 So I want to teach you to the next presentation. It's called Open Coal of the Anti-Social Network. And please give a big hand to John here, this first time at DEF CON. And I want to make him feel welcome. And hopefully you'll learn something and you'll enjoy this. Thanks. Here's John. All right, thank you very much. Hi there, thank you for coming to the talk. I was supposed to do this with Oxblood Ruffin. Unfortunately, he could not travel. So for better or for worse, you're stuck with me. So I thought I would start the talk today. It's mainly on an alternative to existing social media, but I thought I'd start with introducing myself because it's pretty relevant to the whole path that brought me here. So I was born and raised in Toronto. I got my first computer when I was 10 years old. I got a Commodore VIC-20, which really sparked my interest in computing. A couple years later, I got a Commodore 64 and then got heavily into the BBS world, which was a big precursor to the internet. It was a world where people were donating their time and their money and whatnot to build communities, which is really what I would love to see more of today. But I spent a bunch of time hacking around in that world, was supporting BBSs and so on. And so that's really where I came from. My first job out of university was at the original OpenColla, which maybe some of you remember. It was 20 years ago, though. This was a company that was founded by Corey Doctro and a couple of other folks. It was meant to be a company that would... It was an open-source company that was supposed to facilitate sharing and building communities and so on. By the time I got there, Corey had left and it became a closed-source company. And it was very, very different, but I was there building all the search technology. So here is a little example of what it looked like at the time. It was a Windows XP application. At the top left, there's a search box. You enter a query. At the time, Google was not super dominant. It was just getting there. And so when you wanted to search the web, you had to search multiple sites just to find good results. So this would do that for you automatically. It would search across a various number of sites. It would give you a list of results so you can see in the top pane. You can scroll through those results if you found ones that you liked. You'd mark them as relevant. It would re-score the folder, everything in it for you that would help you draw attention to things that would be useful for you. And then it would generate new queries. It would do some light semantic analysis and generate new queries and continually add information to that folder. And so you could have as many of these folders as you wanted. You were also connected to other peers. And so when peers would go off and find interesting things and save them, you could leverage all of that. Your queries would go to them and you'd get their results as well. So that was a ton of fun for me, one of my favorite jobs ever. So what's happened since? Well, for myself, I bounced around. I did a couple startups with two of the other founders of OpenCola. I eventually ended up at Microsoft. I worked in identity for a bit, learned a bit about security. I then worked in a knowledge web team and learned a ton about semantic web and recommendation systems. And then after that, I worked at Netflix for 10 years where I bounced around a lot of the different personalization teams, building all of the algorithms that produced the Netflix experience, the homepage, the ordering videos, and so on. And at the end, I was actually running the whole organization, so I have a lot of experience with recommender systems and being in a big company, trying to balance user needs and the company's needs as well. Obviously, in that time, a lot has changed in the world. Google is the dominant search engine. We've gone through Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. All of these things have happened and along with them have come some pretty big tech problems. We've seen a large amount of information siloing and so all these sites benefit by keeping you as members and so they don't really want to unlock your data and let you use it in multiple places. So if I accumulate things on Facebook and accumulate things on Twitter, they're stuck in those silos. I can't really do anything with that data. I have to use those sites. And that serves these companies. It doesn't serve me or any other end users super well. Secondly, the majority of these companies are profit companies that really make their money through advertising. And that means they make more money if you stay on their site. And so the algorithms are really tuned to grab you in and keep you on their site as much as possible. And again, this isn't necessarily in your best interest. You're being shown things that keep you there. They may not be things that actually are the best things for you. There has been endless amounts of privacy abuse. I think the favorite story that I've linked to here is a John Oliver clip that's talking about the amount of data that data brokers have access to and that you can purchase with a credit card. And in many cases, this data is data that would require the government a warrant to get. And sometimes they even just go and buy the data from the brokers if they can't get a warrant. So it's a pretty crazy situation. We've also seen a huge amount of corporate concentration of wealth and power. There are very few companies at the top that are making a lot of money. Because of that, they can use their power and their wealth to continue to be anti-competitive and to continue their advantage. There's a great link here to the antitrust case against Facebook, which reminded me it's about how Facebook's evolution that I had totally forgotten about. They used to in the early days be really advocates for user privacy and for the end user. And they got to a point that pretty much any for-profit company is going to get to where they have to maximize profit and in order to do so, they had to stop representing the end user. Misinformation, for me, it's been huge since 2016 just trying to think about ways potentially to solve these problems and putting out information that is not accurate and distorts people's perceptions serves lots of different reasons. It could be to distort a political opinion and it could also be just simply to try and make ads. Things that people put in information that attracts attention. You click on it, that helps people sell ads. Related polarization. Strong emotion, it gets a lot of