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Truth Lives in the Open: Lessons from Wikipedia

Victoria Coleman, CTO, Wikimedia Foundation

Moderator: Michelle Zatlyn, Co-Founder & COO, Cloudflare

Photo by Cloudflare Staff

MZ: What is the Wikimedia Foundation?

VC: We pride ourselves in aiming to make available information broadly
not-for-profit

We’re the 5th most visited site on the planet.
We are the guardians of the project. There are 12 projects that we support, Wikipedia is the most prominent but there are others that will be just as influential in the next 5 years: e.g. Wikidata.
299 languages

Let’s also talk about the things that we don’t do: we don’t do editing. We edit as community members but not as members of the foundation.

We don’t monetize our users, content, or presence. We are completely funded by donations, with an average donation of $15.

MZ: If your mission is to help bring free education to all, getting to everyone can be hard. So how do you get access to people in hard-to-reach areas?

VC: It’s definitely a challenge. We built this movement primarily in NA and EU, but our vision goes beyond that. We started doing some critically refined and focused research in Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria.

Trying to understand what global communities need in other Continue reading

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Will Data Destroy Democracy?

Lawrence Lessig, Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership, Harvard Law School and Darren Bolding, CTO, Cambridge Analytica

Moderator: Matthew Prince, Co-Founder & CEO, Cloudflare

Photo by Cloudflare Staff

MP: If there’s one person responsible for the Trump presidency, it seems there is a compelling argument that that might be you.

DB: I very much disagree with that.

MP: How does Cambridge Analytica work, and how did the Trump campaign use it to win the presidency?

DB: we take that data and match it up with lists of voters, and combine that data science to come up with ideas about you who might want to sell a product to, or in teh case of politics, this is this person's’ propensity to vote, this is the candidate they are likely most interested in. WE also do all the digital advertising. By combining data with digital advertising, we have lots of power.

MP: so you don’t want to take credit for having won the election; but the campaign's use of data and targeting was an important factor in the election.

DB: Yes, and what Cambridge did was basically a great turnaround story.

MP: larry you ran a presidential Continue reading

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As Seen on TV

Chris Cantwell, Co-Creator and Show Runner, Halt & Catch Fire

Moderator: John Graham-Cumming, CTO, Cloudflare

Photo by Cloudflare Staff

CC: first off, we have very low ratings! The story came from my father who worked in computers in the early 80s in dallas; later in california. The dynamic between those characters was influenced by my dad.

This was largely a story about reverse engineering. The underdog story was interesting: not Bill Gates, not Silicon Valley, but a different story about the computer world.

JGC: and you managed to do 4 seasons

CC: In four seasons we go from ‘83 to ‘94; we cover everything from small networks to building of internet backbone, rise in search and www

JGC: I watched it before I came; it gave me some bad memories because there were AOL disks

CC: We have an incredible prop team. Some comes from RI computer museum; i have to ask our prop master, he might have manufactured them from images online.

JGC: This is a show about tech but also about money; these people are trying to build companies. The same people trying again and again. Is that a metaphor for recycling something?

CC: Yes, i Continue reading

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Private Companies, Public Squares

Daphne Keller, Director, Stanford Center for Internet & Society, and Lee Rowland, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project

Moderator: Matthew Prince, Co-Founder & CEO, Cloudflare

Photo by Cloudflare Staff

MP: Technology and law seem like they are colliding more and more. Tech companies are being asked to regulate content. For a largely non-lawyer audience, give us some foundations about basic rules when you have content on your network?

LR: Communications 2.0 makes the 1st amendment almost quaint. The vast majority of speech that we exchange happens online. When it is hosted by private companies, the 1st amendment doesn’t constrain it. So this is a space governed by norms and individual choices of people like Matthew. In the wake of Cloudflare's decision to take down the Daily Stormer, Matthew penned a piece saying it’s scary that we have this power, and I exercised it. We have a completely unaccountable private medium of communication.

MP: There are shields for companies for this; What is intermediary liability and why is this a position at Google/Stanford?

DK: No one knows what it means; it’s a set of laws that tell platforms when they have to take down Continue reading

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Betting on Blockchain

Juan Benet, Founder, Protocol Labs, and Jill Carlson, GM, Tezos Foundation

Moderator: Jen Taylor, Head of Product, Cloudflare

Photo by Cloudflare Staff

JT: Tell us about what BlockChain is

JC: Going back to 2008, advent of blockchain came with bitcoin white paper.

The word Blockchain wasn’t mentioned at that point, but that was the advent of this tech.

What it solved was niche problem called double spend problem. Creation of digital cash.

