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Thank you.
And we are the 31st
girls Congress and this bigger
and better than ever, according to the
world, over about
4000 tickets have been sold.
And we all know the world is never wrong
about anything.
There have been great presentations about
very interesting discoveries, new
flaws in software protocols.
There were seven breaches are
quite astounding.
So far, about 31 years we've
been breaking all the things
and and
have been providing proof that things are
broken.
Nonetheless, it seems that we are having
for any future in which are more, more
a lot more things that can be broken.
I think about the Internet of Things
and the idea of having
literally billions of devices on
the planet with
no data from the.
Basically,
one of the premises of what I we'll be
talking about is that
breaking stuff to show that you should
make stuff less breakable
does not scale terribly well.
And by in itself,
this Congress is an illustration of
of that problem.
The IT industry has never
built in security, design security
in its products.
It just has never prevented hackers
from testing it in.
Well, testing it afterwards
is not really tenable.
And a few more
little problems, yeah,
which is what we call
our ethics
and the extent to which we live up to
that.
I'm not saying that
the current sad state of affairs
in information security is our
fault.
To the contrary, what?
One of her premises is that
the hacker communities have a set of
flameouts that
have made us achieve
less than we could have
by not living up to our own ethics,
the six tenets of the hacker ethic
and even more important, by
not being excellent to each other.
Roughly.
The six,
the notion I'll be talking about this
as being politically indifferent,
as being
too political.
And.
There we go.
It's not being too
focused or not
focused enough on usability, usability
as being a bit tribal,
as having too many rock stars and not
enough heroes.
And so on, but first of all,
the political indifference,
a lot of times people say,
well, I just heck,
I don't do politics
at the same time, that
it kind of denies the very fact that
even if you just write free software,
that is a political act,
if only because you then claim
that the current system of copyright is
broken.
If you design a new centralized
infrastructure, that's also a
political act because it allows
for more mass surveillance
and more data collection about this.
Not writing usable software is also
a choice about who will be using your
software.
The opposite is.
Being too political.
Very good example of this is the
recent discussion about the
funding of the project.
People were disputing or let's say
accusing the Tor project of being stooges
of the United States government because
the United States government is funding
the Tor project,
which is a bit
unfair, because
if no one will be funding the project,
there will be no talk
around.
It is a massive project, requires lots
of investment and apparently
nobody else but the United States
government was interested in funding this
stuff.
And yet we're talking about funding
projects.
It's a lot more interesting to look
into who is being
found funding, go to what to do what,
instead of assuming that the funding
is that that the
origins of the money already indicate
a certain intent.
And in the case of the project,
there are two approaches to that.
I start auditing the talk of this
code.
It's I'm not sure the developers would
very much welcome and find
any problems in there
or find a different way funding the top
projects.
That doesn't mean you can criticize the
funding model, but it's more helpful
if you do at least one of the two other
things as well.
And that doesn't mean that there are more
questions about how
we engage with the state.
But I'd like to see
more a nuanced approach to discussions
about how we engage the states on the one
hand.
It wouldn't be bad to take geographical
differences into account.
If you only look at your
fellow members of this community
through the prism of how
the United States government functions,
especially the police forces
or with the traumas of
the oppression by the Stasi in
East Germany and before the Nazis,
and we are having a conversation with
people with a different history than
that.
That's not entirely fair either.
On the other hand,
a lot of the fellow Europeans of the
Germans could do a lot worse and
learn the hard lessons learned in
Germany and
the hard lessons being learned in the
United States, which in
my book effectively is a police state
right now.
But just claiming that anyone will engage
with the government automatically
is licking the jackboot
of the thugs
just doesn't work that way.
On top of that,
there's a lot of discussion about
that, let's assume
that you want to improve democracy and
the rule of law or at least
personal freedoms.
There's a lot of unnecessary
discussions about the validity of tactics
of whether people are being radical
enough, being
radicalized, fantastic, because
the more radical people are,
the more effective the moderates can be
to take positions they otherwise cannot
take.
But if you only have radicals, you won't
have any morals left.
