 He eats up script kitties for breakfast, I 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 Global Rebellion Talk. Thanks. So, yeah, great, very pleased to be here. Amazing environment, indeed, as usual with the CCC. Yeah, 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 seem to be associated with this thing called Extinction Rebellion, but it is not. 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 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 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 background extinction rate for the last 65 million years has been about one to five species a year. So not 150 a day, but one to five a year. And this is fairly conclusive of the fact that we have entered the sixth extinction on this planet. 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 a three quarters of all flying insect biomass dropping in about 25 years. So three quarters less flying insects in 25 years. It's supposedly dropping at 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 end of the insects. We need them that much. Now, climate change has become very much the ascribed to this loss of species. But in fact, it's not climate change that is responsible for species decline per se. The WWF's living planet index attributes about 7% 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 or 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 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 view there. Now, most of that soy, well, 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. So 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 suck it out of the air in these negative emission technology vats, if you like. They're not even gigaton capable. And 29 European science academies concluded that we can absolutely not rely on NETs 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 do 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 at the latest reading. This is the Keeling curve. Now, 450 PPM, as seen as something of a threshold, that probably gets us more or less near 2 degrees centigrade 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 2-degree threshold with a 70% probability. Just looking at ocean rise alone, this is Miami at 2 degrees, which is arguably just around the corner. This is Shanghai. I don't know if you've ever been to Shanghai. Where will all those people go, you might ask yourself. Bangkok is already underwater at this point. 2 degrees represents 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 earth system and the Anthropocene suggests very strongly that it's highly likely, extremely probable that if we cross the 2-degree, 7-degree warming threshold, we will be on an 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, 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 last, from the Ice Age, the end of the Ice Age, about 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, a visualization of what the Earth would look like, what the world would look like at 4 degrees. Now, middle and southern Europe have 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 in from a geostrategic perspective, it would obviously move in 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 1,000 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 though it's still, again, relatively unimaginable, but based on our 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 responses post all that. You know, and this UK artist, pop artist, sort of experimental pop stuff, said this, I wrote this down on a napkin one day. I really like it. Hope without honesty is denial. People reach for hope at these times. But also really like Kate Marvel, climate scientist. She said that we don't need hope, we need courage. We need, courage is the resolve to do well without the assurance of a happy ending. This is more where we need to be going. Banksy, of course, giving us a bit of a hand here with this. From this moment, despair ends and tactics begin. In truth, 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 second warning to humanity very recently wrote that same thing. They said that with the groundswell of organized grassroots efforts, dog 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 science scientific document in all history. They are urging us in the absolute 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. You can look at this as a bit like, imagine you have a disease, a very rare disease, and that the world's expert, those scientists, 15,364 scientists contains most of the world's noble laureates, planetary boundary scientists, food system scientists, geologists, biologists. They say that. So from the perspective of expert opinion, it doesn't get much better. You can imagine that, yeah, 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 particularly bleak end, an ugly end, unless, of course, you stop now doing these things. You can also think that where our space habitat has a variety of subsystems. It is a freshwater subsystem that looks at water purification and filtration, thermal regulation subsystem. You can look at food pods. They are being attacked on our space habitat. If you don't like the word environment or earth, you think it's a bit too kind of patchouli dosed or 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, where you just get out on the street and little, you know, marquee area with your little 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 Raj, US civil rights movement, the Velvet Revolution. It's the way to go. Extinction rebellion is very much a manifestation of that energy. 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 the 31st, where a bunch of British activists marched onto Parliament Square and declared rebellion against the British government for its lack of action on the climate and ecological emergency. And then, soon afterwards, 6,000 or so descended upon London and effectively shut down the city centre by occupying five bridges. Extinction rebellion is a leaderless. That's very important. I mean, the press always reaches for a figurehead, but it is very much a leaderless. It is not stared by the UK, decentralized international political network using non-violent direct action and civil disobedience to persuade governments to act justly on the climate and ecological emergency. I'm just going to show a couple of videos right now to just give you a sense of the kind of of what civil disobedience in this case actually comprises. I'll show you a video from France, particularly focused on over-consumption. 