*36c3 preroll music*
Herald: Our next speaker: Basically, he eats up script kiddies for breakfast, I've heard.
He drives the open source train and his currency is uptime. Please welcome
with a very warm applause Julian Oliver and his "Server Infrastructure for the
Global Rebellion" talk.
Julian: So, yep. Great. Very pleased to be here. Amazing environment, indeed, as
usual with the CCC. First of all, I'm not at all a spokesperson for extinction
rebellion. I do not speak for this movement called extinction rebellion.
Whatever I say here tonight is entirely my own opinion. And so not to be taken as any
overarching description of the movement more generally. What you're looking at
here, of course, might simply be associated with this thing called
extinction rebellion. But it is not. It is, in fact, the extinction symbol. And
this is the part where in the first half of my talk, I depress you. But then we'll
go for a nice, big sort of warm finish. The extinction symbol was, in fact,
created in 2011 by a UK artist called ESP. And this entirely relates to, not
extinction rebellion, being long before extinction rebellion, but the fact that we
have entered the sixth mass extinction on this planet that we are on. And this has
became practically scientific consensus in 2015, where it has been fairly surely
asserted and since reasserted that we have in fact entered the largest extinction
event on this planet in 65 million years. Global populations of fish, birds, mammals
down by about 60 % in 42 years and according to the WWF a few years ago. The
UN puts it at about 150 species lost per day. Now, that's a little bit more than
the father of biodiversity, E.O. Wilson, that says it's around about 27,000 a year.
In other words, one species lost every 19 minutes. But what does that really mean?
Well, when we're talking about background extinction rates, we're looking at the at
the background extinction rate for the last 65 million years has been about one
to five species a year. So not 150 a day, but 1 to 5 a year. This is fairly
conclusive of the fact that we have entered the sixth extinction on this
planet. I'm here in Germany, for instance. Just a couple of years ago, there was this
Dutch-German study done that now reflects pretty much the state of the entire
European continent of the 3/4 of all flying insect biomass dropping in about 25
years. So three quarters less flying insects in 25 years and supposedly
dropping it around about 2.5 a year. Now we need insects much more than they need
us. They are the glue layer of our food system. But within the planetary boundary
and biological sense, they are absolutely intrinsic. They also keep much of our
water very fresh. As one biologist put it, we humans will never see the the end of
the insects. We need them that much. Now, climate change has become very much
ascribed to this loss of species. But in fact, it's not climate change that is
responsible for species decline per say. The WWF Living Planet Index attributes
about seven per cent of species declines to warming. In fact, the real reason why
we are losing so many species so quickly is because we're changing their habitats.
We're just removing them entirely, and certainly urbanization is a part of that
and land change as a result of warming, but primarily it's because we've replaced
habitats with with farmland. This is, for instance, in the Amazon basin carving into
the Amazon right there just to lay down some soy livestock, feed crops. And
there's another another another view there. Now, most of that soy, all of that
soy is really exported for livestock feed, mostly to Europe and to China. But getting
onto the warming thing, which is obviously a massive existential threat we do all
face. We can safely say now that the Paris accord has entirely failed. The warming
projections presently we're looking at about 2.8 to 3.2 by the end of the
century, not including self reinforcing feedbacks. In other words, things like
permafrost melts, just releasing tons of methane into the air or the wildfires that
we've been seeing in Australia and over in California that are just sending gigatons
of carbon into the air. So this is still to be seen as relatively optimistic.
If we're looking at current policies and where they will lead us, that's a lot more
than 1.5. I think, first of all, it's important to point out that this is
actually really happening. And even if it's unimaginable and completely
unacceptable that it is happening, we still need to remember that science does
not need human imagination for evidence. It needs instrumentation and lots and lots
of hard work and decades of study. And it confirms that, yes, indeed, it is really
happening. Technology will not save us. This is also increasingly scientific
consensus. Most recently, looking at the idea that we can just simply scrub carbon
out of the air, we can, you know, we can suck it out of the air and these negative
emission technology. That's if you like. They're not even gigatons capable. And 29
European science academies concluded that we can absolutely not rely on any Ts or
negative emissions technologies to pull enough carbon out of the air at anywhere
near the rate that we need it in order to save us. What I mean by save us? Well,
when I was born, it was around about 330 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere
and we're now looking at about 412 of the latest reading. This is the
Keeling Curve. Now 450 ppm is seen as something of a threshold that probably
gets us more or less near 2 degrees of warming from post-industrial levels with a
70 % probability if we keep it under 2 degrees, in other words, 450 ppm. Sorry.
