 Has everyone had a great day so far? Yeah, sweet. Yep, our final key speaker for this, before the lightning talks, key speaker for the afternoon is Lily Ryan. She is a software developer. And as she describes it, reformed historian, currently living and working in Melbourne for ThoughtWorks. Please make her feel very, very welcome. Thank you. Hey, everyone. Can everybody? Yep, yep. Getting thumbs up. Awesome. As Tom said, I am now a developer. I was a historian. This talk is going to be about the history of technology, because it brings together two things that I'm quite interested in. This might be a story some of you have heard before. A lot of people are probably going to hear it for the first time, and I'm really excited to tell it, because it's one of my favorite stories about the history of technology, which is the first time that somebody ever got hacked, as we would think of it today. So what I want to know is how it went down, and what we can learn from it, and what you think we can learn from it, too. Is this working? Yeah, that's me. And that is a wired telegraph. I'm showing you that because this is probably, this is to give you an idea of what the most advanced communications technology looked like at the point of time we're talking about, and this is 1903. So this is an example of a telegraph receiver, and it's got a printed, it prints out the Morse code message as it was received to give you a sense of what we're working with. That was pretty much the cutting edge at that point in time. And before that, there had been a whole bunch of stuff that had happened in terms of technology development and communications development. I can't go into it right now because it would take me all day. Every single one of those points is a talk in and of itself and surrounded by so much drama and so much complaining in lots of newspapers, between scientists and between different business people, that it's too complex to get into. But it was very dramatic. So a whole bunch of stuff happened before this point in time. And the wired telegraph, when it came in, really changed the world, just generally. People were really excited about it. It had revolutionized police work, business, dating, society. It had completely turned it over. Before that, the fastest you could get was by traveling on a train and that was as fast as information could travel. Suddenly, you could send it nearly instantaneously any way you wanted. When the transatlantic telegraph cables went in, you could send it across the sea. It was a huge deal. And then when they discovered radio waves, that was an even bigger deal. They didn't know what they were going to use them for, but they knew that it was going to change everything. They thought even quicker technology that lets people communicate between particularly America and Europe at that point in time, all kinds of stuff. And it was the shiny new thing. They called themselves etheric engineers, which I think is really cool. And everyone wanted to be honest, like becoming a cloud DevOps person, I think. It's the same kind of stuff. It was really exciting. It was cutting edge. It was exciting. So this is where we're at in these early days. I want to introduce you to some of the players in this particular story. So the first guy is this guy. He's Guillermo Marconi. He's an Irish-Italian inventor who usually gets the credit for inventing the radio, as with all things when you invent them. It's not usually just you that invent something. Most things aren't the product of one genius by himself in a room for five years. He'd built on a bunch of scientific discoveries that had come before him, and he was what people at the time called a practitioner. He wasn't actually a scientist. He didn't really understand the physics behind the stuff he was working with. He would just twirl wires around tighter and wider and see what difference it made. And then whatever was better, he went with that. And that was his entire business model. The other thing is that he was the great-grandson of John Jamison, of Jamison's whiskey. So the first radio company, which was Marconi's Telegraph Company, was funded entirely from whiskey money. So if you're drinking whiskey later tonight, if you think about that, the other guy who's important to know in this story is this guy. This is Neville Maskelline. Neville Maskelline came from a long line of guys called Neville Maskelline, which made it really hard to find a picture of him, but I'm pretty sure this is the one, because both his father and his son were way more famous than he was, but he gets the credit for doing this really cool thing that you're about to hear about. Anyway, he was an amateur scientist. He actually did understand a lot of the science around radio tech at the time. And he was mucking around with it and buttered heads with Marconi a couple of times in the course of doing his work. Also by a stage magician. And he worked at the Royal Egyptian Theatre in London doing magic shows that he used radio in. So at that point in time, which is 1903, the fact that you could press a button on one side of the room and have a bell ring on the other was just mind-blowing. And people loved it. And he was really excited about radio tech, but Marconi was getting in his way. And we'll find out how. Before we do that, the other guy I need to introduce you to is John Ambrose Fleming. Fleming worked with Marconi. He was an actual physicist. He'd had decades of experience with the Royal Institution and universities and publishing papers and all of that kind of thing. Marconi hired him mostly to give him scientific cred and to say nice things about him in the press because as a practitioner, the thing he lacked was respect from academics. That was what Fleming was there to give him and his whole radio business. All right. So at this point in time, 1903, Marconi and the radio world in general had a couple of problems. The first two were Sintini and Distance. Sintini is what we'd refer to now as tuning. That was the idea that you could get a signal going on a very specific frequency and not have it spread out into a whole bunch of different frequencies all at once. And the other thing was distance. As far as signal was able to travel before, it was undetectable. And at