiber strand.
[44:43.240 --> 44:48.640]  So, some companies don't actually lease any fiber to other companies.
[44:48.640 --> 44:49.440]  Some do.
[44:49.760 --> 44:52.060]  It's all proprietary information internally.
[44:52.340 --> 44:54.400]  So, all I can do is conjecture.
[44:54.660 --> 45:00.660]  But I can say on an average cable, I'd be surprised if more than 10% of it is lead.
[45:01.260 --> 45:05.840]  At the end of the 90s, it was something like 97% was dark.
[45:06.020 --> 45:08.640]  And all that is potential infrastructure.
[45:08.920 --> 45:12.360]  That's bandwidth waiting to be used that isn't being used.
[45:12.700 --> 45:14.160]  Well, it's potential infrastructure.
[45:14.160 --> 45:15.680]  But keep in mind, so you've...
[45:15.680 --> 45:19.980]  If you light up fiber, you can change out that technology with technology...
[45:19.980 --> 45:26.060]  With newer technology that is able to move data at faster rates along the same fiber strand.
[45:26.060 --> 45:36.820]  And so, part of the incremental innovation that's happened between 2000 and now is we've gotten to faster speeds on the existing fiber that we already have.
[45:37.060 --> 45:42.000]  So, I don't see that incremental approach changing.
[45:42.240 --> 45:46.460]  We're not going to see ginormous deployments of lighting up dark fiber.
[45:46.620 --> 45:48.820]  I mean, it costs billions of dollars to do that.
[45:49.020 --> 45:51.320]  So, what I'm guessing will...
[45:51.320 --> 45:54.980]  And we already have more bandwidth on the backbones than we really can use.
[45:54.980 --> 45:56.000]  I mean, the problem...
[45:56.000 --> 45:59.860]  The bandwidth problem that we're having currently is how do you get at that last mile.
[46:00.020 --> 46:02.640]  And that's been the problem for the last 15 years.
[46:07.280 --> 46:09.720]  I can say that I run a 2.4...
[46:09.720 --> 46:11.800]  Well, at work...
[46:12.960 --> 46:15.320]  Now, I can't get into too much detail of what I do at work.
[46:15.440 --> 46:21.180]  But I can say that we have some backbone networks at work that are grossly underutilized.
[46:21.180 --> 46:22.240]  And it's largely...
[46:22.920 --> 46:26.200]  It's not that we can't throw data at other carriers.
[46:26.200 --> 46:28.020]  It's that they can't accept it quickly enough.
[46:29.880 --> 46:31.640]  This question is mostly semantic.
[46:31.860 --> 46:33.940]  But I think it's kind of important when discussing these issues.
[46:34.180 --> 46:38.780]  You referred to companies sending DMCA takedown notices to YouTube as censorship.
[46:39.160 --> 46:43.860]  Does one company telling another company threatening them with legal action constitute censorship?
[46:43.860 --> 46:46.420]  Or would you say it's something...
[46:46.420 --> 46:50.680]  Some would argue it's something that comes specifically from the government that...
[46:50.680 --> 46:52.660]  I believe that it's censorship.
[46:53.180 --> 46:54.620]  So you have content.
[46:55.060 --> 46:57.040]  And that content is taken down.
[46:57.300 --> 46:59.680]  And it's taken down through a legal mechanism.
[47:00.280 --> 47:02.280]  So that, to me, is censorship.
[47:03.280 --> 47:05.880]  You can... reasonable people can disagree on this, right?
[47:07.640 --> 47:08.600]  I have...
[47:08.600 --> 47:09.920]  This is my personal belief.
[47:12.990 --> 47:19.730]  I was wondering what your thoughts were on Moxie Marlinspike's work with Android applications for secure text messaging and phone calls.
[47:19.830 --> 47:23.010]  I think it's Red Phone and Text Secure.
[47:23.110 --> 47:24.350]  I forget the name of the other one.
[47:24.630 --> 47:26.290]  I haven't seen it, but I'd love to.
[47:26.610 --> 47:27.030]  Send it to me.
[47:27.550 --> 47:27.830]  Okay.
[47:27.830 --> 47:27.890]  Sure.
[47:29.090 --> 47:32.150]  I have a question on sort of...
[47:32.150 --> 47:33.650]  What are your thoughts on the...
[47:34.390 --> 47:35.290]  I can't remember the...