What you see in a bank account isn’t digital cash. The problem in cryptography was how to create digital cash that doesn't rely on 3rd party intermediary. This is what Bitcoin created.

JB: Blockchain packs in lots of stuff: useful as brand. Like internet/web in early 90s, the meaning is fuzzy.

Properties that all of these apps have in common:

Academic definition: A blockchain is an indelible chain of blocks; once you insert information into one of them it remains.

Marketing definition: many applications have been developed over last few years, all have to do with public verifiability. Reliance on cryptographic methods to achieve goals on clearing payments and the ability to check and verify.

Across the board, removing 3rd parties from equation. Establishing publicly verifiable Continue reading

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The New Breed of Patent Trolls

Lee Cheng, President & Co-CLO, Symmetry IP LLC, and Vera Ranieri, Staff Attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Moderator: Doug Kramer, General Counsel, Cloudflare

Photo by Cloudflare Staff

DK: Patent--IP issues and challenges are accelerating important supreme court cases. there’s also a flurry of legislative activity about patents. Good idea to talk about this topic: where is this going? How to push world in virtuous direction?

DK: current state of affairs. Vera: at the core is the patent itself, which is issued by and often adjudged by the patent office… is this where the problem lies?

VR: I like to blame everyone. How does someone get a patent in the first place? Someone comes up with an invention, patent attorney, documents it with opaque language, and files. The examiner then interprets the patent and searches for prior art, and says “I think this is what the patent owner is trying to claim.”

In the software space, it’s especially difficult. A lot of where inventing happens in software is right here, in businesses. People have a problem and find a solution by developing software. They don’t patent and publish.

Patent office tends to focus on patents.

DK: Talk about the Continue reading

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If I Knew Then What I Know Now: Tales from the Early Internet

Paul Mockapetris, Inventor, DNS, and David Conrad, CTO, ICANN

Moderator: Matthew Prince, Co-Founder & CEO, Cloudflare

Photo by Cloudflare Staff

MP: You guys wrote all this stuff; why is the internet so broken?

PM: People complain about security flaws, but there is no security in original design of dns. I think of it that we haven’t had the right investment in rebuilding the infrastructure.

Original stuff was only good for 10 years, but we’ve been using it for 30.

DC: The fact that we were able to get Packard from one machine to another in the early days was astonishing in itself.

MP: So what are you worried about in terms of Internet infrastructure that we aren’t even thinking about?

PM: i’m worried about the fact that a lot of places like the ITF are very incremental in their thinking, and that people aren’t willing to take the next big jump. E.g. hesitancy to adopt blockchain

Being able to experiment and try new stuff is important.

The idea that you can't change anything because it will affect the security and stability of the internet. we need to weigh benefits and risks or we will eventually die of Continue reading

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Making the World Better by Breaking Things

Ben Sadeghipour, Technical Account Manager, HackerOne, and Katie Moussouris, Founder & CEO, Luta Security

Moderator: John Graham-Cumming, CTO, Cloudflare

Photo by Cloudflare Staff

JGC: We’re going to talk about hacking

Katie Moussouris helps people how to work around security vulnerabilities.

Ben Sadeghipour is a technical account manager at HackerOne, and a hacker at night

JGC: Ben, you say you’re a hacker by night. Tell us about this.

BS: It depends who you ask: if they encourage it; or, we do it for a good reason. “Ethical hacker” - we do it for a good reason. Hacking can be illegal if you’re hacking without permission; but that’s not what we do.

JGC: You stay up all night

BS: I lock myself in the basement

JGC: Tell us about your company.

KM: I was invited to brief Pentagon when I worked at Microsoft; The pentagon was interested in the implementation of this idea in a large corporation like Microsoft.
“Hacking the pentagon” The adoption of Bug Bounty has been slow. We were interested in working with a very large company like Microsoft. There was interest in implementing ideas from private sector at Pentagon. I helped the internal team at Continue reading

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A Cloud Without Handcuffs

Brandon Philips, Co-Founder & CTO, CoreOS, and Joe Beda, CTO, Heptio, & Co-Founder, Kubernetes

Moderator: Alex Dyner, Co-Founder & COO, Cloudflare

Photo by Cloudflare Staff

We’re exploring increasing risk of few companies locking in customers gaining more power over time.

AD: I want to hear your stories about how you got into what you do.

JB: Kubernetes faced problem of either having googlers use rbs or bring X to rest of world. We wanted to have Googlers and outside people using something similar. We chose to do it as open source because you play a different game when you’re the underdog. Through open source we could garner interest. We wanted to provide applicational mobility.

AD: Brandon, talk about your mission and why you started company.

