 I'm a little busy right now. Turn off the radio. Yes, it does. OK, there it is. ImagineX, aka Jesse Kremz. You may know me from such popular things as introducing everyone else. And head speaking again. This time I'm speaking, so it'll be a little different, crazy. I'm the acting operations manager slash president of the Hacker Foundation, which will be a real body in later today. In about six, I'm going to be building D. Feel free to come on up. I'm Nicholas Farre, acting secretary-treasurer of the Hacker Foundation. Can everybody hear me better now? I'm Nicholas Farre, acting secretary-treasurer of the Hacker Foundation. Also, there's a guy that looks just like me, who was a speaker during this room. I have nothing to do with him. The whole point behind the Hacker Foundation is to serve as an umbrella organization for people doing any kind of service, technological research. Any organization that would be at DEF CON is somebody that we can help serve. The point behind it is to take care of all of the paperwork that you don't want to take care of. This is really what it is. It's very simple. You have good ideas. You want to formalize them, maybe get some grant money, maybe fund some money from your great-rich uncle. You want to be a legitimate sort of organization of some sort. Maybe you want to go into Kosovo and run telephone lines, and you need UN sanctioning, and you need to front it through something that exists. Boom, this is how you do it. You talked to us. It's a very simple process. What we provide is immediate IRS 501c3 status for any projects that would normally operate under a 501c3 umbrella. Specifically, projects that deal towards humanitarian relief, freedom of expression, free flow of information, anything that would operate under those auspices. So you're looking at things like open source mine detection robots. There's a shitload of mines in the world, and they're blowing people's legs off all over the place. We've got players that shoot things down. They cost lots, but it would be great if we had a little robot that could go out there and find mines, dig them up, and remove them. Other things, think about using VoIP technology and eating in unique ways, such as making it possible for people in, say, the slums of Honduras to call their buddy, working here in Vegas, send them money. Other projects include rural and banking systems. If you want to start up a credit union in a foreign country and you need some banking software, remember we're talking micro amounts of money make a big difference in these places. We're talking really bad poverty. So you can get some licensed and approved credit union operations software from the World Banking Association from your $5,000 plus a $1,000 fee per terminal, and it runs in DOS on $46, sort of. It's that bad. You look at lots of stuff like that, and you want to make little changes. They're very easy to do. I mean, as soon as you sit down and write banking software to run a credit union that used MySQL, SSL, PHP, something advanced, you'd definitely be making a big impact. That's also a great way if you want to destabilize the global economy. We also provide institutional support for your research and service projects. If you have ever applied for a grant, usually grant funders do not like to give money straight to individuals. They like it to be administered through a university, through some kind of non-profit organization in NGO. We realize that a lot of the people who attend DEFCON and would be eligible for that grant funding who, through just hobbying outside of their professional work jobs, don't have access to an organization that they can apply for grant funding through. That's why we're here. If you have a hobby and you know of a grant you want to apply for it, you come talk to us, you fill out the grant application, put our name on it, you're all good. So one of the big projects that we started with, and this is what happened, here's a short history of why this is here. About three years ago, Nick and I were hanging out and we were talking about Doctors Without Borders and how they were kicking ass and taking names all over the world, helping people live better lives. And we said, you know, it would be great if we could do something like that with our skills. Unfortunately, you know, we need sanctioning and all this other stuff to get in there. So we had a meeting with some other people and we said, we want to do this thing called Hackers for Humanity. And everybody had these totally different ideas about what that meant. So what we decided to do instead was create an umbrella company, an organization that covers all those issues. Hackers for Humanity specifically is an NGO that goes into crisis areas in the world and does tech support. We set up networks. We'll do sub-radio nets. We'll do other things that NGOs aren't very good at so they can concentrate on their core competencies. And we're also thinking about getting into rehabilitation and training for crisis areas so that when... So essentially bringing real phone technology into places that have been torn by strife and war for years and years, like Afghanistan and Iraq. There's no reason that Halliburton needs to make all that money. That money can be recycled back into the economy and do a lot more good. And the fact of the matter is that people who are in this room and attending this conference know exactly how to do these things for far less money and manage to make them far more resilient than for-profit corporations can. And they're wasting my money, your money, everybody's money, so waste of our time. And we also provide the administrative support for groups that are doing this research. Anything that's related towards the