If we keep it under 450 ppm, then we will almost certainly manage to avoid that that
2 degrees threshold for the 70 % probability. Just looking at ocean rise
alone. This is Miami at two degrees, which is arguably just around the corner. This
is Shanghai. I don't know if you've been to Shanghai. Where will all those people
go, you might ask yourself. Bangkok is already underwater at this point. Two
degrees represent something else relatively significant, however, as
evidenced in this fantastic paper, well, fantastic if you read this sort of stuff
and don't want to drink yourself under the table. But trajectories of the Earths
system and the Anthropocene suggests very strongly that it's highly likely,
extremely probable that if we cross the 2 degrees centigrade warming threshold, we
will be on autopilot to 2.5, 3 degrees, 3.5 and 4 degrees. And that's simply an
unstoppable course. No amount of carbon scrubbing can possibly compete with the
self reinforcing feedbacks after that point. We're on a course to a very
different planet. Just to give you a sense of what 4 degrees, for instance, would
mean, should we ever get there, which it looks like we will before the end of the
century if we continue business as usual. The temperature rise from the Ice Age, the
end of the Ice Age back 10,000 years ago to 1850 was 4 degrees of warming. Now,
that's 10,000 years of time for organisms, including us, to evolve and adapt to that
warming. We're looking at the same amount of warming in just 150 years. There's no
time to adapt. This picture I've tweeted a bit, I suppose, but maybe too much. But
this was done for the New Scientist and the visualization of what the earth would
look like, what the world would look like at 4 degrees. Now, Middle and Southern
Europe are obviously entirely gone. North America, Africa, South America and Asia -
they've all gone. I mean, where would those people go? Obviously, they'll head
North. The states will move from a geo strategic perspective, would obviously
move to Canada, China and to Russia. There's been a lot of talk about as to
what that would mean for human populations and human population numbers and of course
you read some wild stuff, how can we possibly know? But this chap who's had his
name on 120 papers or something like this. He's one of the most highly regarded
atmospheric scientists in the world, cited over a thousand times across academic
journals in the domain of atmospheric science, believes it's just a few thousand
people. The carrying capacity of the earth is just a few thousand people seeking
refuge in the Arctic or Antarctica. And of course, all the way to 4 degrees, we have
war, we have resource depletion driving conflicts, we have mass migration and very
unfortunately it is fairly safe to conclude that children alive today will,
even those still again, relatively unimaginable, but based on the best
available information, very probably face mass migration, war and hunger. Should we
not turn things around? This is just simply the way it is. This is where we are
going. But surely governments would never let that happen. You hear that a lot. But
the thing is, they have let that happen and they are continuing to let that
happen. Appropriate response is probably this. This UK pop artist, experimental pop
stuff, said this, write this down on a napkin one day. I really like it. "Hope
without honesty is denial" because people reach for hope at these times. But I also
really like Kate Malveaux, climate scientist. She said that we don't need
hope, we need courage. Courage is the resolve to do well without the assurance
of a happy ending. This is more what we need to be going. Thanks of course, giving
us a bit of a hand here with this. From this moment the spear ends and techniques
begin. And truth is, there's no hope without action. This is really where we
stand and this is not just my opinion. It happens to be an opinion very widely
spread. In fact, the world scientists in their " A second warning to humanity",
very recently wrote that same thing. They said that with a groundswell of organized
grassroots efforts, dogged opposition can be overcome and political leaders
compelled to do the right thing. Now that is 15,364 scientists from 184 countries.
It's the most scientific document in all history. They are urging us in the
absolute and, you know, ineptitude and lack of engagement from governments to
actually rise up and force governments to act. That's what they're telling us to do.
And you can look at this as a bit like, you know, imagine you have a disease, a
very rare disease and that the world's experts, you know, that those those
scientists, 15,364 scientists, contains most of the world's Nobel laureates,
planetary boundary scientists, food system scientists, geologists, biologists. They
say that, you know, so from the perspective of expert opinion, it doesn't
get much better. You can imagine that you have a disease that very few people have,
and the world's expert says to you: "Listen, it's really grim. You are looking
at a at a particularly bleak end, an ugly end, unless, of course, you stop now doing
these things". You can also think that our space habitat has a variety of subsystems,
it is a freshwater subsystem that looks at water purification and filtration, a
thermal regulation subsystem. You could look at food pods. They are being attacked
on our space habitat. If you don't like the word environmental or earth, you think
it's a bit too kind of patchouli dose to a hippie. Then think of it this way, because
that is what's happening. What they're telling us is that it's time to rebel.
It's time to force governments to act because they are not acting. No more
business as usual. What we need is massive swarming, nonviolent, uncontainable civil
disobedience en masse. Civil disobedience, unlike protests were you just get out on
the street on a little key area with a police permit for the protest, holding
little signs, oi oi oi. Civil disobedience actually works. It has
provably worked. South Africa versus apartheid. India versus the British Roche.
U.S. Civil Rights Movement. The Velvet Revolution. It's the way to go. Extinction
rebellion is very much a manifestation of that energy at the idea of actually
channeling civil disobedience to the ends of driving change is very much what it's
about. It's the kernel of the movement. It started in October 31st, where a bunch of
British activists marched onto Parliament Square and declared a rebellion against
the British government for its lack of action on the climate and the ecological
emergency. And then soon afterwards, 6000 or so descended upon London and
effectively shut down the city center by occupying five bridges. Extinction
rebellion is a leaderless... That's very important. I mean, is that the press of
always reaches for a figurehead, but it is very much a leaderless. That's not steered
by the UK , Decentralized International, apolitical network using nonviolent direct
action and civil disobedience to persuade governments to act justly on the climate
ecological emergency. I'm just going to show a couple of videos right now to just
give you a sense of the kind of what civil disobedience in this case actually
comprises. I'll show you a video from France particularly focused on
overconsumption. We're talking about resource depletion here in the CCC this
year, which I think is great. And this was a protest at Block Friday instead of Black
Friday, which is, of course, a mass consumers event. Here we go.
