0:00:11 Katherine: Hi everyone, thanks for joining us again on the Reality 2.0 Podcast I am Katherine Druckman and I am with Doc Searls as usual, and today we have a very interesting guest his name is Robert Douglass and Robert, and I have known each other a long time through the Drupal community but Robert is up to some really interesting things with open-source software and hosting and I think he's gonna have some really useful input for those of us looking to explore options that are more privacy-respecting as far as replacing our some of our cloud apps. But before we get into that, I wanna let Robert introduce himself.

0:00:54 Robert: Hey, thanks Katherine and great to be here and that was a very nice introduction and I hope that you're right that I have some great things to tell you about protecting your privacy but it's unfortunately going to be a mixed story, it's not just all good news.

Some of it will hopefully maybe introduce you to a couple of tools that you may or may not have heard of, and also encourage you to look at them, but it won't be like... You can go replace Zoom and Slack at the click of a button, and have 100% everything you had before with no work. It's not like that, but that's jumping the gun. Let's get to it in a good time.

0:01:36 Katherine: Stay tuned.

It's not that hard though, right?

0:01:39 Robert: It's not that hard-ish.

0:01:42 Katherine: Okay, there we go, that's very optimistic. So, Doc you were just telling us a little bit of a story and I wondered if you could recap that and share with us what we're concerned about today in particular which may not exactly be on-topic for replacing Cloud services, but is however, very timely and important.

0:02:04 Doc: It's interesting that, to me, that we had conferencing kicking over a very long time and we had these sort of... We kind of put up with them conferencing, I guess, cloud-based, I don't know if actually Skype ever was cloud-based, I guess, it was everything's kind of cloud-based at this point, at some level, at a deeper level. But we had Skype, we had WebEx, and we had GoTo meeting and we had free conference call and we had a bunch of other stuff... There's a lot of competition in a market where actually, as far as I know, all the codecs were proprietary, there was a sort of proprietary based level on all of them, but it was not a very sexy interesting thing until we had this virus in the meantime Zoom had kind of emerged as a total leader, it was just... We're using it here. And about a week and a half ago, maybe about two weeks ago, they just started getting the shit beat out of them, and including by me. In fact, I had more traffic on my blog for stuff that I wrote about their privacy policy, than I had almost ever had it was remarkable. Within... I mean...

I normally get dozens of people on my blog, and I blog about once a week or maybe once a month at this point, just be many times a day, but... But all of a sudden, I've got 25000-30000 people who are looking at my blog to see what I said about Zoom... And it was only just taking issue with their privacy policy and telling them to get the trackers off their website. I didn't deal with anything else, but suddenly I became this guy that got sourced a lot on Zoom, in privacy and to their credit. I kept writing about it over and over again, 'cause I became a moving story. And then they changed their privacy policy and I wrote about that and their CEO reached out to me and I had a conversation with him.

0:04:00 Doc: His name is Eric Yuan, seems like a really good guy had a really good talk with him and he said he would do exactly what I told him to do, which is stop, get all the trackers off of their home page turned their home page into the brochure It ought to be, get the marketing shit somewhere else, and he said, "Yeah!" we talked about he would have a fight with marketing about that, and not much about all the other stuff that they were involved with, and in the mean time they get it with a lot of other privacy stuff and they just have become... Like... You know... As they should be like the punching bag and with some cause.

But I haven't written anything more about it except a tiny little bit in something I put up yesterday.

So really interested in hearing about all the alternatives at this point, but while also respecting the fact that I know a lot more about them now and they are doing some cool stuff and there's not an accident that we're using them now. I also think what we're doing now is not especially private is that one of the... We're not discussing stock prices, we're not doing an M&A anything, we're not doing company secrets, we're not talking with our shrink.

0:05:10 Robert: We literally plan on publishing this on the internet.

0:05:13 Doc: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I suppose somebody could jump in here and cause havoc, or jump ahead of us, and put it out there, but a lot of what we do online, is not especially private doesn't really need to be so, but all these things have been terribly blurred and I just wanna get that out because for a few days, those in the middle of this, and I'm actually waiting to hear back from Eric Yuan, he said he wanted to talk more. That was 9, 10 days ago. I haven't heard from him so I don't know what the deal is.

0:05:47 Katherine: I suspect he's a little busy right now.

0:05:50 Doc: He's very busy and I excuse that, actually. I think it's... He's... better things to do. So one of the things that I found, I spoke to a friend who was with a really big dot org that has the top level deal with Zoom and he showed me how they monitor, how they can monitor every line, and the performance on the line and the learning they get out of it, and how they're constantly adjusting the bandwidth and a whole lot of other stuff. That was really interesting, but I didn't realize it was that complicated, and it really is actually...

0:06:33 Katherine: So we were talking earlier though, about Apple and Google, and I think you mentioned that you had some thoughts on the news that came out today and everyone's glowing praise for Apple and Google and some thoughts you had that may not be glowing praise...

0:06:55 Doc: As soon as you're contact tracing that just screams, privacy laws.

0:06:59 Kartherine: Yeah, but yet, they make sure to point out that this, of course, obviously respect user privacy...

0:07:16 Doc: I trust Google, about as far as I can throw them. I trust Apple a little bit more, in part because or entirely because they're really not in the tracking business, and they don't have to be and there's a, there's a lot of liability for them if they're caught doing it and they've done a really good job I think of stating, I think is strong, a privacy position as they can, especially on their health stuff. And I know some of the people who worked with them on the terms for the use of their health app where all the data is yours, it's not there is if you wanna participate in in studies, for example, it's entirely opt-in your own the data that you give them at the end of it in a form that you can use. I'm not sure what that would be in a lot of cases, but very handy for studying Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, how well you're adjusting to surgeries, all kinds of stuff that that could be useful to you.