that point in time, people figured that you could only have one at the expense of the other. You could have a very tuned signal that would only go a short distance or you could have a very, very broad, untuned signal that would go for ages, but you couldn't have both. Marconi's main problem with that was money. He was making a bunch of money at this time selling receivers and transmitters to ships out at sea. And this was important for shipping companies and they would pay him a lot of money to do it because if you can actually send a message out to a ship and say, hey, a storm is coming, get in the cove and wait, you save a whole bunch of lives and a whole bunch of stock that they're carrying and all kinds of stuff, and it's generally a very useful thing. So they were really prepared to pay him a lot of money for that. But of course, if you've got 50 ships all out in the Atlantic and they're all interfering with each other, that technology becomes useless. Marconi was working really hard to crack it and he thought that he finally had and he did this. This is a patent. It's called the patent of the four sevens because it has four sevens in it. It's very creative. And this patent described an apparatus for tuned radio transmissions over distance and receivers. And this was what Marconi was hoping would make him the big bucks. He was already doing pretty well, and this was what was going to give him an edge. The other thing about it was that he was marketing it as something that was exceptionally secure. That meant that you could only receive a message if you knew the frequency that the message was being transmitted on. Super secure. 100%. Yeah, that was one of his selling points. Anyway. Masculine also had some problems. One of them was this. It really annoyed him. Because Marconi did that thing that some people do which is kind of annoying where he patented everything. And that didn't matter if it was something like the four sevens that he wasn't entirely sure if it worked. He just patented anyway. He patented stuff that didn't belong to him, that he hadn't come up with, but he was just the first to patent it. He patented some stuff that he did come up with that he never used. He had pretty much anything to do with radio. He had a patent for it in the UK and eventually in the US as well which was pretty much where this experimentation was going on. As an amateur radio experimenter, Masculine was really annoyed about this because it meant that he couldn't innovate and he couldn't even run a magic show without paying Marconi a bunch of money. And that was a huge problem. And Marconi was prone to some really sort of grand Steve Jobs style scale announcements about all the new stuff. So when he came up with the four sevens and he was talking about this sentinel over distance thing, there was a big announcement. All the papers, everything. It was a really huge deal. What Masculine didn't like about this was that he knew for a fact that this stuff was flawed and it didn't work. And he knew it because he had actually received one of Marconi's transmissions, the test transmissions that had gone back and forth between ship and shore when he was trying it out. He didn't realize what it was until he saw the patent and then he realized that he'd actually intercepted one of Marconi's messages by accident because he'd just been working on this particular frequency and it came in and he thought, oh, okay, that's interesting. So he knew that he had his science wrong and he tried to call Marconi out on it, you know, write him a letter, did the nice thing and said, excuse me, I realize that this may be a bit embarrassing for you, but seems we have an issue with the blah, blah, blah. And Marconi shafted him, didn't care. And he tried again and Marconi didn't care and stuck his fingers in his ears and didn't listen. And so Masculine had a problem in that he knew Marconi was going to make a lot of money out of this and that it was flawed and he felt that he had a responsibility to do something about it for the public. So he decided to do something really dramatic and public that would expose Marconi once and for all for being kind of a fraud. So this is what he did. Okay. So this is June 4th, 1903. Marconi has a radio station down here in Poldew which is in Cornwall situated because that was a really good place to contact the ships that were going out into the Atlantic across to the U.S. and coming back. And it was also in a place that didn't get much interference from anything else. So really good place to do his experiments. Fleming, his partner in crime, was in London at the Royal Institution preparing to give a big speech about this whole 4-7 sentiny distance thing to a bunch of dudes with sideburns and monocles and top hats and that kind of thing. Just imagine that. That's what it was like more or less. And he had two assistants with him who were going to operate the actual machinery. While Fleming stood up the front and talked about how great this was as a scientific breakthrough and how awesome Marconi was and how everyone should give them lots of money. And meanwhile, in London, Maskelline had set up a 10-inch induction coil in the basement of the Egyptian theater. This is a few blocks from the Royal Institution. An induction coil was old-school radio tech even by 1903 standards. That had been invented in the 1830s. So it was really low-grade, basic tech. And he deliberately didn't try to... Maskelline didn't try to tune this at all. He used short waves, because he knew Marconi used long waves. He more or less tried as hard as he could to make sure that if Marconi was saying what he said was true, then there'd be no way that his message would ever get through to the receiver. And because he had... because Marconi had publicized this, he knew exactly what time the demo was going to go down, he knew where it was going to go down, et cetera. The next thing that Maskelline did was that he composed a bunch of messages that were as rude as he could think of. And this was because he wanted to get their attention. And by getting their attention, he would find out if his experiment had worked or not, because at that point in time, there was nothing he could set up at the other end to verify, and nobody was going to