Will Scott

Tag: germany

  • Building Decentralization

    Building Decentralization

    I talked earlier this week on some of the current problems in decentralization at the rc3 event. It’s easy to be pessimistic about the current silo’d technological landscape, but decentralized platforms are continuing to make progress and there’s reason to be hopeful. At the same time, there’s a green field of many more decentralized protocols to discover and define beyond the current notions of DHTs and Consensus protocols.

    The RC3 event was a great commemoration of the traditional chaos congress. The extent of culture and community that was brought into the 2d virtual world managed to capture some of the essence of the in-person event. Like the real events, it was a great opportunity for mixing whimsy and technical learning. In that spirit, I rehashed some measurement work to generate the following statistics about the event:

    • The most common character accessory was wearing a mask, which were donned by 30% of participants.
    • The badge shown on the most user profiles was ‘On Webcam‘, a badge I awarded to a scraped list of usernames on the 2nd day of the event. It was about 3x more popular than the second most popular badge, received for visiting the CERT, which only functioned near the end of the event.
    • A total of 385 badges were awarded and publicly displayed on user profile pages.
    • A total of 334 distinct pronouns were used by users. Only 5 of them were attempts at cross-site scripting attacks.
    • The user population was approximately that of the recent in-person events. Of those, my measurement estimated about 1/3rd participated in the 2d virtual world portion of the event.
    • There were only 2 users who used the same description of themselves on their profiles: ‘Moin!’

    These statistics come from a fairly simple script that measured user pages near the end of the event. User IDs were largely sequential and could be enumerated without issue. This was needed as a step in awarding badges, which could only be done with the non-enumerable “usernames”, rather than these User IDs. One of the things that makes the CCC events unique is their transience, which allows for a safer form of expression than our more usual permanently logged and recorded online experience. In that spirit I have subsequently deleted my collected list of usernames and saved only these summary statistics.

  • 34C3

    I’m very excited to have two talks at CCC at the end of the month. The bulk of accepted talks can be seen and voted on at the CCC “halfnarp”.

    The first talk is on the Internet in Cuba. It expands upon the recent talk I presented at IMC last month, to provide additional color on what Internet access is really like in Cuba, and what the community there is doing to create LANs and other alternatives to the official but expensive ETECSA service.

    The second talk looks again at technology in Pyongyang. Since 2014, there have been a number of talks about the totally closed off tech ecosystem there, but as it ramps up we continue to only get a few glimpses into what’s going on, and it’s getting only harder as the broader tensions ramp up. My goal is to propose a path for getting more rather than less transparency into the picture, because it is a really fascinating place.

    The talks should both be recorded, and might even be streamed. If you’re one of the (I hear it could be up 16,000) participants, I hope to see you in Leipzig!

  • The state of Internet Censorship

    The state of Internet Censorship

    I’ll be presenting next week at 32C3 on the state of Internet access, transparency, and measurement. Lots of the work is done each year on measuring and learning about the state of access, but this phenomenon with growing relevance to many countries is poorly publicized. Much of this is a fear that being too public about what can be measured will make the network operators move to even more opaque techniques, since in many instances these systems are seen to thrive in structures without accountability.

    Needless to say, it has been a busy year in the space, with increased funding for the measurement community and a multitude of new policy in response to ISIS and other perceived threatening uses of Internet Speech.

    I’m excited to be heading back to Germany for the holidays, and hope to provide a reasonable survey of what’s out there and make the network measurement field a bit more accessible!

  • 31C3

    31C3

    I gave a talk last week at CCC in Hamburg on the state of consumer technology in Pyongyang. It’s available for streaming online.

    Images shown in the talk are available.

  • CCC

    30c3
    I spent the last four days at 30C3, the annual Chaos Communication Congress. It was great to put faces to names, and to get to interact with a bunch of people I’ve met online. It was also really interesting to compare the congress with academic conferences I’ve been to previously, and to think about which model does a better job of making connections and sharing ideas.