0:08:19 Doc: And this, I gather from having taken a glance at it, it's really fresh news, is opt-in... It isn't opt-out, there's no shaming of you if you don't do it, which you have, for example, in as I understand in any way in Korea, there it's actually just a matter of... Sort of respect for others that you are going to submit to the same to reporting everybody you've met, with, and everybody knows everything about each other is respect to this virus, and it has been very effective for them, but they also have a... This is a really important point. Like most countries, they have in a way... We would call single payer but basically healthcare is a right and not a privilege, it's not like the US in the sense that we have a B2B insurance business here.

Healthcare is an insurance business, it's not a retail business or you can pay retail for your health care, but you're not gonna do a lot of stuff will never get done because you can't afford it, you just can't afford it.

So you have, it's a B2B insurance business, and that actually incentivize is not disclosing anything, about yourself that raises your risk profile and may deny you coverage downstream. So that is something nobody ever talks about is that this is the 2 insurance business, it's the "it's not the free and open market, we tend to think of when we talk about a free market, so it's a specialized market that a B2B business between companies, we are beneficiaries is a secondary sense. And sharing data, even having data, even owning data, having rights to data is not in the picture for us. I mean, when you... You have a right to get that your doctor or your clinic gets you have a right to that but it's basically their data, so it's a really complicated situation here. It could be we need giant companies like Apple, Google, to get together on something like this, but I don't know what happens once we've let them have the data, there's a... Again, I think it wouldn't be in Google's interest, to match that up with advertising. So all of a sudden, as soon as the cure is found, you're getting ads for some pharma that's gonna give you the cure or because you haven't yet contracted covid 19 type 5 or whatever it is, that you might be at risk for.

So I do love that A... That may be enough to work with. It could be... You could opt into, that you could... Could be... You could say Hey Google. I would like to have that at some point, and maybe Google will work that in somehow they probably would wanted to do that. Now that I think about it.

0:11:15 Katherine: There is a precedent for using health information for advertising and that's using menstrual cycle tracking to target advertising to women. So it's a thing that happens and you know what you say actually that nobody's talking about this, nobody talks about this, until you are unfortunate enough to have even a relatively minor chronic disease. And then this is what you think about all the time.

I think every night you... So I was watching it. A TV, a TV personality suggested that in the not-so-near future we may find ourselves using technology like for example, an Apple watch, that has all these great sensors... It wouldn't be too difficult, I don't think for them to add some sort of temperature sensing they could at least detect a fever. And we all, when we wanna go with a public event, a conference, a stadium whatnot, we wave our personal device to prove that we're healthy in order to be allowed in... And of course, in that reality send me into kind of a panic because what else can you do with that data and how many steps does it take for that data to be used for commerce?

Because the first thing that I always think of is there used to be this thing that went around the internet.

It's a recording of somebody trying to order a pizza. And the conclusion is basically like, "Oh I'm sorry because of this information, we can't allow you to order this pizza because you have high cholesterol.

0:12:46 Katherine: So this sort of thing. And that's the kind of thing that I always go back to in my mind is how soon is it that the Apple Watch has blood glucose monitoring, and tells everybody, rats on everybody with every time they have a cookie to their insurance company, because this is America, and health is a business. And anyway, I digress a bit.

0:13:04 Robert: This is a fascinating introduction to the topic that you invited me to talk about, but it's actually even more interesting because it's always a balance and the battle between convenience versus privacy.

0:13:22 Katherine: Yes, exactly. That is the heart of the matter.

0:13:26 Robert: Any SaaS product or tool is because it's convenient to use, it's easy to use. It was actually easy to get people on to Facebook so that I could communicate with them. People who had never emailed me in my life would write me messages on Facebook. I even got my 80-some year old grandmother on Facebook, and she was able to send me messages, but she couldn't check her email or do other things with her computer. So it's all about the convenience, and maybe now when you say that with the stadium and the admission to the group setting based on the fact that you have a fever or not, then I can actually imagine using in the thought experiment, would I use this, what I oppose this I can use a convenience and safety as synonyms. So maybe it's not so much about whether it's convenient for me to use the Apple Watch and use that as an admission to a stadium, but maybe it's about the safety and it might send you into a panic thinking about somebody knowing something about your body that you might not even have detected the fact that you've got a fever and using that to make decisions about what your granted access to and permitted to do, but other people might go into a panic and a frenzy thinking about you coming into the stadium and spreading a virus that you didn't even know you had and I... Where do you balance those two extremes and the concerns of the individual versus the concerns of the many? And that doesn't... Then I raise that rhetorical question even before we get into the questions of data governance and data privacy and all of that.

And let's not even forget that we're talking about a country, the United States of America that is simply in the throws of showing that nobody even at the top level of government cares about any rule that it exists to begin with. So how do you feel safe in that context? I don't know that is an excellent question, I can tell you about Slack alternatives and how to host them but I don't think I can tell you how to feel safe in a context like that.

0:15:46 Katherine: Yeah, we've gone dark already. It's inevitable.

We always go to these really dark places early on in these podcasts... That's fine, this is not... And you have to take your way out.

Yeah, it's our MO.

0:15:59 Robert: It's basically like a movie plot.

0:16:02 Doc: Yeah, we're in the weirdest moment in modern civilization I think we'd never had this before we ever had both.

We've had pandemics, we never had pandemic plus internet, plus lots of ways that everybody can connect with everybody at almost no cost across any distance and exchange information. It's like we have the biggest Gossip channel ever ever invented in the history of humanity, plus something that's really worth gossiping about plus the complete falling apart in some ways are just fracturing into a zillion pieces of traditional media.

We're part of that. This is a tiny fraction, right here. What used to be a radio right? I mean, that's what this is, this is what you do is now this and streaming and a bunch of other stuff, but I'm actually pretty optimistic about where this goes, because I think one, there's so much broken field running across a field that just got invented. There are no real formal games to play on it yet and all the old formal games are actually kind of getting in the way it's like, "Wait a minute, it's not golf or football or basketball, it's something else. And wait a minute, this isn't even grass, and it's not desert. What the hell is is I don't know, but we're here now, and everybody's running, and some of us are dying and let us pay attention to that. But maybe you shouldn't because if we stop everything, then the economy stops, that's gonna kill a lot of people. And so and a lot of arguments are happening on established norms, but the established norms and themselves are kind of half out the window and it's interesting to look at the safe thing. I mean, a joke I tell about myself as I've been young for a long time, but unfortunately, I'm like the bullseye demographic for this disease and looking at the collective statistics for example, the curve and whether the curve flatten out and occurs going down, meaning that the hospitals can now absorb more patients, but as long as it is not a cure or a vaccine for this, I'm not sure that I wanna play Russian Roulette, that with a gun that has one bullet and 10 chambers, that... 'cause that's what it is for me, it... So, I'm doubling, tripling, and quadrupling, down on this kind of work rather than what I might do if I was out in the world.