*music plays*
They occupied a shopping mall for seven
hours and a whole bunch of stores across the country, Apple Store, etc., just
fantastic stuff. And you might think 'where's this going?'. Well. And is that
really the only approach, you know, occupy malls and shops, et cetera, et cetera?
I'll show you another video for a very different strategy. This is extension
rebellion, New York City occupying Times Square. And I think this is definitely...
Oh, what is the video called? That's right... Player.
*music plays, drums beating*
Sorry, It's a but cut off, isn't it?
Again? Or wait, whatever.
People in the video shouting repeadeatly:
This is an emergency! This is an emergency!
*music plats, drums beating*
This is an emergency! This is an emergency!
Person in video: Good Morning, New York City! This is Extinction Rebellion
enforcing an international rebellion...*continues unintelligible*
*shouting and drums beating*
[Subtitles appear in video, therefore left out here]
Julian: Well, anyway, you get the idea.
*applause*
So something's wrong with my copy of my with my render buffer there, I can see that.
I don't know, anyway. Three demands.
Typically, some branches have more. There are many branches now. 600 plus branches
all over the world. Some have four demands for us, as in the US. Some of these state
branches have added a fourth demand for climate ecological justice for those most
affected by changes within planetary boundaries. Sorry, changes above and
beyond planetary boundaries. But in general, there's this kernel of sort of
three demands. Tell the truth. Government must tell the truth by declaring a climate
and ecological emergency. Working with other institutions to communicate the
urgency for change. Act now. Government. Government must act now to halt
biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025. 2025,
you say. Understand? You might think that is a little bit short, but it's good to
have goals beyond politics. Government must create and be and be led by the
decisions of a citizen assembly on climate ecological justice. And it is working
significantly. In fact, if you go to this climate mobilizationorg map and you will
see that states, municipalities and cities all over the world, tons of them have in
fact declared a climate ecological emergency. What they do after that point
is, of course, the next step. But I can't find a single one of these that is dated
to before April this year. So in just one year, that is a significant political
transformation. *applause*
Yep, yes. And it's certainly not just extinction rebellion. It's Fridays for
future have been just upping the game. They're massively, so, respect! At the COP
25, which was obviously like a massive failure in itself, extinction rebellion
was listed as the most influential organization above the World Bank,
Greenpeace, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a relatively short kind of rise of a voice
for this particular movement. Now, infrastructure for
rebellion. Unfortunately, the movement got off to a reasonably bad start in the UK in
that respect. They went from the perspective of...
What's that? That's a bit odd. *referring to the red blink glitch*
They went from the perspective that we are an above ground movement. We work in
the open. It's not really good for civil disobedience to have that as your mandate or a priority.
And there in the UK, things are, of course, a little bit different. It's
something of a playground there for civil disobedience. The police are generally
quite nice. In fact, one of the chief of police in the UK said 'Well, they're
actually quite nice people, these activists'. This is not something that
exports very well. It doesn't even export over the border. I'll talk about them in a
moment. But they really settled on base camp over in the US. They just went
straight to base camp. Google for sharing like things like contact lists. They
didn't have anyone with technical, shall we say, know how or operational security
intuition or interest to look at it any other way. So they just reach for what's
at hand. The Action Network, too, hosted over in the United States Base camp, I
mean, the extinction rebellion explicitly breaks base camps terms of service. You
may not use the service or any illegal purpose. Well, civil disobedience is
breaking the law. That's what it is. Action Network, which is widely used by,
unfortunately, activist movements all over the world, humans rights spaces as well...
They they really use it a lot. They have just crazy stuff. You understand and agree
that we may disclose your information if required to do so by law or court order a
legal process some point, including to respond to any government or regulatory
request. I mean, this is nuts. Action Network hosted over in the US under a
Trump surveillance apparatus, that massive apparatus that Obama expanded hugely and
just gave to Trump. And I mean, this is an unsafe environment for hosting, you know,
contact lists.On the 3rd of of November last year, my partner said they really
should be an extinction rebellion in France. And and I immediately thought,
well, they will need a server. There in France, you do not want your activists on
Action Network. I mean, you don't want them using Google because, I mean, in
France, this is the situation. Here's France. This is, in fact, Paris and Sally
Bridge in the center of Paris with just cops cruising past and just tear gas and
even taking the sunglasses off and just and just spraying them right in the face.
This is Youth for Climate protesting outside an Amazon logistics center. Very
recently, in fact. Youth for climate, just with with a guy wearing the French stripes
in the background overseeing it. He says, 'Yep, you can do it. The state says it's
OK', and just sprays them. You know, this is France. It's a different environment.
So I just really got them up and running with something really fast. Iceland was
chosen because Icelanders is very well known for its strict data protection laws.
It's well outside of obviously the EU and of course, the five eye states. And I went
the FlokiNET, geothermal direct from source, more direct from grid source.