So you need both in terms of
where you are on the spectrum, there
may be more common values between
the moderates and the radicals than they
probably realize, and there is value in
cooperating or at least appreciating
the differences because
the different parts of the spectrum help
each other.
That's in substance, but also on tactics
should not be forgotten that
the data retention directive,
the victory over that was achieved
by strategic litigation,
not by street protests,
not by direct action,
not by Verizon Kouf.
It was just utterly the
one of the most bizarre ways of
activism you can have,
just spewing hacking
the law, basically.
On the other hand,
we could never have defeated ACTA
even without a lobby in Brussels, which
was an interesting collaboration
across various spectrums.
But we could not have done that without
Polish football supporters
doing street protests in the freezing
cold outside,
even though a good deal of those football
supporters might
be uncomfortably far to
the right end of the political spectrum.
I still think they deserve a statue
for stopping ACTA.
So basically.
The idea of that others have to stop
liking what you don't like in terms of
substance or in tactics
is not very productive.
And then this is the notion which
I forgot, the main tradition is
we have not been terribly good at
communicating
a lot of basic several basic concepts
in computing
just to illustrate that.
Teenagers nowadays get computer science
and secondary education in the form of
learning the ropes of Microsoft Office
2013.
This probably is not the best way
to understand computers.
But that does reflect a
wider understanding of society,
of computers, as of computer
systems, as magic black boxes,
which you cannot possibly understand
and isn't even worth to look into
and to teach other people what
I mean.
Alan Turing has died about 50 years ago,
and we still have not find an idiom
or a language to actually explain
what general-purpose computing means to
me.
And mortal's for normal people,
your parents, your neighbors,
your plumber.
I don't care.
Everyone has a mental model of the car
is about the internal combustion engine.
Thus, to some extent,
a lot of people don't even have that
internal model of this mental
idea of the computer does
is just a magic thing and you push
buttons on it in a certain pattern
and something happens.
Are concepts of
privacy, and our file sharing is good,
but the only attempt I'm aware of
of explaining that is what Jeremy
Zimmerman does with his concept of data
love, which is
terribly romantic.
But he's French and we should
thank him for that. I mean, this idea of
file sharing is data.
Love is fantastic.
It's also this notion of privacy
as intimacy.
It helps a bit.
But still,
how many people do you encounter that say
I have nothing to hide?
Well, you know, way too many.
So this
idea of sharing knowledge starts
with having at least a language to share
that, especially with laypersons,
and the results of that
are very bad legislation.
And that's why I put in this quote by
military honors under the current laws,
protect our infallible systems against
anomalous people, you
or us.
An example of that is
what the expert controls in
the updated version.
Our arrangements say what the definition
is of intrusion software
and that software, among other things,
does it modifies
the standard execution path of a
program of process in order to allow
the execution of externally provided
instructions that apply this
definition to a browser that is
JavaScript capable.
You all are running intrusion software
on your computers that
are susceptible to export controls from
the revolutionary arrangement.
If you take this text literally
with hopefully no one ever will do.
This is not intentionally done wrong.
Despite what you may think
about the military industrial complex,
there was no arrangement to be updated to
include intrusion.
Software was a generally
bellman's measure to
prevent companies for exporting all sorts
of nasty stuff to nefarious
regimes like Syria and others.
But the net result is extremely
unhelpful.
And this would
not have happened if the people drafting
these documents at least had an idea of
what computer software is and what it
does, it would also have
been extremely helpful if
a little bits of civil society we have
weren't overburdened by things like data
retention, net neutrality, copyright
reform, etc.
I would have been able to participate in
this, but were simply overwhelmed.
So even if you don't want to become
politically active
and just hack,
it would be extremely helpful if you were
to at least help civil society
like digital coverage, digital, Gizelle,
SCHAFT at European level,
European digital rights
to help others,
not to write stupid laws like these.
And there's
also useability,
this is my famous error message.
I got a yitzchak.
It informs me that someone else has sent
me a message that was intended to
another session surprise.
I have multiple devices on
which I run exemptive clients.
