That's How You Get a Dystopia @ Mozilla Privacy Lab (Nov 2017)

Описание: (This recording is of a talk that was given at Mozilla Privacy Lab on November 13, 2017.)

Apple/Samsung owns your phone. Google/Facebook owns your data. Amazon/Microsoft owns your network. It seems we are no longer able to conceptualize technology without deciding "who owns it?". Do you want a dystopia? Because that's how you get a dystopia.

When you hear about tradeoffs related to freedom, privacy, security, or even simply quality, too often the discussion is highly theoretical and we lose people to arguments over "well, that will never happen". In fact, there have been enough concrete and documented failures--places where the software development community has accidentally enabled discrimination or even directly been forced to support oppressive regimes--that we can learn quite a bit even limiting ourselves to only what we can glean from major news headlines.

Attendees of this talk will hopefully obtain a new appreciation of just how important it is to design decentralized and federated protocols, even when ostensibly building systems that are "secure, yet centralized" (such as Signal and even Tor), culminating in a description of Orchid, a just-announced open-source platform that takes direct aim at Internet surveillance.


Jay Freeman, widely known online as "saurik", is the developer of Cydia, the alternative to the App Store used on jailbroken iPhones, iPads, and the iPod touch. Substrate, the platform he provides developers to alter the behavior of running programs by way of runtime in-memory patching, has been used by many thousands of developers and deployed to tens of millions of users.

Jay's largely-academic background is in networking, static analysis, and programming languages, which have resulted in nmap+V (which brought "what version of what software is running on the remote computer?" to nmap in 2000), Exemplar/Anakrino (the first decompiler for .NET, released in 2001 while .NET was still only available to beta testers), and Cycript (a hybrid of Objective-C and JavaScript that is often used to explore the behavior of running programs).

In 2017, along with Brian Fox, Gustav Simonsson, Stephen Bell, and Steve Waterhouse, Jay co-founded Orchid, a new peer-to-peer protocol and associated organization with a goal of ensuring surveillance-free access to the Internet for everyone, everywhere. Orchid combines monetary incentives (using a cryptocurrency) with design decisions that give users a feeling of "control" over their Internet connection with a fully-decentralized protocol to build a secure market for bandwidth.