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 consumerist event. Here we go. They occupied a shopping mall for seven hours on a whole bunch of stores across the country, Apple store, et cetera, just fantastic stuff. And you might think, where is this going? Well, and is that really the only approach, you know, occupying malls and shops, et cetera, et cetera? I'll show you another video for a very different strategy. This is Extinction Rebellion, New York City, occupying Times Square. And I think this is definitely a, what is the video called? That's right, Player. Sorry, it's a bit cut off, isn't it? Again. Oh, well, whatever. Anyway, you get the idea. Um, ha ha ha, cool. Something's a bit wrong with my copy, with my render buffer there. I can see that, I don't know. But anyway, yeah, three demands. Typically, some branches have more. There are many branches now, 600 plus branches all over the world. Some have four demands, for instance, in the US, they, some of the state branches have added a fourth demand for climate and 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, the 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 must act now to halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025. 2025, you say. Understandably, you might think that is a little bit short, but it's good to have goals. Beyond politics, government must create and be led by the decisions of a, or sortition, a citizen's assembly on climate and ecological justice. And it is working significantly. In fact, if you go to this climatemobilization.org map, and you will see that states, municipalities, and cities all over the world, tons of them have in fact declared a climate and 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, there's a significant political transformation. Yeah, and it's certainly not just Extinction Rebellion. It's Fridays for Future have been just like upping the game there massively, so respect. At the COP25, which was obviously like a massive failure in itself, Extinction Rebellion was listed as the most influential organization above the World Bank, yeah, Greenpeace, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a relatively short kind of rise of voice for that 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. They went from the perspective that we are an aboveground movement. We work in the open. It's not really good for civil disobedience to have that as your like mandate or a priori. 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, which I'll talk about in a moment, but they really settled on base camp over in the US. They just went straight to base camp. Google for sharing 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 reached for what's at hand. The Action Network, too, are hosted over in the United States. Base camp, I mean, extinction rebellion explicitly breaks base camps terms of service. You may not use the service for 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 right space as well. 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, court order, illegal process, subpoena, 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 then just gave to Trump. And I mean, this is an unsafe environment for hosting contact lists. On the 3rd of November last year, my partner said there really should be an extinction rebellion in France and I immediately thought they will need a server. There in France, you do not want your activists on Action Network and 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 the Sully Bridge, the center of Paris, with just cops cruising past and just teargasting them, even taking the sunglasses off and just spraying them right in the face. This is Youth for Climate, protesting outside an Amazon logistic center very recently, in fact, Youth for Climate, just with a guy wearing the French, the French stripes in the background overseeing it. He says, yep, you can do it. The state says it's okay and just sprays them. 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 Iceland is very well known for its strict data protection laws. It's well outside of obviously the EU and of course the five I states. And I went with FlokiNet, geothermal, direct from source, more direct from grid source. Discourse for the forum rather than base camp for instance. Next cloud for all the vital stuff, replacing Google Drive, et cetera. Hardened Open VPN and data petition on AES XTS 512 bit. Jitsi Meet for Calls and just a very simple MTA. In fact, it's not really an MTA, it's just a send mail, XM, XM4. 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 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 afford something that GroupChat does not. Many teams, each with channels, public and private. And this is just a, it's hardly called an innovation but Slack itself is chosen for that team-based structuring or configuration over GroupChat for a very good reason. There's 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 is, it's 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 don't know, Trump would buy them a Rolex, I'm not sure, but it's nuts that they did that. And then they even defended it, apologizing a little bit or 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 team, terrible stuff. So much so that in the UK at least, 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 XRUK was storing personal data inadequately and that they were very sure that in fact the police would have access to that information. This, when openness is enforced, we have a regime of openness doing things out in the open, it excludes. What about those that might work in 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 gonna 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 a 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 have 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 I just love it. If I start crying, you know why. It's not because the planet's dying, it's because I just love Debian so much, but it needs to be affordable and very well routed. So mission coherent infrastructure was what I was really after. And what I mean by that, well, 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 Organized.Earth, which was the domain name that was chosen exactly 366 days ago. In fact, it was born. I settled on Matamost