Discourse for the forum rather than base camp, for instance. Nextcloud for all the
vital stuff replacing Google Drive, etc. hardened opened VPN and a data partition
on AES-XTS on 512, Jitsi-Meet for calls bit and just a very simple MTA. In fact,
it's not really an empty, it's just a just email, XM. XM form. Meanwhile, the
international movement as branches were popping up all over the world, were
descending on slack. Now slack is particularly problematic for a variety of
reasons. But what's there's a reason why they were jumping on slack. They wanted a
place to share their extinction rebellion, broader global needs. I mean, this is just
a few thousand people at that stage. Some people were members of multiple teams. And
importantly, they chose Slack because Slack does it for something that group
chat does not. Many teams, each with channels, public and private, and this is
just the, it is hard to call it, an innovation, but slack itself, is chosen
for that team based structuring configuration over group chat for a very
good reason. It is a direct messaging back end. Many national branches means many
teams. Some people belong to more than one team. But the problem with Slack is that
Slack is a racist infrastructure. It actually has its discriminatory
infrastructure. Slack voluntarily chose to follow Trump's digital trade embargo,
blocking like Crimea, Cuba and Iran. Several other countries just because they
thought maybe I'd know Trump would buy them a Rolex, I'm not sure. But it's it's
nuts that they did that. And then they even defended it, apologizing a little
bit. Sort of not apologizing later. Google Docs. Branches were jumping to Google Docs
to store contact lists. Here's your regional coordinator, your national
coordinator, your actions and logistics teams - terrible stuff! So much so that in
the UK at least a seasoned organization and protecting activists and ensuring that
they have legal rights or at least legal protections when they need them in the UK
decided to pull out of support of extinction rebellion on the basis that
XR UK was storing personal data inadequately and that they were very sure
that in fact the police would have access to that information. Thus, when openness
is enforced, we have a regime of openness doing things out in the open. It excludes.
What about those that might work and governments or government offices or
corporations or just those that are a bit nervous about getting involved in a civil
disobedience movement? They're not sure they want to actually take that big step.
Those are not going to feel very comfortable at all doing it in the open.
A community owned hub and operated hub for Extinction Rebellion was absolutely
needed. And so I set out just building
criterion for this had to be community owned and operated, platform wise, free
and open source software outside of the Five Eye and EU member states. It needed
to walk its talk and enjoy energy direct from source. No CO2 credits, a'la Google
and Amazon. Debian simply because I've been using Debian since the year 2000 only
and and I just love it. *weeps* If I start crying, you know why? It's not because the
planet is dying, it's because I just love Debian so much. But it needs to be
affordable and very well rooted. So, 'mission coherent infrastructure' was what
is really often what I mean by that. Few people are aware that the global data
center industry consumes or at least pushes out, I should say, as much carbon
into the atmosphere as the entire airline industry. This is the same amount as the
UK. The United Kingdom itself actually burns a year. It's a lot. And for
organise.earth, which was the domain name that was chosen...Exactly 366 days ago, in
fact, it was born. I settled on mattermost and I'll explain why in a moment. And I
and I settled on datacenterlight in the Swiss Alps. Datacenterlight, direct from
source hydro alpine catchment hydro... It was a beautiful Irony there, actually sort
of like a bleak poetry that as warming melts the snow on the Alps, it flows down
into these large catchment bays, which then drive lovely big generators that
power the data center. So I just I can't get past that. It's extremely well rooted.
Their VMs are wonderfully fast. I settled on mattermost for these reasons: We had to
get thousands of people off Slack fast. So the U.S. similarity was mission critical.
There are export path from slack directly into mattermost. It has that team check
configuration that people in an activist communities really like now. They've
adopted that wholesale. It's reasonably unified. UI/UX across the endpoint
platforms, whether you're on iOS or Android or desktop. Team invite links.
Teams can actually control invitations to the teams by sending them a link and they
can recycle that link or at least flush it and generate a new one when they need to,
to control flow. This basic team admin controls. Extremely low entry barrier. The
server was entirely funded by one fresh, ahm French - I was going to say Swiss.
Then I said French. So I said fresh. - One French rebel. scales linearly as regards
system overheads. It's just extremely performant. In fact, when we got to about
20.000 people on organise.earth, the server population, matteremost itself was
running at about 30 percent of one core. "Mattermost for chat. Anything sensitive?
Use Signal or Wire." And that's the rule now on organise.earth, which has become
very much the global hub for the movement, with four hundred and seventy-five teams,
mostly national or local branches. It's a really large Mattermost deployment. Why
not Riot and Matrix/Synapse? Well, in December 2018, when I was looking at it,
it was a little bit immature. The UI UX was a bit geeky, but there were also real
problems with with scalability. I just seem to see that it wasn't something I
could really know that hundred thousand people, for instance, down the road could
actually all use on my particular site home server deployment. The device
verification was really freaking people out. I mean, some of the the great
majority of the rebels, in fact, that we are hosting are in fact the kind that
would look for a Google link to log in. There's no markdown. That might seem a
little bit arbitrary, but it's become relatively critical - especially for the
code / development side of things and formatting, making lists. Markdown is
important. It doesn't have that link-based invitation management either. But there's
also this metadata leakage concern - something that the Matrix team are really
looking at. And they've said so. They've said that the metadata leakage, they want
to fix that. They want a more unified experience across the app layer, too, with
Riot. So I'm looking forward to following that in the future. Zero knowledge: I
would love to go that way. But given the fact that that we already have use Signal or
Wire for anything sensitive and use Mattermost for anything else and use your
individual branch servers, which I talk about in a moment, for anything truly
internal to your branch, we've achieved basically the same thing because Riot -
just like with a Nimmo - is not entirely encrypted by default. It's
something that one must actually set up. So we're effectively in the same place.