0:18:36 Robert: It's really kind of interesting that where we're going with this, so we're glad we have the internet, though. I mean, I... Yeah, the virus could have come at any time in human history and viruses, like it might have been there before in 1918, for example, but the things that I see people using the internet for, in this context, are absolutely amazing. Now imagine that our own source of official like information where the White House press briefing every one that they do it at the limitation.

We would belive every word we hear from that, but in fact, by the time anybody watches the White House press briefing they more or less have heard every fact that is uttered, and they can identify the lies and the mistakes that are being made because they've actually gone and informed themselves. They've read case studies and history from China and from Germany and from Italy. And Spain, where the virus has been harder hitting in the early days then in the United States, they read John Hopkins and other medical clinics publishing about it. They can read the CDC directly, they can share information. So searching for the information is very efficient. You go to reddit, or your family chat where people are sharing things or Facebook groups that are discussing them and you can get information even pertinent into your industry.

So I've read a lot of stuff about tech companies working from home, but I know that people in the gastronomy industries have their channels and travel industry has their channels and they're getting specialized information and they're well informed. Everybody's well-informed. My mom and dad are in the next room reading on their phone about Covid-19, and they are well-informed. I don't have to tell them I don't have to bring them up-to-date, they know they'll tell me things.

So Hey, if we're gonna have a virus like this with or without the internet, you give me the internet!

Any day.

0:20:36 Doc: An interesting thing though, in respect to that is that I'm thinking of how Marshall McLewen said, It's hard to recognize that without radio, we wouldn't have Hitler or Ghandi. And in a similar way, I think without the internet, we would not have had Trump I don't think we would have had Obama before that we would have had yet another boring well-qualified compromised in the usual ways. White guy I...

0:21:07 Robert: Trump is the product of television.

0:21:10 Doc: He is yes, exactly, he's a product of television, but he's also product he tweets, that works, he has a cohort that lives for his every word. And now, I think we all know some of these people and maybe some are listening right now that you know that the guy can do no wrong, it doesn't matter that he lies. And to a high degree, and it's partly Fox News, and it's partly the internet too and I'm not arguing against the Internet. I think the condition that we're in is that we're digital now and not just physical and we're digital beings if we're just physical beings, we have to meet somewhere but we don't know we're meeting on this and this is a digital place, we have a digital instantiation that it is different. And my feeling about this, and Katherine had heard me too many times in this it is that, we're really at the beginning of this, this is a state change in the history of our species that's bigger than what television was bigger than with radio was bigger than what print was, and we're barely starting to cope with it and some amazing stuff.

0:22:17 Robert: You mean the virus, or the internet?

0:22:21 Doc: The internet.

Not the virus virus virus has happened. There will be more and will be better prepared, I think. Has this been Bill Gates thing? I think Bill Gates is like, due for a victory lap on this one. He gave this talk in a TED talking in '2015 saying pretty much one of these is coming and it came five years later now, he's doing a lot of great work on it with his foundation and the rest of it, and one of the things he's been saying, on TV and on radio, and other places will be a lot more ready next time.

And I think that's true.

0:22:51 Robert: Yeah, give that guy a raise a great...

0:22:57 Katherine: And then, but also saying this one, maybe this one, may not be that difficult in opera.

Yeah, exactly, it will be a interesting... It's important to say that it's important if the facts point to that, if the evidence points to that, it's important to say it and let's get all that innovation going. And, I think that we are seeing a lot of that, but I digress and I don't wanna get us too far of the topic because I think we do want to dive into some of our new reality as it relates to existing on the internet fully, as Doc likes to say we are digital beings although I think there are degrees of, let's call it a lifestyle or an existence, but not everybody was as digital a being as probably the three of us are, or have been for a while and yet now everybody's in the same boat.

0:23:41 Doc: And we're digital in different ways, right? !

0:23:45 Katherine: Yes, exactly. But I think there are people out there that are using these tools a lot, more than they ever have, and there is a group of people regardless of how long they've been using these tools, who is very concerned with their privacy on the internet. Because if you're listening, you don't need us to reiterate the importance of that, but it's a struggle, it is a struggle, because it goes back to the thing that Robert just said about the trade-off between convenience and privacy. So what I hoped we might do is give a little advice for people who find themselves now, completely reliant on online collaboration tools, what options do they have and where to get started, really exploring those options and then with that I think maybe I'd like to hand it over to Robert.

0:24:40 Robert: Thanks, and I think to start off I just need to tell the story about how I got here, on this podcast. What caught your attention that led you to invite me to this podcast with you, and Doc.

So I work for a company, it's called Platform.sh, we do specialized web hosting. It's a cool company. Check it out, but we use Slack for our day-to-day communication it and Slack's amazing and we benefit from it so much. We're nearly 100% a distrubted company. So it's really important of the tools that we use. Do it for us, really facilitate communication. Becausee most of us are sitting at our kitchen table or on our couch and doing our work and we really need the communication to work or we wouldn't be able to build a competitive global company as we're doing.

We also use the entire G-Suite, so the mail, Google Docs, the calendaring and Google meets a lot of Google meet between slack and Google, meets, that's basically our communication needs. But Slack isn't quite as reliable as Google is in terms of up-time, overall. So we also have a fall back in case Slack goes down, which it has done maybe three times over the past eight years, so it's a pretty good track record, not a slam against slack in any way, but Slack has gone down and when Slack goes down, we switched to... Our always-ready mattermost instance.