[47:36.210 --> 47:39.210]  Colloquially, it's called the Truth in Caller ID Bill.
[47:39.450 --> 47:40.950]  Oh, the Truth in Caller ID Bill.
[47:41.090 --> 47:41.270]  Yeah.
[47:41.410 --> 47:42.230]  What do you think about that?
[47:42.350 --> 47:43.150]  What are your thoughts?
[47:43.190 --> 47:50.790]  And what would be the benefits or disadvantages of requiring that caller ID is legitimized somehow from its source?
[47:51.010 --> 47:54.130]  So let's talk about this a little bit, because that's a really interesting topic.
[47:55.790 --> 48:01.850]  You know, living in China right now, when I call somebody from my Chinese cell phone, usually the number comes up unavailable.
[48:01.850 --> 48:10.030]  And apparently, the majority of people that I call, and this may or may not be, you know, representative of people overall.
[48:10.210 --> 48:17.550]  It's just, you know, my group of friends, believe that when the phone says unavailable and there isn't a number that pops up, it's a monster calling.
[48:17.990 --> 48:19.350]  And they don't answer.
[48:21.870 --> 48:26.710]  So, you know, caller ID is one of those things that isn't especially reliable anyway.
[48:26.710 --> 48:31.350]  We haven't even really figured out, you know, how to make it work across international boundaries yet.
[48:31.510 --> 48:36.310]  In some cases, even, you know, within the United States, it doesn't work very well.
[48:38.730 --> 48:56.850]  So, a truth in caller ID bill, it's going to be difficult to enforce, because what has to be proven in the legislation as it's written now is that you intentionally obfuscated your caller ID somehow, and that you did it with malicious intent.
[48:59.130 --> 49:06.390]  So, one of the other interesting problems with caller ID is that if you pass a law in the United States, well, the phone system is global.
[49:06.730 --> 49:14.510]  And so, what I would expect to happen is that the malicious people that are doing malicious caller ID things would just move outside of the boundaries of the United States.
[49:14.990 --> 49:20.150]  And then what do you do to enforce the law against somebody who isn't particularly known?
[49:20.350 --> 49:23.470]  Because with the world of VoIP, it gets very interesting.
[49:23.470 --> 49:27.950]  I mean, it becomes very difficult to see where calls are actually coming from and who's sending them.
[49:28.770 --> 49:31.810]  We've opened... we've let the genie out of the bottle on SS7.
[49:32.010 --> 49:44.710]  And, you know, when some sleazy VoIP provider in Romania has the same access to the SS7 networks as Verizon, then you really aren't safe anywhere.
[49:44.990 --> 49:47.690]  So, don't trust caller ID is the bottom line.
[49:47.710 --> 49:52.750]  And if there's a law that gets passed, you totally know laws are always effective when they get passed, right?
[49:55.990 --> 49:56.870]  Super presentation.
[49:57.830 --> 50:00.770]  You talked about government monitoring phone calls.
[50:01.030 --> 50:04.750]  But there's... cell phone spyware is a very scary thing.
[50:04.950 --> 50:06.230]  And it can be downloaded.
[50:06.570 --> 50:09.510]  And if I put it on your phone, I can track your movements.
[50:09.690 --> 50:12.330]  I can watch... listen to your phone calls.
[50:12.470 --> 50:15.990]  I can turn on the microphones or listen to your room telephone calls.
[50:16.730 --> 50:18.430]  It's not getting the media attention, though.
[50:18.430 --> 50:19.490]  I think it probably deserves.
[50:19.930 --> 50:21.090]  You know, it sure would.
[50:21.730 --> 50:27.510]  If Sarah Palin downloaded cell phone spyware, or better yet, if Bristol Palin did.
[50:27.870 --> 50:32.050]  And, you know, I think Fox News would be all over that.
[50:32.390 --> 50:34.830]  And that's really part of the call to action, right?
[50:35.010 --> 50:39.430]  We have these devices that have ridiculous security flaws.
[50:39.630 --> 50:43.990]  And anybody who really knows anything in this area is well aware of this.
[50:43.990 --> 50:50.550]  There are APIs that leave large swaths of things that should never be open open.
[50:51.230 --> 50:55.470]  And really what we're not seeing is these platforms...
[50:55.470 --> 50:58.310]  Well, you know, there's an attack surface that's as big as goatse.
[50:58.530 --> 51:00.310]  And nobody's really doing much with it.