Organized.earth has now grown to host a large number of platforms which I have
deployed there. We have, of course, Mattermost. We have NextCloud to us. Only
office is used for collaborative editing that has some missives I talk about in the
moment. Etherpad-Lite is used really heavily. LimeSurvey replaces Google Forms.
Jitsi-Meet doesn't really replace Zoom. But this is something that we're working
on very much. Rainloop with Docevot and PostFix for the for the mailing. And then
we have GitLab. GitLab has been a massive success. We have a few hundred coders now
working flat-out in the GitLab that we have deployed. And it is very interesting
that many of them say that would they would not be able to do what they're doing
on GitHub. Given that GitHub is tied to their work, GitHub is tied to the to their
real life a little bit too much. And they are genuinely worried about a boss or
corporation or company surveilling them when they are maybe, for instance, engaged
in a project that is technically illegal or quasi-legal. Discourse is used, I
guess, less heavily on the main organized.earth server than it is on some
of the branch deployments. The French server, for instance, now has 70,300
members in its Discourse. Yes, 70,300. What a win. Yeah. It's just like a marketplace
of chatter. Signal and Wire replacing WhatsApp and Skype. Mastodon node was
created, which has become quite popular with branches. And we have PeerTube
replacing YouTube. And importantly, we're working very hard to ensure that we have a
gender balance as much as possible within the open space of all these platforms. On
the backend, of course, Debian sobbing. AES XTS for the data
partition. Failed2ban and UFW for the firewalling. (aside) Those of you that are
taking photos of this are feds. I see you taking photos. Take photos.
laughs Snort for the intrusion detection. Prometheus and hardened
OpenVPN. I'm really into Duplicity for backups and Pecona for hot MySQL backups.
It's a real problem when you're trying to backup huge databases that are 14-15 GB or
more: You can't take them down long enough to do a dump with, say, MySQL or something
like this. Percona provides a really interesting solution for hot backups. I
had to work on optimizations with an IDB heavily in order to get the kind of
performance that was squeezing out of Mattermmost in its interaction with MySQL
on the server. Nginx we now support two protocols: v4 and v6. The v6 addition was
certainly very, very bumpy and I wish it wasn't so bumpy, but it was. I thought I
knew or understood physics better than I actually did the day of deployment.
PostFix and Dovecot. And then we have LetsEncrypt. Platform challenges: Jitsi-
Meat does not replace Zoom. Zoom is just simply more performant. I think about 1.7
Mbits/s is the lower-level, minimum bandwidth required for a user in order to
have a quality call but Jitsi-Meet is higher. And so we do get people on 3G,
they just drop out and we sometimes have 40 or 50 people on the call and Jitsi-Meet
is not cutting it, unfortunately. Only office unless you want to pay 6,000 a
year, which of course we won't. You're looking at only 20 simultaneous editors at
the same time. This also needs to, needs to change. Thankfully, NextCloud's text app
seems to offer us a sweet spot there, as far as simultaneous editing. In the
meantime, EtherPad-Light is being used really heavily. There's a lack of epic
controls in MatterMmost, which is precisely why we are forking it. We are
forking Mattermost, which is a massive job, such that team admins can have all of
those hundreds of teams can individually manage their memberships. That having to rely
on me to drop into the into the CLI and use the Mattermost tooling to do things
like following the GDPR, deleting all of the posts of a particular member. And we
have SSO expectations for a mostly non- tech membership. People are so used to the
idea, especially the very that the younger and the older end of the demographic both
expect one unified log-in for all platforms. And this is just a real hassle
and very difficult to manage. But with Mattermost, it acts as a OAuth2 provider
that does offer us some interesting possibilities there. The XR Server
Platform has since evolved to this. It has MailTrain as the mailing list manager and
this is working real well. I'm at MailTrain V2 with a sweet docker compose
deployment. I thoroughly recommend giving that a go to replace your mailchimp
whatever needs. We also have a 'Rebels Manager' as the CRM. So this effectively
replaces Action Network and it leverages MailTrain. There's a very talented
developers in Brussels and Belgium that have put together the Rebels Manager,
which will be deploying across the entire movement. And yeah, it's working out real
nice as far as the deployments. The branch service deployed in the spirit of
decentralization. I have deployed these and there are many, many more to come. And
these are entirely independent from organized.earth, from the main hub. They
are self run self-administered. Admins are trained over ten to twenty five hours and
then the keys are flipped and then they just sail off on their own. 2020 plans:
the Mattermost-fork I mentioned, but importantly, the Wire-Mattermost
integration. What I'd really like to see and what we're talking about with the
Rebel codes is, I guess as we call ourselves, is to have a Wire Add-On or
Plugin for Mattermost such that you can just simply click on a bunch of different
people that you'd like to engage in a into anend-to-end encrypted voice call or chat.