people's attention, particularly negative emotion. And so the algorithms that these companies use to figure out how to keep your attention, they're really amplifying a lot of the negative emotion which leads to polarization. It leads to us feeling that we're further apart than maybe we actually are. They're stifled innovation. These companies will build what only makes profit for them. So there may be lots of great features that would be super innovative but you aren't going to see them unless the company can make some money from it. And then lastly, in order to manipulate networks and manipulate discourse, there's been a huge rise in bots. So automated systems that pretend to be people that will manipulate the internet structure to try and trick Google or manipulate discourse on these social media platforms in order to try and get more eyes on the types of stories that these folks are interested in. So if we step back though and really ask ourselves what are these sites offering? It's actually not all that much and it's actually not all that hard to build. Up here I've got arguably the three sort of top social media sites today. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Facebook, it's really just a feed. Every post in it has just an image, some description. It's a bit of a structured item. And then you can do a few things with that like you can like, you can share and so on. And you can add a comment. On Twitter, it's pretty much the same thing. It's just an image with some text on it and you can comment, retweet, like or share on Instagram pretty much the same thing. So if you take a step back and you look at it, well, what are you really getting as an end user? You're getting the ability to indirectly interact with your friends, your family and your community and you can perform a fairly small set of actions across all the sites that I'm thinking about. It's really just post, like, rate, comment, tag and share. And I include even things like Amazon and YouTube which may not be considered directly social media but they're places where that fit this pattern very well. And what you get back is a feed. But in order to get access to all of this, you're really building, we're really allowing all of these other problems to exist. So you also get all the aforementioned problems. So I found a great quote in the antitrust case against Facebook that really is just asked the question of why is it that in a country that's so paranoid about government or corporate surveillance, why is this really the only option that we have? And I would say it's probably because people that go and want to build these type of companies have two things in mind. They either want to make money or they want to control what's going on. And I think that's sort of very different than the types of companies that have been built up to give us these products today. So for me, fundamentally the question is how can we have a more trustworthy internet? And I do not think that profit seekers can really offer a solution to this. For example, there are certain things they just don't do. They did not and could not really have produced the internet in the first place. It would be it was too risky, too long run. All of that was based off of public funding to start and then at some point was taken over by private companies. But they did create all the problems we've seen. So I don't really feel like I would trust them to solve these problems. So I think we need to start with just a different incentive model, which is rather than thinking about how to make money solving the problem. This is a problem probably we're solving. So let's just figure out how we how we should solve this problem from principles first. So in terms of trust then I've enumerated at least what I think is a minimum set of principles. So any system that's built to try and solve these problems, I believe needs to be transparent. You need to know what it's doing and why it's doing what it's doing. So you can choose to use it based on what it's doing and you can detect misuse. The system also needs to provide for accountability if somebody abuses the system. There has to be some mechanism to punish that person or that entity in order to disestablish that misuse. You need as well you need some personal control. Your information or your data you should know what's happening to that data. You should know where it's going, who's seeing it and how it's being used whether it's for your benefit or not. And then lastly but obviously not least you need some degree of security. You shouldn't be able to pretend to be somebody that you're not in the system and you shouldn't be able to access information in an unauthorized fashion. So if we look at these principles though a closed source for profit model generally will minimize each one of these principles. And in this in the security sense you know you you might be able to argue that some of these companies do a good job of securing your data from maybe from hackers although you probably know a lot more about this than I do. In the very least they're just going to sell your data if it's profitable for them. So that's clearly not a trustworthy behavior. So from my perspective this really strongly suggests a free open source distributed software model. So before I dive into how it all works under the hood I'll give you a little demo to show you what has been built so far in OpenCola and so this is really just a re-envisioning of what was originally in the product and the ideas that came from the original OpenCola. It's going to be slightly different it's very similar to the existing social media but there are a couple things in it that we do a bit differently. But just keep in mind that this is just a reference application. Fundamentally this is a platform and the idea of it being open source is that you can build whatever you want on top of this. So I'll switch over to the demo which is visible Okay So let's look at setting up the application I've skipped over just the install there's a server that you that you can run and then there's a what we'll see is the use of a browser extension I've skipped over the install just for the sake of time but I'll show you how to set it up once it's been installed. With your browser extension basically it allows you to take a few actions again this could be extendable but I've just got a small set here for now the little green bubble on the end is just a status indicator green means everything's okay yellow means it's doing something and red means something bad happened there's a little disc icon that