tweet about it as they were talking. So he would have to wait for the next day's newspaper to see if anything had gone down. So we wanted to make sure that it packed some kind of punch. And that's an actual excerpt of what he sent. Um... He went on to do that in some very choice passages of Shakespeare that were very relevant, and I didn't write them down because it was quite long. And generally speaking, yeah, it was pretty good. I'm pretty sure that was supposed to be a limerick, but only those first two lines survived. So if anyone wants to finish it off for me, please let me know because it would be really cool. But, yeah, while Fleming was standing up the front giving this talk, the two assistants in the back noticed that the arc lamp that was in the theater was flickering and it sort of looked like moss, like something really strong was interfering. And so they turned on the printer of the receiver that they had waiting for Marconi's message to come through from Polu to demonstrate this tuning distance thing. And it started to spit this out. And Fleming, who's at this point quite advanced in years and a bit deaf, didn't notice what was going on behind him and was sort of standing up the front doing his talk about how awesome Marconi was and how great this technology is. And in the back, the two assistants are freaking out, watching this stuff go through, realizing it can't be from Marconi, not knowing what the hell is going on. And it was getting closer and closer to the actual time when Marconi's scheduled message was supposed to arrive. So they didn't know what would happen, because if that interfered, then they would not have proof that this thing worked and they wouldn't get any money at all. But Maskeline knew what he was doing. It cut off pretty much exactly in time for Marconi's message to come through. So one of the assistants tore a bit of paper off that had printed out all this rude morse code, stuck it in his pocket, pretended that nothing had happened, handed it to Fleming. Everything's good for the minute. The audience hadn't noticed anything was going on. However, they went and told Fleming that this had happened and then there was a fallout. So once Fleming found out that this had happened, he wrote a letter to Marconi where he more or less freaked out. He said there was a dastardly attempt to jam us. And if I can find out who did it, it will not be pleasant for him. And he also called it a ruffianly attempt to upset the experiment quite outside the rules of the game. And yeah, there's a whole bunch of stuff that went back and forth between them all. It's just full of these great phrases that are very 1903. It's incredible. Nothing happened publicly until about three days later when Fleming wrote a letter to the Times of London newspaper in his most school-principlished tone. He demanded to know names of the people who had done this, these attacks of scientific hooliganism. How dare they? At the same time, he said that we can afford to laugh at it because he believed that what had happened was that the culprit had hacked them in a very sophisticated way that was designed specifically to circumvent these particular security measures that Marconi had put in place. He theorized that there was a strong earth current that had destroyed the grounding of the antenna that they'd set up on the roof of the thing and used a tuned frequency that had disrupted the broadcast, and he was very convinced that the only possible way this could have happened was because somebody was doing something very, very fancy and high-tech. And then Masculine wrote back the next day, which must have been really great if you were, you know, subscribing to the Times every morning of a breakfast and the monocle falls out of your eye socket. Yeah. So Masculine outed himself as the attacker the next day, and he emphasized that it was a simple, untuned radiator that was what he had used to disrupt them. And in his defense, he said that this hack was the only possible means of ascertaining fact which ought to be in the possession of the public. He said, you know, I've tried to warn you. I let you know that this wasn't working. I told you I had proof, you ignored me. This is what I had to do. Now everyone knows. Great. And because Marconi hadn't made the specifics of his tech public, he was very secretive. He put black boxes over everything. He never allowed outside observers to watch his experiments happening. And he would lie about them and tell everyone that it was great. There was basically nothing that anyone could do to disprove him until now. And so Masculine said, I more or less had a responsibility to do this. You're trying to make money of something that is broken. And that's not on. And their defense was not very good. The general thruster that was, the Masculine shouldn't have broken in on their demo because it wasn't fair. And there were a lot of words like tradition that were flung around and sacred institutions and how dare you, science is respectable and you've just done this ruffianly thing. And that's not fair at all. How dare you? We were going to make lots of money and now we're not. Damn it. And it wasn't a fair interference because you were using a backdoor in our technology. This is actually literally a quote. They said it was not a fair interference. The attacks were getting in through the backdoor. You shouldn't exploit that. That's just rude. Yeah, they didn't handle it very well. And the Marconi company shares teched. And Fleming got fired. His reputation especially suffered because he was the establishment dude who stood out for Marconi and his science is solid. It's great and I vouch for him. So he got fired and he fell out of favor with the community generally because he had sold out and lied. It was okay for him. He went away for about five years and invented the vacuum tube and came back. And so yay Fleming. But Marconi didn't do so well. And after a while he sort of overcame this and went on and then the war happened and then the government took the radio patents anyway and then went on from there. But the thing that this affair illustrated mostly was that it started off a whole debate about due diligence that had never happened before in the public sphere. This whole intersection of