We're excited about that. Enhance team admin controls: Team administrators should
be able to do a lot of the work that that I shouldn't be doing. A Federation feature
which effectively replaces Mattermosts enterprise offering, which is about three
dollars a month or something per seat. It's a crazy amount of money. I mean, in
our populations that would be completely impossible to afford that sort of The
Enterprise Enterprise edition anyway. So we are actually sort of forced to fork
Mattermost, which I'm sure is really gonna piss them off, but we are going to do it.
We've already started. Jitsi-Meet-rework: We want to build an OAuth-wall for Jitsi-
Meet so that we can protect our instances. Simultaneous session recording, not using
Jabari or with the chromium browser on a server, which I can't believe is the
solution that they have chosen. I will never, ever install a browser on a server.
It's just it's just illegal. And it's just it's just wrong. Bandwith optimizations,
we need a lot of work done there. Rebels Manager replaces Action Network. And then
we want to have a member facing services dashboard with that OAuth2-flow and
particularly and very importantly, colocation deployments. Working out of VMs
is all very well but you do have key theft from RAM as a as a plausible possibility
in many instances, so to speak. And so what we would like to aim for is being
able to drop off dedicated boxes with the RAM, epoxied into the slot and good to go,
nice on lockdown. Yes. Swiss VPN for the entire movement, this is something that I
should have done within it within a few weeks. And I also want to obsolete myself
so I can dedicate myself to other movements while maintaining at least a
tech advisory role within Extinction Rebellion. But it is time for techies to
rebel. There is no hope without action. But there is no action without
infrastructure, at least not at the scale that we need it today. We need massive
deployments, distributions. People need places to work and to organize and to do
so safely. SysOps, DevOps, Codes, front and back. All can dedicate an hour, a week
or a couple of hours a day to a cause which is probably best described as the
single biggest challenge that we as a as a species actually face. Live in your time
and dedicate an hour or two a week or a day, if you if you can, to this. Maybe not
Extinction Rebellion, but for Fridays For Future, Sunrise Movement, future movements
to come. If you are interested in getting involved in Extinction Rebellion and
joining the the the very large tech team, then visit rebellion.global, find your
local branch, get invited to Mattermost and then see you there. Another end of the
world is possible. Thanks a lot, guys.
*applause*
Herald: Thank you very much, Julian Oliver - Extinction Rebellion.
*applause* Herald: If you have questions, you know
the procedure. There are microphones from one to number six. And as far as I know,
we already have questions from the Internet. So signal angel, question number
one please. Signal Angel: Hello, someone from the IRC
wants to know, how do you enter the encryption passwords for your data
partitions during automated reboots in the data center?
Julian: This is completely impossible to do for an encrypted root file system,
obviously, one needs to, in fact, look at data partitions that are encrypted. But
the root file system not unfortunately on many the deployments that are not Colo and
those that do not have the flexibility of presence at the point of entering that
password. So from that from that basis, we we go with a an encrypted AES 512 Bit
encrypted data partition and one comes in over the VPN, tunnels in through SSH and
then decrypt and mounts. I realize this is not exactly ideal, but it is all we can do
in the VM space. Herald: And the next question from
microphone number two. Microphone 2: Hello, first of all thank
you so much for all this work you've put into creating this platform for the
movement. My question is, what measures have you taken to protect yourself against
the case where, for example, your home is raided by police and they try to somehow
get into the servers through other means than just impounding them.
Julian: I'm being socially engineered aren't I? n public? No, no, I'm I'm
particularly cautious about that stuff. And all of us, all the sysadmins of which
there are now about 30 across the different branch deployments, we have
very, very strict procedures for this sort of thing, including redundancy across
backups, leaving home check, powering off the laptops. In fact, just like I
installed the entire movement's infrastructure community on infrastructure
on a thinkpad X230 that I bought for one hundred and forty five euros on the German
eBay. And. And I've encouraged all of the SysAdmins to buy the same, precisely
because you have this lovely battery lock on the back. You can just flip it and and
pull out the battery. You know, if you're ever facing police or a stop and search.
And of course, some countries like, you know, maybe India or Brazil, this becomes
really critical. But there is just a routine. I'm leaving home, I'm powering
off my laptop. Just which screen-locker we're using, KeePass, you know, phones
encrypted. The files, The, um, the file system. And we just have to do our very,
very best. There is no such thing as perfect sort of forward security in this
space. But all we can do is employ best practice operational security and also
most importantly, treat sysadmins as high risk first stage targets, and they are
increasingly so from this perspective. Sysadmins are forbidden to go to actions.
They can not be arrested because there's always the possibility of coercion. And we
actually have a whole kind of script with sysadmins when they entering into the fold
to to explain to them, you are aware of the risks, you know, and you need to lean
on your branch to explain to you the the legalities of the of your
operating environment. What are your rights? Can you be coerced to to cough up
a password, you know, to to give the master key to your to your to KeePass, for
instance, like this. You need to know those rights. You need to know your
rights. And if you can't deal with the heat and you don't want to go that
distance, then step down from being sysadmin and give it to someone else who
is willing to go that distance. There are so many factors. And again, we can't
generalize across the entire geo cultural, political jurisdictional space that
Extinction Rebellion works at because it's just so various. Yeah.