allows you to save the site that you're on there is a thumbs up icon that allows you to like the site you're on and then there's a trust action which I'll talk a lot more about later and is something I think novel in the for social media and the last thing is there's a little search icon that lets you go to your feed and then you can search things that you've interacted with and we will go into the peer view at this point you're the only person in the system so this peer is you and you can go and set up your name and an image for yourself so I'm going to pretend this is Nola who is the original open cola mascot put an image in and then there are three other fields that are set for you automatically you get a you global unique open cola ID you get a public key which is used to secure your at communication and make sure that you can validate that it came from the person you thought it did and then there's an address right now this is an HTTP address because it's a local machine I'll explain a bit more about that later okay so now we're set up let's go and take a look at what posting looks like so in order to do some posting you are when you're browsing the web you can take some action on the pages this is where we're slightly different you're not you can I'll show you in a second how you can create more organic posts but the post that we're looking at here everything is very information centric so when people interact with the same resource all of that gets combined so you can see what everybody in your network is thinking and talking about on that particular item so we can start here and we can go and say that we like the DEF CON page and then we can go and say that we want to save a Wikipedia page if we go back to our feed notice that now we have those two items that we interacted with are sitting in our feed this feed is just reverse chronologically orders it's done some convenient extraction of a text description and an image for you under each posts it indicates who posted it and then there's a few there's actions that you can take and also that you can see all the activity of your peers so you can resave stuff you can resave and see activity of saves you can like you can tag you can comment and you can edit the post itself one of the nice things that it does for you as well is that when you actually interact through the web browser it's actually taking that whole page and it's storing it as a single page archive so not only can you just click on the link and see the current page but I'll show you what I'll show you right now is that you can click on the archive link and if you notice this is being served off your local computer so you can go back and see exactly what you interacted with and you can do that without being tracked okay and so this is the more traditional social media post this is a bit of a an expert form right now I'm going to make it a bit simpler but you can edit you can edit any of the fields that go into the template that gets rendered in the feed normally in social media often you're often just wanting to type something in the description so if you've got something that you want to to share you can just put it in the description box and when you save that it just creates relatively empty entry with your image in it and that's sort of the more traditional path so it's great to have your own personal repository I find it super useful just to keep track of things but of course you want to be able to connect to your friends and leverage all the things that they're doing as well so we'll take a look at how you connect two peers together first we need a peer so luckily I have one pre-created here Clippy and Clippy already has some existing posts and these two Clippy and Nola want to connect and so what they each do is they go into their peer view and they basically there's a token that's given to them that they are they basically exchange with each other and so I'll just mention that this is adds a bit of friction to connecting that doesn't exist in existing social media and as you'll see later this is actually pretty valuable it actually provides some great functionality on the other side you do this token exchange out of band of the application so you can use you can use whatever you're comfortable with it's not hyper critical but if you want to be super secure you could use something like a signal to send that token to a friend but the point is that you only connect to people that you actually know that you've verified you know this person so you talk to them out of band once you add them if you want to you could edit the name or their image and see that person how you want to see it on your side and now you're connected and if we go back and look at the individual feeds we'll see that they are now synchronized and on Clippy's side Clippy can go then and interact with the posts that were posted by NOLA add in a comment maybe like a post and if we go back over to NOLA's feed and refresh notice all of those changes took effect immediately and again it's reverse chronologically sorted so every the most recent activities at the top so now you're connected you've got your all your data you probably also want to be able to search that data that's something it's somewhat different again we're a bit more content-centric so the idea is that you share this information and then it should be really easy for you to find afterwards you've got your a single repository of the things that you care about across all the sites that you interact with so searching is pretty straightforward just enter your query in the query box here we entered writing what we got back was the one writing result that made sense notice that this looks exactly like the feed and the feed and the search results are totally unified everything you can do in one you can do in the other so it's super convenient so you can go down and say edit the search result if you didn't like the description that it had extracted you can edit it this changes it for you and anybody that you share with but anybody that already has saved it it won't change it for them and then you can like the item you can add a tag on and if you go back to the main feed once again everything has has been updated and you see that at the top of your feed and so would Nola on her side we didn't specifically build a mobile version but just to show you what it looks like right now it's actually pretty functional it looks pretty good the one challenge on mobile is that you probably don't have the plugin and so we had to figure out how to make it easy to add content