Now, imagine that you don't want to know
about Otar or you may think
there's some STD because you don't know
what the acronym means and you
just want to do instant messaging
with someone else and you're continuously
confronted with stuff like this.
I have to choose between using a
yabut client that does stuff like this
and just use Skype.
The impact of that is that most people
will start using Skype again instead
of a Yagmur lines like Getsy,
and why would you care about
that?
Because you will be using another client.
Now, 50
is fine if you only want to communicate
with other people who also use that
stuff.
And here comes to clinch
the security of a social network
that is community communicating.
In addition, they will be
dictated by the amount of hassle
the largest group in the network will put
up with.
So in order to have secure
communications, you must have
usable communications for the largest,
the greatest common denominator.
Again, normal people,
not fish.
So even if you don't believe in graphical
user interfaces, even if you prefer to
torture yourself using V.I.
or IMEX,
they both suck.
You're your own security depends
on the extent to which other people have
usable, secure means of communication.
So I don't care about your hate
or jihadism or
to tell the people don't call on
Facebook.
Facebook is where the other people are.
And this is not a funny phenomenon,
tribalism.
If you were an anthropologist, I would
observe 15 to
30 Seefried.
This is a tribe of mostly white,
upper middle class, university educated
or at least flunked out of university,
middle sipping, maid sipping
and a surplus of facial hair.
I mean.
Diversity wise, congratulations,
we may have reached parity
with the IT industry in general
on the gender ratio, looking around
at this fine
event, fantastic.
Instead of 50 percent females, we have
maybe 20 to 30 percent.
Most people here are from Germany, the
Benelux, Poland, Scandinavia.
And by that logic, there should at least
be a few hundred people of Turkish
descent in this group.
There are roughly no.
It also means that the I.D., a
hacker ethic of we won't judge
you on bogus credentials
such as academic achievements, race,
gender, etc., we do not live
up to that. There aren't apparently are
barriers. That in itself is a problem.
I have no idea how to solve it because
I'm a white male.
The facial hair.
But let's at least acknowledge that.
And then we have
this interesting phenomenon, and I think
that kind of is the rock that ties
the room together, rock
star culture.
And we have fantastic heroes.
We need more of them, let's say Chelsea
Manning, Arthur Snowden,
John Kiriakou, those are true heroes.
This is not what this is about.
This is about some of
our heroes were also our rock stars.
And the reason I'm using the rock star
analogy is that Ms.
Roxon stands to be assholes that
treat a group is like shit trash
hotel rooms and are not excellent
for each other.
And.
That fosters a culture in
which the other problems can occur
if it's important to have rockstars,
you get into a level of
competition that's unhealthy.
It's not helpful in terms of
cooperation.
And if you're the
most interesting way of getting to the
top is by breaking stuff, because
breaking stuff is, by definition, easier
than building stuff that's unbreakable.
It also puts an incentive for doing a
shitty thing of just accusing
your perceived competitors of not being
ideologically pure
or to have put pressure on
content committees by saying that speaker
has Nazi friends and that and therefore
the speaker's guilty by association.
Let's just judge on the merits
of the person alone and not on the on
whoever he or she associates with.
It also precludes usability
because to write usable software,
if you have code that software, you by
definition can no longer adjust its
usability.
It's like having a child.
And of course, if it's your child, it's
the smartest, most wonderful child in the
world.
It may still be a shitty child.
So sort of in conclusion,
I think if you want to fix certain things
in our culture, you should at least fix
our culture and maybe the
politics. And by the way, being
too political is less of a problem, not
being apolitical, I think.
So keep on
people phoning all the things,
keep them decentralizing all the things,
people encrypting all the things
I just realized is not necessary enough.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Walter.
We have time for a few questions.
Are there questions from the Internet?
Not yet, so.
No, not at the moment.
Not at the moment.
OK, so microphone number three,
I don't have a question, but
I just want to say thank you for this
talk.
You're welcome.
Microphone number two,
hi, also thank you for the talk, but
I think you mentioned a lot of very
important things here.
But I also think that it's important
to think about, you know,
the thing one of the things you mentioned
last like you're saying
that we should judge a person only
by themselves and not by the people
they associate with.