Herald: Thank you. And the Internet has another question.
Signal Angel: How do you keep your community of, as you explain mostly non-
technical people on your geeky and decentralised solution as it grows?
Julian: No problem really keeping them. I mean, It's maybe when one of the founders
says something like completely controversial or absurd. This is being
recorded, isn't it? Then then yeah, we have we have lost some number,
understandably, but still the served population just grows day in and day out.
And I am expecting in 2020, at this current rate, we are looking at a at
around 400, 400 to 500 new members a day, on the Mattermost at least. And with
branch server deployments, it'll be three or four month until we've filled all the
national branch requirements. There is no problem for that. Mattermost is seemingly
reasonably enjoyed, not so geeky in that sense. Discourse is also very widely used
within the, I mean Twitter uses Discourse internally, but also publicly. We see many
large corporations and organizations and NGOs using Discourse as a forum solution,
as a discussion forum solution. So it's actually familiar to a lot of a lot of
people anyway. The geeky ness, I would say is probably when we start talking about
the need for a VPN. That's when a lot of people just switch off. So there's a lot
of cultural work, techno cultural work, if you like, that needs to be done there in
order to secure the movement further. Herald: Thank you. Microphone number five,
please. Microphone 5: Hi there. Um, so you talked
all about your communication infrastructure. Can you share anything
about your financial infrastructure? Julian: That's also very varied, too. I
mean, branches have their own funding coming in, but then there are others that
that will receive funding from. Previously it was the UK was managing a lot of that
funding. That's entirely switching now to the international support team, which is a
multinational group, if you like, organization within Extinction Rebellion
that does handle all the finances and donors would come to the movement wanting
to give money. And then that's distributed throughout the movement as needed to meet
the ends of branches. It's still just a year in and it's still quite varied. I
mean, XR Germany, for instance, actually donated to the global movement recently.
So it came back that way. It's I think it's it's always going to be relatively ad
hoc, especially also given the fact that some financial institutions, state craft
are very much on the tail of. I just spoke too much didn't I. But method no. Yep. You
need to be very careful about about where bank accounts are as regards the tax
state. And so I think it's it's gonna be a changing environment for quite some time.
I didn't actually know much about the finances side of things to answer that
wholely, but yeah. Thanks. Herald: Thank you. Microphone number
three, please. Microphone 3: Hi. A lot of people find it
very hard to go from this content to dissent and more people tend to get
involved, involved if we lower the barrier of entry. So, you know, it sounds great
when you say like a couple, couple a few hundred new people a day globally. I
suspect it would be more the low the more you lower the barrier of entry if you have
some sort of a gateway drug. So what are you thinking about making some kind of
system, some some kind of easy invite, sort of a one click, get an invite to
Mattermost thing that would make it easier.
Julian: Well that already exists. The organise.earth is really only the global
hub where branches will, for instance, interrelate, collaborate and interoperate,
if you like. But the branch server deployments themselves, they will handle
their own onboarding, if you like, but there is certainly some streamlining to be
done there. One of the things that comes up a lot is password complexity. We have a
very strict password complexity policy and that really frustrates people that would
like to name, would like to give the password the name of the dog, and the
year, maybe, at best. But you know, we really need to work on on finding a sweet
spot. We don't want to also have people going into arrest, forgetting to power off
their phone after following the encryption operational security guiding that we have.
And then their phone is, you know, face swiped into or something like this or
they're just tricked into swipe-unlocking the phone as happened in the UK and then
they're going to find their way into the platforms with best guess passwords. I
mean, who knows? We need to find a common middle ground, but also educate as to why
it's important that we use these platforms and in these ways and have passwords of
these strengths, etc.. It's an ongoing process.
Herald: I see the Interwebs has a question.
Signal angel: Someone in the IRC wants to know, why did you think it was necessary
to set up new infrastructure instead of using other radical tech infrastructures
like Riseup for example? Julian: Well, Riseup had, yeah, has its
own problems. We really wanted to go have community-run infrastructure such that we
can legally be responsible for that infrastructure, that we can say that it is
here for us and that if there is any, there's any attacks on that
infrastructure, we are in a much better legal position to be able to represent
ourselves from our operational circumstance and jurisdictional
circumstance. It was also very important that it's in Switzerland. Importantly, in
Switzerland, for Swiss data centers, you need to break the law in Switzerland
before there can even be a request for, say, a server seizure. And that needs to
go through the highest courts. This makes Switzerland a very, very nice place to
actually deploy server infrastructure for a civil disobedience movement. Riseup
simply doesn't meet it in that capacity. Herald: Thank you. Microphone number one,
please. Microphone 1: So my question was partially
responded already about the financial infrastructure you have. I know some
associations, but like, you know, they could afford a hundred bucks per year or
something like that, because that's so low and, you know, doing brilliant work. But
so it seems to me that you deployed tens of servers just for the V1. So what are
your initial cost? Could you lighten up that so that I can act back home? How do
you get the money initially? Julian: I installed almost all of that
infrastructure without receiving a single cent from extinction rebellion. And in
fact, I receive very, very little money from extinction rebellion now. And it was
only after burning through all of my savings from November to August, I burned
through all of my savings and ran myself financially into the ground, ended it
entirely on a gratis basis. And only then after that, I have a very small amount of
living expenses paid, which is really tiny, but just enough to cover my costs.