in that's actually pretty straightforward you just use the share functionality in a browser you copy the link you post it into the description and if the only thing you've put in your feed your post is a description it's going to do the same parsing that it did before and show you a result that has the image that that the description and the title parsed out for you okay and then the last thing I'm going to show talk about is just the persistent web and so this is just to sort of underscore the fact that you're not just bookmarking things you're also maintaining an archive of the things that you've interacted with so I was showing this to a friend and I just typed in the search Corey and up came four results and they three of them looked like they made a ton of sense to me they either were articles written by Corey or referred to him I'd recently read a book called the dawn of everything and was a bit confused I didn't know why that would pop up so I went over the Wikipedia page searched for it he wasn't the name wasn't there so I went back and said okay well what was actually indexed so I went into the archive version instead and I did a search for Corey and lo and behold the original version that I interacted with actually directly mentioned Corey so when I do my search if you're interacting with pages that are changing you still you have a record of the things at the time that you interacted with them okay let me bounce back to the slides okay so what I thought I'd just give a sort of brief explanation as to how this was all put together it's it's actually pretty simple what you just saw was the browser extension in the web UI there is a main API that is how that's running the server and that was written in Kotlin Kotlin is sort of a more functional and fun version of Java you can use all of the existing open source libraries with it and it just seemed like a sort of open source friendly choice but the meat of open of open cola is actually all of these components at the bottom so the first one is the entity store this is where all the metadata is stored about the post that you're interacting with so it has like all the links to the images the descriptions and everything you've interacted with we have a SQL light version of this and a Postgres version of this so you can run it in process as a library or if you choose you could host your your your entity store somewhere else or at least scale it differently there's a file store which stores all of the archive information and it will store everything that if you're sharing larger sets of files or whatever it will store any actual binary files it is a hash based store so it's globally addressable it's currently it stores things locally on your machine but it it is a very simple interface and you can imagine sharing one and putting one up remotely if you wanted to so that you could be a bit more efficient with it the search index is just built based off of Lucene which is an open source search engine it's super scalable there's a Lucene one that uses the directly the library so you can run it as a single process but again you can run it in solar as well which is a wrapper around Lucene and can scale to fairly massive situations and you can run it remotely if you want to and then the last piece is the network provider and this is it allows a node to communicate between to each with each other currently we are actually communicating over HTTP but we're using zero tier as VPN solution that allows us to make it look like remote peers are on your own network which is convenient for directly communicating and being able to view other people's feeds we're definitely looking for better ways to do it we're stretching what it was meant to do and we want really secure connections between people and it's not really meant for setting up as many VPNs as you have friends so we're we're looking for a different way to do that at the core of all this though really the core of open call is just this data representation we everything is stored as a fact these are not informational facts these are database facts and so in a post the description has a fact the title has a fact and this is basically every fact it's just a tuple it has these components it has an authority ID which is essentially who is asserting the facts that would be my user ID there is an entity ID which is what you're talking about it could be a resource or a file or another person in the network there is an attribute which is what property of that entity you're talking about the value there's an operation about whether that indicates whether or not you're asserting or retracting the facts and then there's a transaction ID so these facts get groups when you take an action that generates a set of facts they get grouped into a transaction that transaction is signed and that's the unit that's communicated between nodes and so it's actually you can this is really extendable this is the type of thing that you probably wouldn't want to run in a big enterprise database but for the user scale that we're talking about this is a really great choice and then another just fun fact about this database is because of the way that it models data it's actually always accreting data it's not deleting old data and so if you wanted to go back and look at what your feed looked like five years ago you could actually just generate a query just slightly modify the query to get the feed and it would produce that for you okay great so you've seen the demo you've seen a bit of how the architecture looks like so how does this help I listed a bunch of problems at the beginning your data is your data it goes wherever you want it to go you're sharing it with your friends in terms of whoever you connect with it's automatically replicated to your friends your friends can see your data right now on social media sites so that's nothing new there's some nice features of that though if you lose all your data you can go back to your friends and say hey can you repopulate my data store for me so you've got a backup of your data but the point is that you can take that data and put it wherever you want and we imagine situations where you might actually want to share it with applications that you trust and you can take the that trust away if you want to but to get larger features in the future in terms of the attention economy there's no advertising in the system it's possible that your friend may try to advertise you but there's no advertising component to this whatsoever and so there's really no there's no incentive to keep you in the site