[51:01.570 --> 51:05.070]  Please, somebody attacks Sarah Palin or Bristol Palin.
[51:05.350 --> 51:08.950]  Let's not call for attacks on specific people.
[51:10.130 --> 51:12.890]  I don't want to be hauled off of here in handcuffs.
[51:13.150 --> 51:23.310]  But what I would say is that, really, as hackers, as freaks, as security people, we need to be looking at this stuff.
[51:23.310 --> 51:27.150]  And we need to be talking about this stuff with people that don't know as much as we do.
[51:28.490 --> 51:29.010]  Hi.
[51:29.410 --> 51:34.970]  In my phone, I have a setting that says, like, don't send identification.
[51:35.130 --> 51:38.630]  And when I call somebody, it'll show up as a no number.
[51:38.930 --> 51:43.970]  Is that actually something in my phone that's preventing my phone number from being sent out?
[51:43.990 --> 51:46.630]  Or is that done by the provider?
[51:46.850 --> 51:49.590]  So what you have is a GSM phone, presumably.
[51:49.850 --> 51:50.050]  Yes.
[51:50.050 --> 51:53.010]  And what you're doing is you're setting a flag.
[51:53.230 --> 51:58.550]  It's a GSM feature where you can instruct the GSM network not to send your caller ID.
[51:59.330 --> 52:01.110]  That can be honored or not.
[52:01.730 --> 52:03.610]  And it isn't controlled by your phone.
[52:03.770 --> 52:06.630]  Your phone's just the interface through which you can select that.
[52:06.950 --> 52:14.710]  If you have a CDMA phone, if you dial star six, seven, you can selectively block your caller ID.
[52:14.830 --> 52:16.850]  Or you can have your carrier block it for every call.
[52:17.410 --> 52:17.890]  Okay.
[52:18.070 --> 52:18.390]  Thank you.
[52:20.290 --> 52:21.110]  Hello there.
[52:21.590 --> 52:24.610]  Going back to infrastructure and community for a second.
[52:25.030 --> 52:34.470]  I'm curious your thoughts on what we can do as people to liberate ourselves from these corporations and actually build our own phone networks, either wireless or otherwise.
[52:34.950 --> 52:39.670]  So the scope of my talk really is a call to action.
[52:39.670 --> 52:42.790]  But it isn't a call to any specific action.
[52:42.790 --> 52:45.090]  And I have to leave things open-ended.
[52:45.930 --> 52:48.410]  I don't know how all this is going to shake out.
[52:48.610 --> 52:51.770]  I don't know three years from now how this is going to look.
[52:51.970 --> 52:53.890]  And really that's up to all of you.
[52:54.470 --> 53:03.630]  And it's up to you if you're passionate about this issue to look at a way where you can leverage where you're awesome and what you know and how you can inspire other people.
[53:04.470 --> 53:14.250]  And so really all I can do is encourage you to take that part of you that understands that part of this issue that other people don't.
[53:14.250 --> 53:16.770]  And shed light on it.
[53:17.150 --> 53:18.070]  Make it public.
[53:18.430 --> 53:19.250]  Talk to other people.
[53:19.390 --> 53:20.090]  You're here at HOPE.
[53:20.230 --> 53:21.090]  That's what this is for.
[53:21.350 --> 53:24.410]  I have time for one more question and then we have to go.
[53:25.270 --> 53:36.310]  When do you think routers will be a thing of the past and the Internet will be wide open, CDMA or something like that, with just digital signal processors everywhere?
[53:37.330 --> 53:43.330]  As long as we need to push packets and as long as we're still using TCP/IP, we will need routers.
[53:43.770 --> 53:45.950]  So I don't think that's going away anytime soon.
[53:46.950 --> 53:49.550]  You know, what the transport is before we get to there.
[53:49.750 --> 53:54.470]  And I don't think we're going to see wireless as what we're using for our trucks.
[53:54.650 --> 53:59.630]  I mean, that's going to be glass in the ground and it's going to stay that way, at least for the foreseeable future, I think.
[54:01.570 --> 54:03.810]  You know, that's an interesting question.
[54:03.810 --> 54:09.870]  But until we get away from using TCP/IP, I don't see that happening.
[54:10.510 --> 54:10.790]  Okay.
[54:10.990 --> 54:12.530]  Well, you've been a fantastic audience.
[54:12.750 --> 54:13.850]  Thank you so much.