So, I, I hadn't really thought about that very much until all of the remote work started and then I saw a couple of things happening. I saw a lot of people posting videos and tutorials about using ZOOM and Slack, and Google meet and Google Docs and DropBox for collaboration. I was like, "Wow that's really cool. All of these people up tooling and up-skilling on their digital abilities and improving their communication and working with groups, learning to work like I've been working with my company for the last 10 years, that's really nice. I like seeing that. But they're all using these priority things.

And on the other hand I started seeing a lot of concern from some groups, groups that can't use those tools, European groups that don't trust American cloud companies for whatever reason, or are legally bound to not use them.

0:27:20 Robert: And I also saw lots and lots and lots of indications that authorities all over the world are simply going to use the pandemic as an excuse, as a chance to tighten controls on communication and demand things like Apple, you really can decrypt that message. Why don't you do that for us because it's in the public health interest. So, of course, you should decrypt that message, that you previously said you couldn't decrypt. And yeah, we've seen that before. There's legislation that's being worked on that's meant to undermine the sacrosanct aspect of encryption which is that you need the keys. And he, scripted, so I thought Okay we've got all of these authorities, who are once again infringing on people's privacy, trying to be able to snoop on everything that's said anywhere any time because that's how they feel they have to operate to do their job.

And we've got these people who are turning to these tools and we use this matter most at my company.

So let me check that out.

So I did. So my team worked on matter most and we also came up with a couple of other tools that work really nicely called next cloud and get... And we researched what it takes to host those as a self-hosted product, so that you can set up group where communication tools that are similar to G-cloud or sweet Etienne zoom and slack, but hosted yourself, so you've got some control over the data privacy. And what I found was simultaneously very encouraging and very discouraging at the same time.

So what I found was that we as a traditional web application Oster have absolutely no problem in matter most or a part of next club for example.

So with matter most, the Slack alternative, we now have a one-click installation for that, and you can basically have a matter most up and running in a minute with our system and there are others that can do it too, and it's really great and you've got most of the slack functionality and a couple of features that are really nice... That's like might not have... And it's your own data now you have to trust your hosting provider a little bit, but at least you can encrypt your disk, right?

So if you know how to encrypt your disk and launch a matter most in a docker container, or use the platform.sh which has a template for that, then you've got a Slack alternative secure and encrypted data at rest, encrypted and year in control.

It's more work, and it's more responsibility than just signing up for Slack, but it's actually not a lot less convenient. That was really a good feeling to me.

0:30:23 Robert: With next cloud next cloud is a really amazing tool from Germany that's used in a lot of European governments because it provides a lot of the same functionality that G-Suite offers, but its self-hosted and also end-end encrypt claims. It doesn't even leak metadata, which is really nice.

And we discovered that we're able to very easily host the part of it that replaces a say Drop Box or the calendaring or if you have an email server to add to it, then the email part of it. So called being email, so, Dropbox, Google Docs, part of it, a good fine.

The part where I was disappointed, I was when we looked into the Jitsi part, and Jitsi is like a Zoom alternative, okay, you can host web and voice meetings just like the one we're talking on now but self-hosted or you can use the public Jitsi meet server, or I guess probably many servers but end point that they provide, and that's really cool, but if you really wanna self-host Jitsi and if you want to self-host something that does web meetings and voice over IP, then your traditional web hoster, isn't going to cut it because all of a sudden he... Or do you start running into terms like STUN servers and TURN servers and RTP, protocols, and it's not all HTTP based, it's UDP based. And all of a sudden, I was a part of the networking universe where my brain just turns into mush. And where we have ports closed and they can't be opened, and we had to admit defeat without changing our product, so we weren't able to host Jitsi right off, which was really sad for me.

0:32:18 So a traditional web hoster can't do that because, to host something that's handling streams and peer-to-peer streams and doing the transcoding and the routing of those streams, it takes a different type of computing resource than a traditional web app is consuming. So, Platform.SH wasn't able to host one of those and it was sad for me and it just gave me a glimpse into... Once again, this paradigm, this balance between convenience and privacy.

So if somebody wants to actually host something that replaces zoom there is a tool for it but you have to look beyond traditional web hosting to be able to host it and look for specialized hosting that hosts TURN servers and STUN servers, instead of NginX servers.

So, that's my intro to the tools that I came, here to talk about Katherine.

0:33:19 Katherine: Fantastic So can you give us an idea of because of most people who are in business or in the business of making money.

Can you talk a little bit about the cost difference between a self-hosted approach and a cloud service approach?

0:33:37 Robert: Yeah, sure that's a really interesting question because you have to add a different column to the cost equation so when you buy a SaaS service, that's usually you assume the convenience is gonna be there and that you have very little work to set up, so you basically just look at their pricing model, whether it's a per user per month type of thing or whatever licensing scheme that SaaS Products is offered, and there are two or three or four main types of pricing schemes that we're all familiar with, and you just figure out what it's gonna cost to meet your needs for your organization and then you can ask yourself whether it's worth it, based on what you think the perceived functionality and benefits going to be.

And with Slack, I prefaced that with saying that that tool basically runs my company right that in G-Suite, so they could probably double their prices and we would just keep paying it. Don't listen to this Slack.

0:34:49 Robert: Yeah, don't do that, but in reality, there's a lot of value that comes from that tool and for a lot of people, it would be really hard to replace with self-hosted then you have the monthly payment you're going to pay to somebody, which would be then to your hosting provider, which essentially just moves the privacy concern to a different layer. So it still exists. You have to trust your hosting provider you have to be able to put technological safeguards in place like encryption on the disc and over the wire to make sure that nobody is looking at your data, if that's your concern, but the hosting provider will be cheaper because they're just selling you one part of the equation, they're selling you the compute power to run the application storage to store your data, whereas the SaaS provider was charging you for that, plus the work that they have to do to keep the service online and monitored scaled plus the value pricing that they would sell to you to say Yeah well, you're getting this much value. So we should get a part of that, even if it's beyond their costs, which is fair. So your hosting provider is gonna charge you less money to run a Mattermost than Slack charges you and that's just if you want to take the open source version and run it yourself. Mattermost will also sell you a support contract support subscription, if you want, if you need help, if you want that safeguard to be able to problem solve in troubleshoot with the software, and that will still be less than Slack charges you okay, and you might think... Great. I can get everything that I'm getting from Slack with Mattermost for a lower price and that's true, you will pay less money for the software in the hosting than you would for Slack and you will get most of the features, but, there is a... But, there's always a... But, but it's not as convenient.