and from my perspective we're not doing anything to bug you we're not SMSing you all the time to tell you if you've got new content it's up to you if you want to come and use the site if it's useful in terms of privacy abuse your data is yours and you should share it with people that you trust and you now are actually in the power to do that you can take it you can revoke it I think there's an opportunity potentially here as if they're at the point that there are potentially applications out there that want to use your data and aggregate it in larger sets we pretend you you could potentially think about creating and service agreements versus end user agreements meaning that since I have all my data is valuable and it's across every single site if I want to use it if a service wants to use my data you could conceivably create some sort of licensing such that you say you're only allowed to use it for these reasons which is very different than the world is today so it's just something that we'd like to explore in terms of concentration of wealth and power this just provides you with an opportunity to move away so to the degree that people do move away you take away the big companies power and I'll talk a bit later about how we're trying to make that easier to do because of course the big question is well will people do this in terms of misinformation every piece of data that comes to you in the network comes from somebody it's not random it comes from somebody so if you see an article say from the Washington Herald let's pretend that's not a real site and it's saying this incredible story and you go and look at it and say well wait a sec this comes from some weird bot farm that I'm aware of you can mark that story that the point of that trust button in the toolbar was that you can mark a story as untrustworthy that signals to your friends that if they ever come across that that you probably they probably shouldn't take it seriously and it can also be used to penalize throughout the network wherever that information came from and obviously you can also just turn off people if they abuse your trust too much but the point is that once you get all of this trust data in the network you potentially can actually build some interesting algorithms that help you to be able to sort of navigate things that you haven't seen before. So anyway people can still put to be clear people can still post fake news but you are a moderator yourself you can control whether or not it replicates beyond you in terms of polarization there's less incentive to share negative emotion I definitely wouldn't claim that people won't do it but it's definitely not being amplified by advertising don't need to say much about stifled innovation this is an open this will be an open source project soon I'm just not quite at the point of releasing everything but since it will be open source anybody can do whatever they want with it and that means you can build whatever feature you want and then in terms of bots bots exist because they're super easy to create and scale you can go and create a bunch of Facebook users or you can create fake links that try and trick Google and it's really cheap to do that and it's an arms race to try and figure those things out but there are definitely cases especially we know now with the potential acquisition of Twitter where it's like there are lots of bots that are actually affecting the social discourse and actually distorting conversation but in this world to get in the network you actually have to exchange a token so I think it would be practically impossible for somebody to automatically trick enough people to actually have large scale effect on the network and if it does happen it really is your fault it's not some company's fault who's not spending enough time on the problem it's because you let it happen in your network and then there's an easy way to turn it off once you do find them a question I often get about is well what about information bubbles I don't I don't know that I have a really great answer for that I don't think we directly solve this I think it might be reasonable to say that in a world that's less polarized where you have more control you might be more accepting of opinions outside your own perspective I think the challenge though with information bubbles that they're natural they've existed forever I just don't think we've been as super as aware of them as we are right now and I think it's really a social problem of people really desiring to understand to build empathy and understand people not like them versus a technical problem and I don't believe that any algorithm is ever going to solve this problem personally so I think that's something that's a bit out of bounds of what we're doing however when we do get to the point where we're thinking about algorithms where you know people if people are willing to share with algorithms that are help like help them discover new information any algorithm how you can basically tune it in such a way sorry you can tune it on a spectrum between exploring and exploiting where exploring is just randomly giving data to see what people react to and exploiting is when the algorithm says I'm going to give you exactly what you want what we think you want that's going to actually get an action and you can relatively easily tune between these things so that what I would love to see is a case where the user could decide the level of explore exploit that they want which would allow them experiment with their bubbles and for me I look at something like YouTube I get stuck in bubbles all the time I see a friend's YouTube feed and I'm like why am I not seeing any of this stuff and I'd love to be able to have control over that in the algorithms that I interact with so we do have some thoughts on that so what are we thinking about well we're we're still pretty early on in what we're doing and right now the the visibility is right now just restricted to your peers which actually may be a good thing we don't know what it's going to feel like for people once they've been using it for a while but definitely at some point we want to think about introducing peers and so on and maybe being able to see a bit further out as long as people are willing to share their information maybe more than one degree away one of the big things is how how do we help people get off existing social media there are two ideas that we're experimenting or thinking about one is that because we are not actually an application in the way that say Facebook is we're we're running in the in the browser