organizational mission, a lot of the things that we've been mentioning. And a couple of the things by extension that we haven't, we can provide all of that support that we won't find in a network. So tax deductible generation status went away for the project, specifically open source crowding to be a good example of this. So hacktivism projects will be a good example. We aren't actually... We have no political interests, but we understand that some of the activities that we support may have political impact. We're not trying to read elections, but if people can read The New York Times in China, that may change some things. Uncensored. Yeah, censoring issues. Also, if you have an open source coding project out there that you believe has some sort of charitable aim, a lot of people have PayPal donation buttons. But corporations and other people who would be likely to film those projects seem kind of leery about donating to just a random PayPal account. If you believe that your project has a charitable aim, you can come talk to us. And all donations through your project under our auspices could be tax deductible. And that's a really big thing for corporations that are using the software that you're writing to support the projects that you're writing. We wouldn't take anything off the top of that. Basically, people donate to that PayPal account. We send you the exact amount of money that they send us. One of the things to remember is that we're not a money-wandering front. Though it does sound that way. He's going to be a CPA, so we'll take care of that. We also don't want to end up funding cyber-alkaida. So we will be doing some oversight with where the money goes and what it's spent on because that would be really bad if we did that by accident. Also, the organization is a whole of the people who... The people who run it, the people who spend their time helping you out. Also do things like hosting events, maintaining online forums to help all of the projects that would be working under our auspices to work better together. There seems to be a disconnect. That's one of the great things about DEF CON, is that it brings people who otherwise wouldn't mix together. Just the chance random encounter with somebody that, you know, a friend of a friend creates a lot of interesting synergies. If there are any corporate types out there that like the word synergies. Synergies. Did you want to talk about these? So, connecting projects with compliant goals and efforts. For example, we have some people we know who work at the open courseware program. And we know people in Iraq who want to use open courseware in their educational program. Unfortunately, there's no internet in Iraq right now. It's very stable. So, it's much easier just to get the entire open courseware load, stick it on a hard drive, stick it on a plane and send it over there. That's the kind of stuff we can help with. If you just want to help and get an interest, we can hook you up with people. And if you're somebody who has a need and you need technology help, we can do it the other way. Also, another idea that one of the people who's on our board had was the hack of benevolent society. Not, we're still working out the tax and legal implications of how we're going to do this, but the essential idea being it seems that especially after, you know... The dot coms. Especially after the dot com blah. After dot bomb, it seems that a lot of people here are living under a feast or famine sort of thing. That, you know, one year somebody will have a great job and they'll be making a lot of money. Their friend will have nothing. Next year the situation will have reversed. And a lot of the times when you've been fired and when you're living check to check exorbitantly, you suddenly have no money. You have to start selling a lot of your hardware. And then when you're trying to get back into things, you realize you have no money to buy that hardware. The idea behind the hack of benevolent society is to create a fund for people when they have money to be able to donate to and get the tax benefits of and when they don't have money to be able to pull out just to buy a laptop, just to buy, you know, a cell phone for a couple of months to try to get a job. Something so that we can all try to break, you know, the sort of feast or famine cycle that a lot of people attend this conference live under. Yeah. So public awareness. Everyone's, you know, evil hackers. Ooh, go boo. So we're going to deal with that on a... We're going to try and deal with that. We're going to get in touch with the press and deal with stuff like that. Specifically, negative images. EFF has really helped with this kind of stuff, but I'm doing a century advocacy on what we are. I mean, most people think that hacking is about breaking into things, but hacking is also about creating things. And that's often forgotten, facet. Hackers don't have a PR firm. There will be that. Go ahead. And again, we provide overall administrative support. If you're having trouble branding or marketing what you're doing, if you're having trouble just getting it out there as a distinct project, we can help you with that. Again, we also help with funding administration. And a lot of times people, especially hackers, have a very hard time managing finances, managing large groups of people. I'm sure you've all had some kind of problems with that. A lot of what we want to try to do is to help organize those things. Is to help give you very simple tools to help manage money, to help manage people, to help manage other outside resources to focus again on what your core competencies are. And also, being the hacker foundation, we want to be as transparent as possible. A lot of times all you'll