Fortunately, with Mattermost My experiences that it's actually pretty damn close, and I would actually recommend people who want that control in that privacy to dump slack and go out and use matter most, why not? They are nearly at future parity and self-hosting a Mattermost seems really straightforward to me. As I mentioned, we've got a one-click template for it and it works right out of the box, absolutely no problem. As I mentioned though, the other tools that have have different dependencies than just like your traditional web hosting dependencies those get a little bit harder and that's where this extra column and the cost equation really comes into play. That column is how much work are you going to have to do and how much expertise are you going to have to have to actually make this work and pull it off, not just when you set it up, but operationally and down the line, that's kind of a really long column title. You probably wanna reformat it, but it's a big column and the series is super variable and it really depends on who you are and who you have on your team who can handle those things and how much you're paying them and if you're paying that person 150 grand a year, then you're gonna really have to consider how much money you're saving in the first column, if it's gonna be convenient for you and then you come back to that convenience or price versus privacy equation.

So it's not a clear cut Katherine.

It's not...

I wanted to be clear cut, because ideology and dogmas way easier than real life, right?

0:38:31 Katherine: So that's also a good point. And that is, does necessary, there's necessarily satisfying our collective. Those that are privacy enthusiasts doesn't even satisfy that because... And what I'm getting at is, are there any sort of "Gotcha's" or considerations that maybe we're not thinking about, "Is this an easy privacy and or security band-aid or There must be additional considerations aside from just switching platform, aside from the magic of a self-hosted app is not a magic and there are still considerations. I wondered if you could talk a little bit.

0:39:23 Robert: Well, considerations is a little vague but let me just get a way you might have met. Let me take Edward Snowden as an example, Edward Snowden magically made it to Russia, alive. And as far as I know, he's still alive that to me is miraculous, and wonderful and I hope that that continues for a very, very, very long time. Because I kinda like the guy and one of the tools that helped him get there, that he promoted after he succeeded and saving his own skin was signal and I and signal. And this doesn't even touch the realm of self-hosted versus whatever, it's basically just one of the messaging apps that you can download onto an iPhone or an Android phone which gets a bit of text from one person to another, but signal out of all of the apps that seemed to be available as the endorsement and blessing of Edward Snowden. And he's got a nice real life case study to back him up that it actually works because if it didn't work, he would have been in deep shit, and he wouldn't have made it.

Oh yeah, so I use signal for all of my personal messaging, chats, when I can.

0:40:35 Robert: Okay, so considerations. So that's an easy example because it's actually no harder install signal, then it is what's app? But you know what app is spying on you? It's owned by Facebook, right?

Of course they're spying on you, they're basically printing it out and pasting it on the NSA's wall.

Okay, you know that's there, you just know it. If you don't know that, then you can't be helped, and you deserve what's coming to you. So this is an easy decision to make. Okay, signal versus WhatsApp.

However, it's a lot more nuanced when you move to the rest of the stack, and you have to actually put work into using them.

0:41:20 Robert: Let's presume that a large number of art, your listenership, are actually well versed in installing their own operating system of choice and opening up a command line installing software configuring stuff and wonderful things, right wonderful, wonderful things. For that audience, the option of having something self-hosted is actually a lot more attractive.

This is exactly the right audience to be looking at a matter most or a next cloud or jitsi server and seeing how they play together and figuring out the Stun servers and then the... RTP protocols, and the turn servers and the UDP networking considerations and what ports do need to be open and what ports don't need to be open and making sure your disks, encrypted and sure it might cost you a couple of days but guess what, if you're doing something where your life depends on it. Like Edward Snowden was... Or your business depends on it because you've got intellectual property that some foreign actor is trying to steal or that you're actually fighting as an activist for change in your country and trying to bring freedom and transparency to elections, encouraging people to mail in their ballots or something like that.

Then you might be subject to attack and if you're subject to attacks, you'd rather face the attack front on, see that it's happening be able to mount your own defense, than outsource your defense to a company like Slack or Zoom or Apple, who although well intended and people that I would probably really like and get on with still don't have your best interest in the front of their mind as much as you do.

Their life doesn't depend on it. Your yours does.

Their company doesn't depend on it, yours does.

Their privacy doesn't depend on it, yours does. So if you've got the skills, if you got the means and you really want the guarantee that you're doing something that's private and the privacy really matters, you on up with that one choice you've gotta do it yourself.

0:43:32 Katherine: And it depends on your threat model.

0:43:35 Doc: An interesting thing about Signal for example, is Signal isn't busy caring about anybody's privacy as I mean, I'm talking about the developers. It, you're totally on your own, and that's what you need the means by which you can watch your own ass, that's what you're talking about. And whereas if you depend on early on Apple or Facebook or something else, you have this intermediary, you have this other party that you have to rely on, and some of us would rather rely on ourselves.

There's so many good...

0:44:13 Robert: I'm really happy when I can rely on somebody are than me.

0:44:17 Doc: Yeah, that's a thing, yeah, me too.

But there are things that Katherine was mentioning earlier. The Apple Watch. Well, I have a heart app on the Apple watch that can tell me if I'm having a trial fibrillation, which nothing else does, so I've got one. My cardiologist that get one of those, so I have one and there's unfortunately, it'd be really great if there was an open source watch that had that on it or something that I could have around a set that did that, but that thing does. So sometimes you just have to go with what's available, even if you're making some kind of moral compromise doing it.

I'm not recommending that by the way, but I'm just saying that there's some place, sometimes it's like that.