in an extension that extension can know when you're on Facebook and it can know when you're doing things on Facebook so if you decide that you like a post or you you save something that information can be replicated in your own data store which means you can sort of like get the value in open cola and still live on regular social media if you want to furthermore with privacy law you have the right to request whatever data these sites have on you and so we are thinking about writing bulk importers that allow you to go and say give me all my data I want to pull this data back in so that allows you to move your data over and then the real question is how do you get people over and I think we can potentially slowly map people between these worlds as people move over but I think we've got a couple of ideas about how to make it a bit easier than it has been in the past we're also thinking about identity I think one of the my big criticisms of say something like Facebook is that I post something that is about my family and then everybody random person I know sort of sees it and I'm kind of like that's not really what I want I want to be able to create my own communities I want my family community I want my tech community I want my music community and I want to be able to control where that information goes and so I think that's something that is definitely not in the best interest of the existing social media companies but I think there's actually a reasonable solution where you can have an integrated feed but when you post things you choose what identity it goes to you can copy things between those identities and so on but I think that would be improvement of over what we have now we're looking at building a better mobile app maybe it allows you to bump with somebody to be able to exchange your contact details and allow a bit more rich functionality on a mobile device I think one of the things that I would be super excited about would be if we do get to a point where there are lots of people and they're willing to share their data with trusted applications I imagine maybe an academic institution is saying hey you know what we'll do for you is if you give us your data we can do some research and understand social structure and opinion and that kind of stuff and in return we'll give you we'll we'll host algorithms for you so that you can get broader algorithmic results to help you find new information and in that world because your data that open coal has access to data across all the systems that you're on it's got a much richer set of data than any one particular site does and and if since all that data is shared with this system and it even knows things that you've done on youtube you could potentially build a youtube recommender that was not even did not even involve youtube and so that algorithm could produce different results for you that were optimized for your purpose versus youtube's purpose and I think similarly you could apply this idea to amazon when I go into amazon and I look for I look at all the star ratings I have no idea who those people are I don't really know if they're bots I don't know if they're like me but you could potentially use this data to help recommend even products for you which sometimes is a good thing and they could probably do a more authentic job of doing that than amazon would in terms of trying to maximize the revenue we're also thinking of the notion between publishers and consumers so obviously in the social media world today there are a lot of people that just publish out data for people and so it's relatively straightforward for us to allow people to create a one-way connection we just haven't done this now done this yet I think it'd be super interesting if we could even get newspaper newspapers to be interested in this and if they were signing the information that they were propagating through the network if the more people you got doing that the harder it would be to inject fake information from unknown sources into the system I'll skip over the leveraging the network to enable trust algorithms I think I've sort of touched on that the really just a platform from doing these things everything I've shown you is meant to be pluggable and everything I've shown you is meant to be extendable and I think on top of what's been built it would be fairly straightforward to build an application ecosystem and even a recommender ecosystem all the data is standardized and the APIs are standardized so you could anybody could make what they want out of this it could be different somebody could make it look exactly like Facebook if they really wanted to but having some basic tooling at the bottom to enable that would be great the last thing is search filters so right now when you're there's probably many different ways you want to look at your data and so enabling rich search filters where you can actually specify people and tags and keywords and say this is the my named filter that does this allows you to build your own feeds basically okay so now what you've seen sort of where we're at right now just to reiterate we're we're just we believe this problem as we're solving whether or not we make any money we're not looking for easy funding we are a non-profit company we want to work with other smart cool people we're looking for debate collaboration and other ideas we're specifically interested in alternatives to the network providers Tor is it probably the next thing I want to take a look at but there may be other options that just allow two nodes that are sort of arbitrarily placed on the internet to be able to talk to each other and so just want to explore and have some options there peer-to-peer systems also have some challenges with the fact that nodes are you know transient they're not always online and so the question is how do you make how do you create a seamless experience like you get with sort of centralized control right now we do have as I mentioned all the data is replicated amongst your peers so there's an easy solution is potentially to delegate to your peers when you're offline and that can allow you to get get updated even if you're offline but I think there's other cases things that would be interesting to like creating dead drops to pass information around or just having some other storage that allows for information to persist outside of your actual system so that's all I had to talk about today hopefully you enjoyed it if you want to ask any questions or if you have any ideas I will be out front or you can reach me at John dot Minjely at opencola.o thank you