and I'll explain why in a moment. And I settled on data center light in the Swiss Alps. Data center light, direct from source hydro, alpine catchment hydro and there's a beautiful irony there actually sort of like a bleak poetry that as warming melts the snow on the Alps, if it flows down into these large catchment bays which then drive lovely big generators that power the data center. I thought, I can't go past that. It's extremely well routed, their VMs are wonderfully fast. I settled on Matamost for these reasons. We had to get thousands of people off Slack fast. So the UI similarity was mission critical. They're export paths from Slack directly into Matamost. It has that team chat configuration that people in 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 their 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. There's basic team admin controls, extremely low entry barrier. The server was entirely funded by one French, I was gonna say Swiss, then I said French. So I said French, one French rebel. It scales linearly as regards system overheads. It's just extremely performant. In fact, when we got to about 20,000 people and organized at Earth, the server population, Matamost itself was running at about 30% of one core. Matamost for chat, anything sensitive, you signal a wire. And that's the rule now on organized at Earth which has become very much the global hub for the movement with 475 teams, mostly national local branches. It's a really large Matamost deployment. And why not riot matrix, matrix sign apps? 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 really, really problems with real problems with scalability. I just seem to see that it wasn't something I could really know that 100,000 people, for instance, down the road, could actually all use on my particular, say, home server deployment. The device verification was really freaking people out. I mean, some of 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 has, it might seem a little bit arbitrary, but it's become relatively critical, especially for the code development side of things. 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. There's zero knowledge, I would love to go that way, but given the fact that we already have a use signal or wire for anything sensitive, and use metamost for anything else, and use your individual branch servers, which I'll talk about in a moment, for anything truly internal to your branch, we've achieved basically the same thing because riot, just like with OMEMO, is not anti-indecrypted by default. It's something that one must actually set up. So we're effectively in the same place. So Organize.Earth has now grown to host a large number of platforms, which I have deployed there. We have, of course, metamost. We have NextCloud, two instances. OnlyOffice is used for collaborative editing. That has some missives I'll talk about in a moment. Etherpad Lite is used really heavily. Lime Survey replaces Google Forms. We just see Meet doesn't really replace Zoom, but this is something that we're working on very much. RainLoop with Dovcott and Postfix 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 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 their real life a little bit too much, and they are genuinely worried about boss or corporation or company surveilling them, when they are maybe, for instance, engaged in a project that is technically illegal or quasi-legal. Yeah, Discourse. Discourse is used, I guess, less heavily on the main organized server than it is on some of the branch deployments. The French server, for instance, now has 17.3 members in its discourse, 17.3,000 members in its discourse. 17.3, what a win. Yeah, it's just like it's the marketplace of chatter. No signal and wire replacing the WhatsApp and Skype. Yeah, 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 agenda balance as much as possible within the admin space of all these platforms. On the back end, of course, Debian, AES XTS for the data partition, Fail2Ban, and UFW for the firewalling. Those of you that are taking photos of this are Feds, I see you taking photos. Take photos. Snort for the intrusion detection, Prometheus, and hardened OpenVPN. I'm really into duplicity for backups, and Percona for hot MySQL backups. It's a real problem when you're trying to back up huge databases that are 14, 15 gig plus plus. You can't take them down long enough to do a dump with, say, MySQL dump or something like this. Percona provides a really interesting solution for hot backups. I had to work on optimizations with NODB heavily in order to get the kind of performance that we're squeezing out of Matamos and 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 just guess I thought I knew or understood V6 better than I actually did at the day of deployment. Postfix in Dovcott, and then we have Let's Encrypt. But platform challenges. GSC Meet does not replace Zoom. Zoom is just simply more performant. I think it's around about 1.7 megabits per second. It's sort of a lower level minimum bandwidth required for a user in order to have a quality call, but GSC Meet is higher, and so when you get people on 3G, they just drop out, and we sometimes have 40 or 50 people in a call, and GSC Meet is not cutting it, unfortunately. Only Office, unless you want to pay $6,000 a year, you are looking at, which of course we weren't, you're looking at only 20 simultaneous editors at the same time. This also needs to change. Thankfully, Next Cloud's text app seems to offer us a sweet spot there as far as simultaneous editing. In the meantime, Etherpad Lite is being used really heavily. There's a lack of admin controls in MetaMost, which is precisely why we are forking it. We are forking MetaMost, which is a massive job, such that team admins of all those hundreds of teams can individually manage their memberships without having to rely on me to drop into the client and use the MetaMost 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 younger and the older end of the demographic. Both expect one unified login for all platforms, and this is just a real hassle. And that is something that's very difficult to manage, but MetaMost acts as an R-Worth 2 provider, so that does offer us some interesting possibilities there. The XR server platform has since evolved. It has this. Mail Train is the managed manager, and this is working real well. And Mail