0:45:07 Robert: That is an eminently pragmatic and not extremist point of view.

0:45:12 Doc: Yeah, it's purely pragmatic and we make pragmatic choices a lot but we have our ideals, too. I would love, I love the fact that I can still host my own web server and host my own email if I want to. Both of those things became a pain in the ass. And I don't host those things anymore and nobody's the wiser, in front. It's helpful that I have in my Searls dot com mail is at Rackspace, and I pay them 10 bucks a month. But the important thing there is that it's substitute-able. I can yank it out of there, and I can put it somewhere else, I could put it back on my own server in a basement somewhere, if I want to. And that's having the ability to do that is what's cool.

0:45:55 Katherine: Well, and it's funny, we talk about pragmatism and so we tend to become a lot more pragmatic when we're talking about keeping ourselves alive and sometimes that actually does dovetail nicely with our ideology, in the case of Signal.

But I digress.

0:46:18 Doc: So this is hard to find the right thing, I'm very bigoted about a stick shift. I wanted all of my kids to be able to drive a stick shift car and with the older ones that was the only choice they had to learn at one of those things.

But I haven't had a car that does that in a long time, so my youngest kid has never driven a stick shift, and we could even find one for him to drive honestly, so... And now he lives in Manhattan, and nobody leaves their apartments, so I... It almost doesn't matter, but again, it's... There are a lot of practical considerations.

0:46:58 Katherine: Also another consideration that is worth talking about, I think, is it... So we talked about Zoom at the very beginning.

And Zoom has some issues, it has some security issues that have been brought up by a few people, they've since hired one of the top security consultants around, and I'm sure that they will get on track, but this, it's still worth noting that I think it would be tough for any application to withstand the scrutiny that comes with that level of popularity increase, the sudden popularity that came about because of the pandemic quarantine that forced everybody to live their lives almost exclusively on the internet, and suddenly everybody's using Zoom and for that reason, suddenly it's under a microscope. But I, I don't know if other applications as I think that I sure they're... And I'm sorry, I...

0:48:02 Doc: I'm not sure that there's ever been an example quite like that.

Yeah, in a... When I was talking to Eric Yuan, their CEO is... a week and a half ago, his background screen. Like my background screen right now is an oil platform, off the coast of California.

His was the San Francisco Skyline, and it's kind of like what happened zoom as all the buildings on that Skyline drained out and they all went on Zoom, and oh by the way, every church in every school, in every university and everybody suddenly adopted this thing because they did a better job. Now, the interesting thing about them is that they actually never meant it to be the world's conferencing system that they had a B2B offering, basically, they made over a half billion dollars the last I looked entirely by selling this to big companies and some small companies but it was basically, there was a free version is a premium offering and at the high end, it was a lot of hand holding and close association. So two universities I know were using Zoom one is Harvard and the other one is Arizona State, which is the largest university in the country, in terms of the undergraduate population is something like 70-000.And they moved on to that, like overnight, everything they did, went on to that and they worked very closely with Zoom on that and at least, so their chief technical guy told me anyway, and I have her no complaints about that, and that's astonishing it. I have another kind of a hats off toward Facebook by the way, much as I dislike the platform, for many, many reasons they help. They've had very few crashes. Remember, Twitter? Early on, there was a fail whale every five minutes and I did a lot of photography on Flicker and Flicker had problems, but Facebook has been remarkable. I think that is one or two big fails. And aside from that, nothing that's astonishing that they've been able to do that same with Google say with... And everybody's using Amazon as a back end and what including zoom by the way, they're using Amazon, and AWS All all hail Linux on that too, right?

Is this remarkable thing. It's this utility. You expect it to be there, like you expect the electric grid to be there only. It's a lot more complicated and making that work is just almost astonishing. And the good thing, at least in the case of AWS, is it's not telling what's running on it what to do, it's agnostic to that, but you still wonder. 'cause you're not rolling your own all the way down.

0:50:54 Robert: I would really love to heap the praise on Facebook. Like you just did, but yeah, I... That is the, the absolute most bitter case of all because never, including zoom, never has a tool come along that did more to enable the interpersonal communication of people and families and communities and organize events and to share things that were meaningful and to keep in touch with people that you are far away from. Never did a tool do more to actually make the internet into something like what people want it to be to give it its ultimate purpose, which was to really find and connect with people, it even powers Tinder for God's sake. It should have been the best thing that ever happened to the internet, but at the same time, I... They are the most egregious abusers of your privacy and do the absolute least that I can detect to actually protect the people that power their platform, the people will... Who use it as... So tracking your messages are not private. They will not take false information off of their platform, when it's verifiably false. They provide a platform for hate groups they through the last election cycle, and look where that's gotten us.

0:52:25 Doc: They care about they care about privacy like Trump cares about facts.

It's about the same, and they're not built. The weird thing is there, and I've talked to some people there about this. They're at a base level, they have a very simple architecture, that's very hard to change, and it's one that everybody's familiar with. Beneath that UI is something that's busy profiling everybody and using a profiling to route ads based on targeting, parameters. It's all about ads.

0:53:07 Robert: You don't have to look any further than the motivation is of the thing is, they in fixing that is really, really hard. Yeah, they would have to not depend on ads.

0:53:18 Doc: Yeah, well yeah, exactly, but it out beyond that. But they can't fix that but the other thing they can't fix is like you said, they allow these hate groups to have a group or just to have hate. And if you wanna "Hey I wanna make black people in Florida distrust Hillary Clinton and not go out and vote.

And it was real easy to do with Facebook, but the thing is, the Wall Street Journal had a really great piece, like several years ago, which was the title was "Facebook hires 20000 people to do the work computers can't" which is look at the worst of human depravity and turn it off. That's how they do it. They do it with human beings who are busy looking at heads chopped off and worse on a constant basis, and 20000 people they hire to do that 'cause their machines, couldn't do it in, how do they fix that? I'm not sure they have fixed it.