science and commerce was completely new. The idea of trying to make money off of scientific discovery. And they needed to have some kind of set of standards around it because if you're going to lie about your science that's really not cool. And people have a right to pay money for something knowing that it actually works. Which is mind-blowing. The other thing is that this whole affair pointed out that if tuning was going to work there needed to be some kind of regulation of standards for frequencies and who could use them and stuff. And what devices could transmit on what frequencies which is just nuts I know. But then that was when they started to develop things like frequencies and things like that that people could then own and use exclusively for certain things. Which is how ship to shore communication eventually ended up working and how most radio stuff ends up working today. Except if you buy a doorbell from China and then your neighbor's car alarm goes off. But generally works okay. The main lessons out of this. So if you're Marconi this is generally a textbook example of how not to behave if you're trying to sell a cool new thing. Here are a few things to remember. Firstly, open source has always been a good idea. If you're developing something don't hide your ideas away and don't let anyone else see them ever. If you really want to do the best job possible let everybody see it, let everybody poke at it, let everybody try to break it because once they do that you can fix it and you can make it better and that's really cool. And accept community help. Instead of just locking it away having your two people who work for you being the only people who help you out get everybody in on it as much as you can. And if you can't do that at least be open about when you screw up because then you build trust and you establish good relationships with the people that you hope will give you money and then you can help other people avoid the same issues. Test your stuff, yeah. Especially if you're trying to make a lot of money out of it generally a good idea to make sure that it does actually work instead of hiding and lying and just hoping you'd figure it out by the time you went live. You know, and don't lie. That's a really great piece of advice that I think that is worth remembering if you're trying to do stuff. Just be honest, if it's broken it's broken. That's cool. Work it out. But don't try and go live with something that doesn't work and don't try and make a whole bunch of money of something that you know doesn't work and if somebody calls you out on it, work on that. And don't forget about the old tech. That's the other thing. You can patch all of the latest stuff but if you've left your servers vulnerable to a SQL injection that's going to own you just as easily as the coolest, fanciest new thing that you could possibly have. So don't forget about that stuff. You're still going to be vulnerable to it. Just keep updating. Make sure that you've covered all of your bases. And then if you're masculine, I actually think that he behaved pretty reasonably in this scenario. So if you find yourself in his position, try to do what he did. So know your duty. Know that if you see something that doesn't feel right, you should call people out on it and try to do that properly and respectfully first and hope that they're responsive before you try anything else. Write them a letter. Email, say, hey, I found this vulnerability. It's here. You may want to do something about it before you start exploiting it and give them a reasonable chance to do something about it and fix it. And if you decide that that is the only recourse, then don't be a jerk about it. Stop before you do any damage. Do enough to prove what you've said and then draw the line. You don't go any further than that. You don't go sell it on the dark web. You don't do any of that stuff. Be respectful and do what you can to make sure that they do the right thing. Yeah. So that's it for me. And hopefully you enjoyed the story. Cheers. Thank you. Thank you so much, Lily. We have a few minutes for questions, but do you have answers to questions that might come? I don't know. Shall we test you? Do we have any questions? Cool. Pardon me. Do you know what happened to masculine? He went on and did lots of really cool stage magician-y stuff and generally was a complete thought in Marconi's side for the entire rest of his career. It's pretty great. You can track it all across a bunch of old, like named journals named like the electricians apprentice and stuff like that that are since out of print, but probably microfishable somewhere. They were always writing snarky letters to each other in the press. It was great. Makes really good reading. Any less? So this whole concept of sort of writing to each other in the press as a historian rather than a specific case is that I'm sort of seeing that as kind of the mailing list of the 19th century. How often what other kind of amazing, fascinating debates were happening in that time? Oh, lots. Lots of stuff. I mean, 1903 was an interesting time. You had lots of industrialization that was kicking on. Lots of debates about social reform. There was unrest socially in terms of international relations. There was a war shortly afterwards. There were lots of things that went on. It's more or less what goes on in the papers, what goes on in your Facebook threads now. Same stuff, just fancy. I have a question. Well, is it really a computer hack? It's a hack. But it's not really computers. It uses radio waves. It's not going on to any computer technology. Not yet. But at the same time we use radio waves all the time in computer technology now. That's how Wi-Fi works. And a lot of other stuff. So it's important to make sure that what we do, even with the very, very old stuff we still think about today. I know what we use now is built on these very same concepts. I understand. Any further questions? Which one of you first? Hi there. I was just wondering what you thought about MedSec in terms of the approach to disclosing vulnerabilities. I don't know much about it. Can you say more? It's probably something that's taken off line. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. No, please join me again in thanking Riri. Thanks.