Train V2 is sweet with a Docker-composed 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 Mail Train. There's the very talented developers and Brussels or Belgium 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 servers deployed and the spirit of decentralization, I have deployed these, and there are many, many more to come. And these are entirely independent from organized at Earth, from the main hub. They are self-run, self-administered. Admins are trained over 10 to 25 hours. And then the keys are flipped, and then they just sail off on their own. 2020 plans, the Matamos fork I mentioned, but importantly, the wire Matamos integration. What I'd really like to see and what we're talking about within the Rebel coders, I guess, as we call ourselves, is to have a wire add-on or plug-in for Matamos, such that you can just simply click on a bunch of different people that you'd like to engage in a end-to-end encrypted voice call or chat. Very excited about that one. Enhanced team admin controls. Team administrators should be able to do a lot of the work that I shouldn't be doing. A federation feature, which effectively replaces Matamos' enterprise offering, which is about three, I think it's about $3 a month or something per seat. It's a crazy amount of money. I mean, and in our populations, it would be completely impossible to afford that sort of the enterprise edition anyway. So we are actually sort of forced to fork Matamos, which I'm sure is really going to piss them off, but we are going to do it. We've already started. JitsiMeet rework. We want to build an OWARP wall for JitsiMeet, such that we can protect our instances. Stimultaneous session recording, not using Jibri 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 illegal. And it's just wrong. Bandwidth 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 OWARP 2 flow. And particularly and very importantly, co-location deployments. Working out of VMs is all very well, but you do have key theft from RAM 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 and locked down. Yeah, Swiss VPN for the entire movement. This is something that I should have done 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 with an 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, coders 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 species actually face. Live in your time and dedicate an hour or two a week or a day if you can to this. Maybe not Extinction Rebellion, but Fridays for Future, Sunrise Movement, Future Movements to Come. If you are interested in getting involved in Extinction Rebellion and joining the very large tech team, then visit Rebellion.global, find your local branch, get an invite into Matamost, and then see you there. Another end of the world is possible. Thanks a lot, guys. Thank you very much. Julian Oliver, Extinction Rebellion. 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, SignalAngel, question number one, please. Hello, someone from the ISC wants to know how do you enter the encryption passwords for your data partitions during automated reboots in the data center? 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 of 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 basis, we go with an encrypted ASXDS, 512-bit encrypted data partition, and one comes in over the VPN, tunnels in through SSH, and then decrypts and mounts. I realize it's not exactly ideal, but it is all we can do in the VM space. And the next question from microphone number two. Hello, first of all, thank you so much for all this work you 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? I'm being socially engineered, aren't I, in public? No, I'm particularly cautious about that stuff, and all the disciplines 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-owned infrastructure on a ThinkPad X230 that I bought for 145 euros on the German eBay, and I've encouraged all of the sysadmins to buy the same, precisely because you have the lovely battery lock on the back, you can just flip it and pull out the battery, if you're ever facing police or a stop and search, and of course in some countries, like maybe India or Brazil, this becomes really critical, but there is just a routine. I'm leaving home, I'm powering off my laptop. Which screen locker were you using? Key pass, phones encrypted the file system and we just have to do our very, very best. There is no such thing as perfect 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 cannot 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 explain to them you are aware of the risks, and you need to lean on your branch to explain to you the legalities of your operating environment. What are your rights? Can you be coerced to cough up a password, to give the master key to your key pass? For instance, like this, 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's so many factors, and again, we can't generalize across the entire geocultural, political, jurisdictional space that Extinction Rebellion works in because it's just so various. Yep. Thank you, and the internet has another question. How do you keep your community of, as you explained, mostly non-technical people on your geeky and decentralized solution as it grows? 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 yeah, we have lost some number, understandably, but the server population just grows day in and day out, and I'm expecting in 2020 at this current rate we are looking at around 400 to 500 new members a day on the matemost at least, and with branch server deployments, it'll be three or four a month until we've filled all the national branch requirements. There is no problem for that. Matemost 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, you 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 people anyway. The geekiness, 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. Thank you. Microphone number five, please. Hi there. So you talked a lot about your communication infrastructure. Can you share anything about your financial infrastructure? That's also very, very too. I mean, branches have their own funding coming in, but then there are others that will receive funding from, previously it was the UK was managing a lot of that funding, but 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 it's distributed throughout the movement as needed to meet the ends of branches. It's still just a year in, it's