know about any particular nonprofit organization is what they put in their annual report. We want to be able to make sure that all the information without compromising other people's privacy rights is out there. All funding that goes out and specifically to what it goes to is public information. All incoming institutional funding, if there are any corporate funding, any foundation funding, we want you to know where our money is coming from. The only thing that will keep anonymous by request are small donations. We want to try to be as transparent as possible so that you know exactly what's coming in, what's going out, and what's happening in between. All of our board meeting mimics are public. Our board members rotate annually. Board membership is open to pretty much anybody who has an interest in forwarding the goals of the organization. And our annual board elections are held every year here at DEF CON for your convenience. So, you should come on up and see us tonight. That's sex, executive board meeting. It's our second floor. It's up by the pool. It's that stairway you're never allowed to go up. One night it came. Just don't go in the roof. We are still planning and pending. Is anybody from the IRS here? Good. We're hopefully going to get that stuff taken care of very quickly. The IRS is a nice money with a very slow organization. So, we're taking our own sweet time on this one. All of our paperwork is organized. We are organized as a California charitable corporation. Every piece of paper, every form, every person that we could have possibly contacted has been contacted and we're expecting our positive determination whether at any moment now. Please. So, any questions? Are you ready for a long time? You're saying too much. You got to come up here and grab the mic. I have to repeat the question. I have to repeat the question. I'm not so good at that. I'm just going to make some comments on this presentation. Oh, girl, no. Okay. I'm very pleased to see this, but I think your basic problem is the word hacker has been taken and reserved, so to speak. It's almost like a trademark. You're not supposed to use somebody's trademark. If you try to sell a beverage, Coca-Cola, they're going to come down on you hard because they own the legal rights of the name. In the public mind, a hacker is a certain kind of person. It's in the mind of the public. It's in the mind of large parts of the press, of law enforcement, of corporations. There is no way that you're ever going to change a perception. The term I've heard is like boiling the ocean. Okay. I'm quite serious about that. I'm a marketing guy. I'm also in the marketing industry, unfortunately. What? I'm also in the marketing industry, unfortunately. Well, I am, too. And I'm unfortunately unemployed, but that's later. We'll talk about that later. All right, so anyway, so my point is what you really are describing is a wonderful thing. You're describing a group of independent software and hardware people who want to do projects for the welfare of humanity, so to speak. Just like doctors who have borders, in effect. That's one of our subprojects. Exactly. But the point is you need a name that more reflects doctors without borders or software developers for humanity or something like that without sounding too goo goo, so to speak. You're never going to win with hackers. You're also describing it sounds like a professional association that reminds you of the associations for aging rock and rollers. Which, actually, seriously, which include an old age home. So I was waiting to hear something about a retirement home for hackers. That was a... That's actually one of the ideas behind the British society. My name is getting bad. I know it's coming. You're not getting younger here. Every deaf con is a little harder, I know. When I look around this audience, I see most of the people younger than me. Some of you are probably young enough to almost be my kids' age or in college, one's a grad school. I'm a little older than that. But I'm not a hacker such. I'm a security marketing guy who wants to hear people talking about. By the way, I'm looking for a job in Silicon Valley. Hey, hey, hey, put the mic down now. Love you, thank you. Happy Christmas for anybody who wants it. Who isn't marketing, isn't he? I know what Nick takes this one. It's funny you mentioned it. I actually was trying to describe this to a Texas trial attorney. On the flight actually over to Vermont where we were starting to get to the IRS paperwork. And to a certain extent, I do agree with you. And the two things that I have to say sort of in response to that are one, right now we are just starting out. And the people that are going to be involved right now understand what the term hacker really means. And as we end, of course, as any small organization starts growing, they don't get known so much for their... I mean, yes, the name is a big red flag. But based on what we're looking at as our growth model right now is to sort of use and leverage that as a name. The word hacker does stand out in the press. But yet when you see that, you look at it, you're interested in it. We know enough about the press and how to manipulate and how to leverage that term so that people see the word hacker and then see good deed. People see the word hacker and then they see good project. Yeah, I know, it will be difficult at first and a lot of people won't get it. And the other issue with this is that we're going to get called bad anyway. I actually sat around and kicked around names for days and days and days and days and days. And it occurred to me, you know what? We're going to get sucked into it anyway. It's fine. Someone else has a question? So someone over there had a