BP: We started CoreOS four years ago; We spent a lot of time thinking about this problem and containers were natural choice. They are necessary for achieving our mission. We wanted to allow people to have mobility around their applications. We wanted to enable new security model through containers. So we started building a product portfolio

AD: There are tradeoffs between using a container or an open source tech; how do you think Continue reading

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Making Mobile Faster than Fixed Line

Cole Crawford, Founder & CEO, Vapor IO, and Chaitali Sengupta, Consultant, Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies

Moderator: Michelle Zatlyn, Co-Founder & COO, Cloudflare

Photo by Cloudflare Staff

CC: moved between private and public sector.

CS: her company added 100 million customers in India.

MZ: Let’s start with where we are today: trends or things you’re seeing in the marketplace that weren’t there 5 years ago.

CC: What’s interesting is combination of data mass and data velocity, resulting in a more dynamic internet. E.g. Latency wasn’t mentioned by customers at first; AI is helping to create a new low-latency internet.

CS: One of the biggest things is applying lessons of cloud to telecom to see how we can make systems more centralized and virtualized. Network function virtualization; putting things on general service servers. Now dovetailing into 5G, where we see more bandwidth.

MZ: We’re currently in 4G world; when will 5G standard get finalized?

CS: Standards are getting finalized; trials are getting started. Many 5G systems are up and running NWC America ... is running trials already. I would say end of next year or 2019

MZ: So the future is here and it’s almost distributed? 4G took 2 years to Continue reading

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Disruptive Cryptography: Post-Quantum & Machine Learning With Encrypted Data

Shay Gueron, Associate Professor of Mathematics, University of Haifa, Israel, and Raluca Ada Popa, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, UC Berkeley

Moderator: John Graham-Cumming, CTO, Cloudflare

Photo by Cloudflare Staff

Raluca is also a Co-Director of the RISELab at UC Berkeley as well as Co-Founder and CTO of a cybersecurity startup called PreVeil. She developed practical systems that protect data confidentiality by computing over encrypted data as well as designed new encryption schemes that underlie these systems.

Shay was previously a Senior Principal Engineer, serving as Intel’s Senior Cryptographer and is now senior principal at AWS, and an expert in post-quantum, security, and algorithms.

JGC: Tell us about what you actually do.

RP: Computing on encrypted data is not just theoretical; it’s also exciting because you can keep data encrypted in the cloud. It covers hacking attacks while still enabling the functionality of the system. This is exciting because we can cover so many hacking attacks in one shot.

SG: I’m working on making new algorithms; also on making solutions for quantum computers that are increasingly strong.

SG: I’ve been working on cryptography: making it faster, recently I’ve been thinking about solutions for what will happen when we Continue reading

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What Will AI Mean for Everyday Life?

Willie Tejada, Chief Developer Advocate, IBM and Anthony Goldbloom, CEO, Kaggle

Moderator: Jen Taylor, Head of Product, Cloudflare

Photo by Cloudflare Staff

JT: Our focus today is really what does AI mean for everyday life. I’m hearing a lot about AI. What is your assessment about where we are and how it is making a difference?

WT: we’re in an unprecedented, interesting era. From a consumer perspective, negative connotation.
It’s an interesting era we are in; these technologies are going to do a tremendous amount in terms of consumers selecting what they buy, Helping patient-centric care.

Combination of data set & availability of resources is fueling AI.

You might hear 90% of the world’s data has been created in the past two years. AI will help us deal with that kind of information overload.

The big difference with programming systems is that AI knows how to understand, reason, learn, interact.

AG: There is a set of techniques through which we can more accurately predict fraud, insurance plans, credit scoring.

This is a jump in the past 15 years.

5 years ago, the ability to do very exciting things with unstructured data, i.e. automating radiology. Then digital networks Continue reading

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The View from Washington: The State of Cybersecurity

Avril Haines, Former Deputy National Security Advisor, Obama Administration

Moderator: Doug Kramer, General Counsel, Cloudflare

Photo by Cloudflare Staff

Avril began her career on the National Security Council, and went on to become the first female deputy at the CIA.

DK: How will cyber will play a role in military operations?

AH: We look at it from the perspective of “asymmetric threats”; state actors (those who have high-value assets that they can hold at risk with no threat to them). The US is more technologically advanced and relies on cyber more and more; we are as a consequence more vulnerable to cyber threats. Asymmetric threats thus hold at risk those things that are most important to us.

In the cyber realm we can’t quite define what constitutes a use of force, and saying so can be used against us. So this is an area that is crucial to continue working in; in many respects the US has the most to lose from using a framework that doesn’t work.

“The private sector is utterly critical in creating a framework that is going to work.”

We want to have widely-accepted norms and rules so that we can ask other countries Continue reading