0:54:25 Robert: I think it they could fix it partially the way that YouTube fixes their ad problem partially as well, by having premium tiers, where you can say No, that's not worth it to me, I would rather do with all of that. Let me pay you. I know what your service is worth to me. I'm a higher earner, relative to some of your audience. Let me just give you some money and you turn that stuff off.

0:54:49 Doc: It would be great.

0:54:53 Katherine: Okay, but in that world, though, were you... You have a freemium model for something like Facebook though, doesn't that just mean that marginalized groups lower earners are the ones that are most easily manipulated. And Doc's example, the people who were convinced not to vote for Hillary Clinton are not the people who are going to be able to pay for Facebook, so I don't know why I understand your point, I don't know that that's a solution either.

0:55:29 Doc: I think they could easily do it I think if they could usually have a freemium model and... And he could do it, but they bought Whatsup, and Whatsup had actually a dollar a year when they started out, and I don't know what percentage of people to paint it, but it was a lot and they got a better part of the billion users, including a lot to pay money.

This may be apocryphal, maybe someone in the audience can weigh in with this on this, which is that they wanted to go after Google and Google is in the ad business, they wanted to poach people from Google, which they did, when they moved to Silicon Valley and Google and Facebook became an mortal enemies, mostly over talent over who worked where and they were in the same business, and they were jealous of each other, where Google was jealous of Facebook's ability to get much more intimate with people, and because they knew much more about individuals who were on the cloud on Facebook? I was jealous, in Google's ability to shoot people with were on the... And that's what happened, it was like two advertising companies going after each other and ignoring the other ways of making money. And we're still here.

0:56:36 Katherine: The point I was trying to make earlier though I wanted to get back to it really quickly though, going back to Zoom was that Zoom was sort of the anointed one, in this particular scenario because everybody seems to flok to Zoom, I don't know anybody who didn't... At least initially, in terms of schools, and businesses and even individuals, and very, very small businesses, they as they all started using Zoom all of a sudden, I wonder had the anointed one, so to speak, be Google team, or couldn't have sorry, Microsoft Teams or Google meet would they have survived the same scrutiny?

0:57:18 Robert: Can I address that because I missed my chance to heap praise on Zoom? So what did zoom do? They did something incredible. They came to the after-similar products were already established including a product that is native to Google's G-Suite. It's the easiest thing on earth to set up a Google meet or Google Hangout as it used to be, I mean you just basically have to make a calendar invite and boom, you've got a hyperlink that takes you into a web conference. How could that be easier?

Yet zoom came in and one business from platform.SH who is a happy zoom Subscriber because they actually came and added more value to that space then Google was providing... It usually works the other way around. Usually Google comes in and takes a business like Zoom and basically throws them off the bus, because they've just got the scale to do that, but this is a case where zoom came out and challenged Google and won and I think that's really amazing. Google would have had the infrastructure to do it and some people are probably using Google meets and Googles freed up their enterprise tiers and some of their features that are normally paid-for features to just about anybody during this crisis but people are still going to zoom and that's because they simply offer product a better experience with exactly the right mix of features that people want and they're being responsive. Could you imagine Google actually responding to Doc Searls criticism of them will... Or anybody else is criticism, the... And the CEO of the company gets on the phone, hell no... Come on. Those are cool guys who started Google, but they're not responsive to customer complaining, they're kind of the opposite. So zoom has been amazing in this situation. They're so amazing that my sister who is an elementary school teacher, in Michigan is sitting at home in the mornings and evenings taking course work over zoom so that she can learn more herself and become a better teacher, and get more advanced degrees, and then during the day, she's teaching her class using ZOOM and this is a tool she had never heard of before, Corona she... She heard of or corona virus before she heard of the tool zoom, but now she's basically on it all day. So, I think zoom deserves all the praise we can...

0:59:35 Doc: Yeah, it's turn a verb "lets Zoom". They have become the conferencing, what Google is to search. And again, in a very short time, I was talking to my wife about this over lunch, just actually a few minutes ago about if we talked to him again, besides wood, he called me about and said, he would do... What else could we advise them to do?

They seem to be pretty good at doing what they're doing once they fix the leaks once they add some add some of what everybody's asking for on it. There's so many directions they can innovate and they clearly are doing a great job. I was mentioning with this guy that works for a big one of the big non-profits, it's a science location.

He wanted to show me the science that they put into it. He said You should see the great work they're doing, when you have the full enterprise version and you're looking under the hood, and how it's managing the way people communicate. And he said there's some really smart stuff going on here.

So, hats off. But I also think it's a competitive market. Lots of new stuff can come up here. And is this the only way to work?

You know, they are platform to, to some degree. So we have a conference coming up at the end of this month, the in an internet identity workshop, which always happens to the Computer, History Museum, it happens twice a year in, and has the virtual side in the museum shut down like everything else and I, we were called and we're ready now to move it online, and not just in the physical worlds and we're doing it through something called Qiqo-chat which works with Zoom. In other words, you got to them, you can use Qiqo chat.

And I was on a war before that. That they are also something of a platform where an API anyway, that you can call on to handle heavy lifting with whatever it is. I'm not used Qiqo chat. Yeah, I need to get familiar with it before we get on, but I think it in all rooms, it'll be a real conference with an open space conference it's an un-conference but it's all open space. Everybody goes to their own, break-out rooms, the beginning of the day people event with their topics are. Say I want to talk about Slack alternatives.

You get a room and the conference. So many conferences take place simultaneously and then people get together when big intending at the end of every day, the...

1:02:11 Robert: I'm a self-confessing conference attendee and therefore climate criminal I've flown in to so many conferences on that.

I wouldn't be able to count them.

And I read articles every day. The warning signs are being blasted at us by the scientific community that ecological collapse is imminent, if we don't change the way that we live. And for years, now been ever more critical of the habit of the tech industry to have so many conferences that you could basically do nothing except go to conferences, maybe two or three a day, even if you're in a city like San Francisco every day of the year.

And still not get to half of them. So why are there so many conferences and all of a sudden they're aren't... Oh my God, there aren't. They're just going away and guess what? There's not a cataclysmic horrible effect on the industry as a result. Not yet, and then I guess, and I don't think there will be because we can adapt, we can do things online, we can have un-conferences with the zoom and quick quacker or whatever you call it.