question. Jennifer has spotted you already. You raised your hands up high. There you go. No, come on up. What's your question, loudly? Yes, we do. We actually do have international members. We've had a lot of support from some of our colleagues in England. And we are looking to make more friends across the oceans. We have friends seen and unseen in all over the world. Next question? The birth rate drop-off being a problem or being a plus? Are you talking about just how to get phone lines in there fast? We should talk after. There's a couple solutions. I don't want to just make an answer myself with some wrong ones right off the bat. But regardless of the technical implementation there, implementing telephone systems at little or no cost, they get the equipment for free and we teach them how to operate it at as close to free as possible. If they have any free time to help use it, we teach them how to repair it. We tell them how to contact us if they need spare parts or they need other assistance. It's not one of those examples that you typically see in developing societies and developing nations where people are only interested in throwing in a telecommunications infrastructure when there's money to be made on it. We saw that as a side effect of what happened in Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Yes, it was an extraordinarily repressive regime. Many of the most brilliant lines of Chile were either killed, made disappeared, or left Chile. But at the same time, he brought an environment there where people had an interest in making a lot of money by implementing a telecommunications infrastructure. Right now they have a much more liberalized government. Pinochet is this close to being indicted for his crimes against humanity, but at the same time Chile enjoys the benefits of that telecommunications infrastructure that was put there for a profit motive. What we're trying to do is do the same thing under a non-profit auspice. That's the whole point behind the Hacker Foundation to try to bring a lot of these developing nations into the world excluding the normal profit motive that comes when people throw this telecommunications infrastructure there. The other thing is that we're looking to build durable solutions with no interest in what's called t-shirt charity. We are going to build durable long-term solutions that the locals can maintain and build. And you see there's a benefit. It's kind of scary in a way. A lot of people have had their jobs outsourced from here because India, which used to be a third world country, is now a pretty high-tech place. I look at that in two ways. That's the hand of straight in action, but also, you know what that means? There's a lot more Indian hackers, and now there's a 2,600 being there. That's pretty cool. In a lot of times, development organizations will attempt to impose a certain brand of technology as sort of a cultural imperialism. The Hacker Foundation is not interested in doing that. What we're interested in doing is finding out what people want, and then figuring out how to implement it. For instance, a friend of mine, Dirk Koening in Grand Rapids, who runs the community media center there, went to a village in Africa to try to improve the communications infrastructure amongst a group of related tribes. And he went there, he had all these plans, voice over IP, wireless networking, team candidates, he got 11, that sort of thing. And then when he got to talking to the chief, the chief said, well, you know, if I had a bell that all the villages could hear so that they knew when to come into the village, that's all I need. They figured that out, and that's when I ended up getting implemented. We're not interested in anything other than helping people achieve what they want to achieve. And if a bell ends up being the technological solution that they want, and we can provide it, that's what we'll do. Any more questions? Please? Okay, if you want to talk to us. Yeah. In time, or just cash? We did all our own paperwork and filed our own stuff. It was $700. But you know what? We spent a weekend turning our brains into mush, literally, doing IRS filings. Goddamn. And... No oppress is a very good book, but if you have no experience or background in a nonprofit organization, a lot of the language and a lot of the verbiage gets to be overwhelming. You know, I've worked under universities and nonprofits. You know, my most substantive job in my career was working for a 501c3 computer recycler. I was the general manager of my college radio station and we were largely independent. A lot of the things and a lot of the terms that they use, the meaning of you really have to learn just being out in the real world. That if you're interested in starting a 501c3 on your own, that you go out there and start volunteering and start trying to help out people in the administration of another nonprofit so that you know exactly what they're talking about when they're working on other things. But the total dollar investment is pretty high. Also, what state do you live in? California. It's the most friendly states to do it, but again, friendly states typically have the most administrative overhead. We did it. It was a long time for our paperwork to travel through the system. Almost a year and that was for a $25 form. It happened during budget cuts. I've seen fees of $200 an hour. I've seen flat fees of $200 online on a little Google ad and I'm way more willing to think about it. But you really do have to look at what you're doing with there. Thank you. We're done, but we'll answer questions out in registration. Thank you very much. We hope to see more of you. Hackafoundation.org. Applications are on the DEF CON CV if you're interested.