And I can make a lot of money deploying servers if I wish to for dreary NGOs etc.
etc., but I have dedicated myself to do this on the grounds that it needs to be
done and it needed to be done. Yeah. So it was actually free for the movement.
*Applause* Herald: Thank you for that.
Julian: Pleasure. Herald: Microphone number two, please.
Microphone 2: Right. You already mentioned that these server partitions are encrypted
at the data center. So do you have any other OPSEC mechanism in place? For
example, if these data center's raided? Julian: The data center can't actually, at
least without it being a breach of constitutional law in Switzerland, be
raided. But there, are there are some measures put in place for a switch-off in
the event. But I can't talk about that without putting other people on the hot
seat. Yeah, but it is it is all sorted. Yeah.
Herald: *laughing* Thank you. The Internet has another question.
Signal angel: Someone on the IRC wants to know, do you share the recipes for your
DevOps deployments? And specifically were, Signal and Wire difficult to set up?
Julian: Well, Signal is not so difficult to set up, but maybe it is easily confused
with the fact I mentioned the Wire server deployment. I'm in talks with Wire at the
moment. Does that make Wire about a server deployment for the movement such that we
can actually run our own entirely and again, write apps for that for that server
for use in the movement. But I think Wire and Signal, as far as an end user install,
it is extremely easy in getting them up and running. I think Signal has problems
obviously with the phone number discovery aspect. I mean, SIM cards, I don't know,
they're license plate numbers these days. I'm really quite a fan of Wire's non-
dependance on that. But as far as the blueprints are concerned, I really do hope
to write, as part of my self-obsolescence plan is to write a full documentation for
the server installs, for the for the post install ordering and such that I can be
handed over to someone else to do the deployments for me. And I think I have
actually found that person. That person happens to be German and very, very sharp.
So, I look forward to the possibility of publishing that at that point. But for
now, it's just a case of me doing the deployment, and then I sit down with
sysadmins for 10 to 25 hours and walk them through what that server is and how they
can sail that ship. It's how it's done at the moment.
Herald: Thank you. I think this is a call for participation, right?
Julian: It is indeed. Herald: Microphone number two, please.
Microphone 2: Is the Mattermost fork public available?
Julian: It will be, absolutely. I mean, it's just started. It's something that we
just kicked off. So hopefully, by about midyear, I think we might have something
that you could put into staging, maybe not production ready, but we'll see. Yeah, I
think it's gonna be great. And it's gonna be great for the community as a whole. I
mean, outside of extinction rebellion, but just those that would like an alternative
to Slack that doesn't have dumbed down team admin controls and has maybe
federation, if you really want to grow something really, really big. The sweet
spot is a folk Mattermost. I'm convinced. Herald: Thank you. Microphone number
three, please. Microphone 3: Why no digital civil
disobedience? Julian: Ah, yes, I can't talk about that,
but I'm very, very enthusiastic about it and have been engaged in that a little bit
here and there in the past. But yeah, electronic civil disobedience is, is very
close to my heart. And there's lots of it happening in the movement and it will be
in 2020, but I can't talk about that obviously, at all. Yeah. Would love to,
but I can't. Herald: So sad. Microphone number two,
please. Microphone 2: You're running a lot of
services with huge attack surface. What is the worst that could happen should your
infrastructure get compromised? Julian: With, services with what, sorry?
Microphone 2: What is the worst that could happen if your infrastructure is
compromised? Julian: Um, well, the branch servers are
entirely decentralized from the, from the organise.earth hub. Um, I would like to
think that it's highly unlikely that organise.earth is compromised, but if it
were to be compromised and I was not able to instigate a power-off event in process
or prior, then unfortunately it would be, there'll be access to large email, um,
registration information, largely, and our DB is database encrypted at the database
layer, but unfortunately if one has root, if one can privacy escalate to root, then
you would have access, potentially, to a decryption of the database. But there's
little we can really do about that. Um, if we find in 2020, let's say there is
encrypted by default. In other words, zero knowledge with OMEMO or with Riot
abstracted over Matrix and Synapse, well, hopefully Dendrite, written in Go. And it
is really performant and it can run six figure populations, it can support six
figure populations, then we'll absolutely switch to that and I will drive that
change and that time. But in the meantime, just use Mattermost for general team chat.
Everything else goes over Signal or Wire. That's how the movement runs right now.
Yeah. Herald: Thank you. Unfortunately, we run
out of time. Julian, would you be able to answer questions in the, uh, after talk?
Julian: Yes, of course. Yes, absolutely. Herald: So the offer, if you have
questions, come together, come to him and ask you questions. Julian Oliver, thank
you very much. Julian: Thanks, guys.
*Applause*
*postroll music*
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