But one might also ask
and that is something that has to do with
the person themselves, why do
they associate with Nazis?
Wait, why do they do that?
And I think that's a legitimate question
to ask. And I would like you to maybe
elaborate why you think that
this somehow doesn't say something about
a person.
I think it's important
to to think about this as well.
And I think that it is problematic.
And, for example, to
to to be friends with a Nazi.
Yeah, well.
Personally, I wouldn't associate with
Nazis.
However, I consider a person who was
willing to do so a better person than me
simply because that person considers
evil Nazis fellow humans.
If you start denying the humanity in
other people, you're becoming a
totalitarian.
My question you could to my question
around, that's not what I said.
Let me let me put it this way.
There may be there may be other reasons,
the example I have in mind is someone
who actually is
is not considered by
the culture standards of the
country, and the person is living as
a white person who nonetheless is
associated with a neo-Nazi because they
are both from a very modest
Working-Class upbringing and realize the
kind of challenges they have had to
become Hecker's themselves to overcome.
Neither of them are the
well, the white, middle
class, university educated
mother sipping male
a surplus of facial hair.
That in itself can be, I think,
a fair a good reason why someone
is still talking to someone else like
that. And let me say,
OK, we have been got
this speech already.
Anyway, Wallenberg
is brother in law was US gerring.
I mean, Wallenberg will help
so many people escaping the Holocaust
nonetheless, had one of the architects
of the Holocaust at this Christmas dinner
because it was his brother in law.
Well, I'm slightly exaggerating here.
People do not always get to associate
with the associate, not do not always get
to choose who they associate with.
If only because, for example, family.
What would you find it reasonable
to exclude someone for not disavowing
his or her family?
Well, clearly disavowing
the ideology and not being part of that.
To answer that, we have to
make sure that everybody could
try to have a question, so there was one
person from the Internet.
OK.
Well, actually, there are two now, but
the first question is, how
do we solve the problem with rock star
Kaija?
By demanding that our heroes
keep on being excellent to each other and
us just not
to apply a lower standard
so our heroes than we would otherwise
apply for other members of our community
as simple as that.
Microphone number three,
you mentioned that there should always
be moderates and extremists,
so to say that they will
all set against each other, but
I think that a big problem going on
there is that generally the moderates
don't understand why the extremists do
what they do and the other way around.
And there's not really any communication
between the two. So they should
coexist, but there should be more
communication as to exactly who does what
and why and how the two can work
together.
But I think that's kind of the important
part of that.
Thank you for the rephrasing my point.
And I did myself.
OK, OK, so we
are short on time. We'll have one more
question from the Internet.
OK, in regards to the diversity
issue, do you have any information
on the development in regards to
this issue?
And is there a tendency
to towards a less open group of
like tipping people with
facial hair?
Actually, as a person with facial hair?
I have no idea.
And just to just quote Nick Farr will
certainly is not us this time.
If you have to start thinking about it,
you can only there's only one thing
certain you're doing it wrong.
And it's I think it's mostly a matter to
ask people, for example, who have a
visiting hackerspace but who did not
return, why they didn't return.
It's this is a question that
cannot be answered by the people who
are part of a still partake in
the community. It's about the people who
took a look and left.
And I have to do that.
It's about realizing
that walking around in a
T-shirt and sipping Martha
in itself already
signals we have codes
and you must know the codes to fit
in.
But much further than that, I don't.
That's
OK.
So final question from microphone.
My pleasure.
But please make it short.
Yeah, I just have one question.
I think there is a lot of
kydd on, you know, programing
on that one for people that want to
learn. But I feel that there is a lot
of less guides about, you know,
what you can do to get involved in
politics or take actual civil action
in this community at least.
Well, actually, I mentioned European
digital rights and they publish kind
of Dumela like guides like
a guide to the Brussels maze and
stuff like that. And several other NGOs
and civil society published similar
documents.
And
this is not meant as a let me Google this
for you, but it actually is quite a bit
of information available and
quite often also in your native language.
Thank you.
OK, so as we are out of time, so
this concludes our Q&A session,
please give another round of applause to
Walter.