still quite varied. I mean, XR Germany, for instance, actually donated to the global movement recently, so it came back that way. I think 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 know, but, no, but, Nope. Yep. You need to be very careful about where bank accounts are as regards the tax state. And so I think it's just gonna be a changing environment for quite some time. I didn't actually know much about the finances side of things to answer that wholly, but yeah, thanks. Thank you. Microphone number three, please. Hi. A lot of people find it very hard to go from this content to the send, and more people tend to get involved if we lower the barrier of entry. So, you know, it sounds great when you say, like a couple, a few hundred new people a day globally. I suspect it would be more the lower, 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 kind of an easy invite, sort of a one click, get the invite to matter most thing that would make it easier? Well, that already exists. The organized on earth is really only the global hub where branches will, for instance, interrelate, collaborate, 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 their dog and the year, maybe at best, but we really need to work on finding a sweet spot. We don't want to also have people going into arrest for getting to power off their phone after following the encryption operational security guiding that we have, and then their phone is face swiped into or something like this, or they're just tricked into swiping, unlocking their phone as happened in the UK, and then they're going, they're finding their way into the platforms with best guess passwords. I mean, who knows? We need to find a common middle ground, but also educate us to why it's important that we use these platforms and in these ways and have passwords of these strengths, et cetera. It's an ongoing process. I see the interwebs has a question. Someone on 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? Well, RiseUp had, yeah, I mean, RiseUp has its own problems. We really wanted to go over community-owned 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 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 service 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. Thank you. Microphone number one, please. So my question was partially responded already about the financial infrastructure you have. I know some associations, but, like, you know, they could afford 100 bucks per year or something like that because they're 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 costs? Could you lighten up that so that, you know, I can act back home? And how do you get the money initially? 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 burnt through all of my savings and ran myself financially into the ground and did it entirely on a greater 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, et cetera, et cetera, 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. Thank you for that, Alfred. Pleasure. Microphone number two, please. Right, you already mentioned that the server petitions are encrypted at the data center. So do you have any other OPSAC mechanism in place, for example, if the data center's rated? The data center can't actually, at least without it being a breach of constitutional law in Switzerland, be rated. But 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 in the hot seat. Yeah, but it is all sorted. Yeah. Thank you. The internet has another question. Someone on IRC wants to know, do you share the recipes for your DevOps deployments and specifically where signal and why are difficult to set up? Well, signal is not so difficult to set up, but maybe it's easily confused with the fact I mentioned the wire server deployment. I mean, talks with wire at the moment, those 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 server for use in the movement. But I think wire and signal as far as an end user install 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 licensed plate numbers these days. I'm really quite a fan of wires, non-dependence on that. But as far as the blueprints are concerned, I really do hope to write a, as part of my self-obsolescence plan, is to write a full documentation for the server installs for the post install auditing and such that it 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 sell that ship. That's how it's done at the moment. Thank you. I think this is a call for participation, right? It is indeed. It is. Microphone number two, please. Is the MetaMOS fork public available? It will be, absolutely, yeah. I mean, it's just started. It's something that we just kicked off. So hopefully by about mid-year, 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 wanna grow something really, really big, the sweet spot is a fork of MetaMOS. I'm convinced. Yeah. Thank you. Microphone number three, please. Why no digital civil disobedience? 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 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. Yep. Love to, but I can't. So sad. Microphone number two, please. You're running a lot of services with user-attacked surface. What is the worst that could happen should your infrastructure get compromised? With services with what, sorry? What is the worst that could happen if your infrastructure is compromised? Well, the branch servers are entirely decentralized from the organized at Earth Hub. I would like to think that it's highly unlikely that organized at 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 registration information, largely, NODB is database encrypted, or the database layer, but unfortunately, if one has root, if one can privilege 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. If we find in 2020 that, say, there is encrypted by default, in other words, zero knowledge with OMIMO or with Riot, abstracted over Matrix and Synapse will 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 in that time, but in the meantime, just use Matamost for general team chat, everything else goes over signal or wire. That's how the movement runs right now. Thank you. Unfortunately, we run out of time. Julian, would you be able to answer questions in the after-talk? Yes, of course, yes, absolutely. So, Norfer, if you have questions, come together, come to him and ask your questions. Julian Oliver, thank you very much. Thanks, guys. Thank you.