You can do that and a lot of my team, which is the developer relations team, the overall team, the Evangelist team, at platform.SH, we had dozens of conferences, lined up for us, to go to. Because that's the thing you do, you go to the conferences, you talk about your product at the conferences.

They all got canceled. Every single one. There's not a single conference that we're definitely booked to go to in the entire calendar we've replaced them with online conferences with webinars with webcasts, we're doing more blogging. We're paying more attention to our documentation and these amazingly we are getting more leads.

It's working!

1:04:03 Doc: it's really interesting. Or have you noticed that O'Reilly just one of the biggest conference givers in tech, right?

Bailed on them. They're done the panel is all the one.

1:04:15 Robert: I hope they stay that way. I hope that after the Corona vaccine gets administered and herd immunity is there and we can go out and be social again. I hope that we just stop it, stop flying everywhere because we can afford to...

1:04:33 Doc: I was such mixed feelings about that, 'cause I am a 1.5 Million Mile Flyer. With United alone, my wife is a 3 Million Mile Flyer. With United. That goes back a farther distance.

And before that, she was on with Pan Am as well, and of course most of his conferences and it is, and I do every photography, I have many thousands of photographs have taken from planes and I love aviation, I love the whole thing at the same time, it's really interesting to me to look at this sky, here in Santa Barbara, we're on the flight path from basically everything in South America, and Mexico to the West Coast other than leaving from Los Angeles and the sky is usually full of contrails.

And if you look at it, if you study whether the... I'm not talking about the... Was there talking about contrails? No, I'm talking about actual contrails was the one the clouds the aviation lays down at high altitude, it's massive, it's absolutely massive, it has to have a climate effect. I don't know what the hell it is. whether it traps heat. Or whether... Or whether it reflects enough sunlight that is actually has the opposite effect on the climate whatever it is, it lays down a lot of stripes in the sky that turned into high altitude, clouds and affect whether... And if it effects far more than that, it's really amazing. But I'm not seeing them now. I see if I have an app Flight Radar. 24, it's a good one.

You still see a lot of aviation on it, but nothing near what we used to have, because... And a lot of planes are flying half empty right, which means that they're using less fuel but they just have to get from one place to another, even if they don't have passengers but the whole thing is gonna get re-done, it's clearly gonna happen.

1:06:29 Robert: I'm not sure it'll change though. I think people's behavior won't change. And if tomorrow everybody said if they say "Oh hey, it's safe to fly again but guess what prices are like they were before then? It's gonna be instantly business as usual. I don't think that will change even though the lesson that we've been shown is that you can actually replace a type of conference with Zoom or Mattermost.

1:06:53 Doc: Here's a big part of it. In an united a pulled... They made a bet if there's a God, that there's a bigger business and business and there are just a lot of companies that have expensive comps flying and they... We wanna fly first class to earn their way into first class, and so we're at the business class, so no first class in many cases. And so, they enlarge the business class and shrank the other, the rest of the plane. And I think with... That's the conference class, that's the good... The front of the plane is the people going to conferences as... And the people are getting paid well to go to conferences and having been in that business, I know how easily companies cut that as an expense.

The conferences are on the expense side of the balance sheet, and so is advertising for that matter, advertise is gonna take a huge hit on this thing.

The kind that's in Facebook, which is very targeted and often small potatoes, but the big brand advertising, a lot of that I think a lot of it's gonna go but the wayside.

1:08:00 Robert: Well, look at that! Two horrible evils killed with one virus advertising, and air travel. I love it.

1:08:07 Katherine: Oy... I think the change from this will be lasting I think that it's going to take so long for things to go back to anything like what we would have considered normal that I think there will inevitably be some massive changes. I think that... You know what will be interesting to see, Doc, for your conference, the internet identity workshop, but it'll be interesting to see the change in Attendee suddenly people will have the opportunity to attend. Didn't before.

1:08:37 Doc: I'm curious, throughout that, too. I know that will be interesting. We had lots, we had, I think we have... We generally get 250 to 300 people, sometimes a little more. We killed it, we killed the physical version of it. About a month and a half ago, a pretty early on in the conference killing spree.

But by that time, a lot of people had paid and... A lot of sponsors had paid, and to our surprise, they're not completely most of them have not.

I think we had one person saying I want I and I, one sponsor did.

Now, whether if we were to keep it is nothing but offline be able to keep the same low or the same kind of sponsorship, is an open question. I think a lot is going to depend and this is kind of an interesting point occurred to me on how productive it is, right, is this is because it's actually been a very leverage conference. A lot came out of that so far. For example, the lats for example, it was very much which more mean to be log-in with Facebook and log in with Google, but that's what it turned into. But that came out of, IIW to a large degree, but I'm, I'm fairly optimistic about it.

Yes, as we're still gonna have it, we're still gonna have the physical version of it, but we'll see. It's an open question.

If the Computer History Museum, says, "You know what, we're not gonna have the space anymore, we're gonna put other stuff in that space, then we probably won't do it, then it'll be over because I don't think we'll ever be anywhere other than the Computer History Museum, it's... We're too identified with it so much. Almost like part of what they do.

1:10:27 Katherine: I was just thinking that this is just... He had another opportunity to innovate.

Well, we're going to inevitably or If we deserve to survive this, we will see innovation in medicine will see innovation, in various industries. But one of the things that I hope to see innovation is, is in the way that people do business and like, Robert said earlier, maybe there are better ways to get these leads than flying all of the world, and I think there's an opportunity there to innovate on that note, I think we've been talking for a very long time.

It's obviously been enjoyable because we continued if for quite some time.

Any final thoughts on... On any of these things?

1:11:23 Robert: Stay home, be safe, deploy Mattermost.

1:11:26 Katherine: wash your hands...

1:11:31 Doc: Always wash is your microphones!

1:11:35 Katherine: Well great, thank you so much, Robert, for joining us at it was delightful...