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Michael Douglas, co-CTO at Golden Frog, discusses what we do to preserve a private and open Internet. Michael spoke as part of the online discussion privacy Golden Frog Texas LinuxFest 2014.
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Michael Douglas: please continue to participate in the drink and small food items fingery. I think the schedule to speak to me for half an hour. If I talk long, it'll be amazing. I think we'll schedule a half hour, and I'll talk through it so fast 10, 15 minutes. Most of them have already left, but I would like to thank the panelists. I think two of them is out. A couple of them traveled here, one from outside the state, one down from San Antonio, so we certainly appreciate them come and help us spread the word of the status of network and privacy.
A brief history about myself. I am co-CTO at Golden Frog. I share that role with the gentleman who was in the back of the anterior chamber and ... well. Under I manages and directs all the management software. It manages all operations, equipment and all that fun that way. On the other side of the house, we are a very agile store, a very open shop [inaudible 00:01:12] started the company 20 years. It will be 20 years old in December, worked for this family, and it was very interesting.
today I hope you either discover or re-confirm you or you have found the truth that privacy and security are not something that we as citizens of this nation, the world, whatever country you're from; this is not something that we delegate the government to take over and protect us. It is something that we must have for ourselves.
When I was preparing this presentation, I do not know what you guys were talking or exactly what they would say. I knew the whole subject, so I am very happy that I have heard many of them say "you must have it." This is in your hands, because the truth is the government will not do it. They will not do it universally. You can come from a government of a country where you have the strongest laws and supervision, laws on privacy, but the truth of the matter is that you live in a world where there are no Internet within the borders of a set of laws.
Really, until Snowden is released ... I'm still skeptical about what the government is and is not, but Snowden showed us the worst case I'll admit I I do not allow myself to believe he was as bad as it really was, they imprison all the information they store all the information and keep it forever. These are the things that were behind how we got to where we are today.
Really briefly, I just want to go out that Golden Frog. Who is Golden Frog? We started to live in 1994. This is actually when I started working for the family, as Texas.net, a small low dialup ISP in San Antonio, Texas. Over the years, it has grown to include Austin, Houston, Dallas / Ft. Worth. As part of that, these days, if you remember, one of the services you have received from your ISP's Usenet access, and we ran Usenets for a while. Other ISPs have come to us and said, 'we hate running Usenet servers. Can we pay you just to provide Usenet? "
In 1998, we formed Giganews and began to sell our Usenet servers that we were already under way for our customers to other Internet service providers, and global customer base. Then a point, I do not know exactly what year we started to do that, but we started to sell direct consumers Usenet access. Now that your ISP service no longer comes with Usenet, if you still want to have Usenet, you must come Giganews or other Usenet provider in the world.
the key to some of the things we're talking about here in this panel. Coming to 00, we realized that being an Internet service provider remote access was not going to survive. the incumbent, monopolistic style of telecommunications and cable companies were not going to leave us an ISP. the independent ISP leaving. We had aT & T, who were Southwestern Bell at that time were buying POI lines so that we can provide our customers with DSL. We order, they say two weeks. Just two weeks, they say, it is still two weeks. Literally two weeks came, and they said another two weeks. It was obvious that if we wanted to continue to be a viable business, we had to find other lines.
So with foundry data, we moved to the provision of colocation data center. We had several data centers over the years. Today, we own and operate two here in Austin. We have one in Houston, and we just broke ground on a center purpose built data we build from the ground in Houston, replicate what we did a few years here in Austin with our flagship data center.
Fast forward to 08, we formed Golden Frog. Golden Frog is the incorporation, if you noticed. We are in fact a European country for a little privacy. Again, as the data Foundry was formed due to the actual appearance of the incumbent monopoly, the ISP protected government were to come, Golden Frog has been formed for the reasons and things you have heard here.
We spent a decade in addition to going to Washington, going to the state governments and rallying and just try to get them to pass laws to protect your privacy, to protect your security, to allow you to have privacy in your home, in your stuff in your materials, data and metadata both. It was clear they are not going to listen. Panelists said even - now that Snowden out, suddenly these people are listening, and they pass bills. The laws of Texas, we could have spent two if Snowden was released a month earlier.
In short, some of our strengths advocacy of what we have done over the years. Back in 00, we advocated to merge Time Warner / AOL for open access to independent ISPs at the Time Warner network. It was adopted as a requirement of the merger. Time Warner has never really done, at least not for us. We knocked on the door many times, but in 02, the FCC reversed the decision, and the network was closed anyway.
In 05, we were very involved in the FCC's policy statement on net neutrality, including by ensuring that you have access to lawful content of your choice. You can run applications and services of your choice, connect your choice of devices, and to have competition among network providers, application providers and content providers that you could choose.
Net neutrality is not a name we have actually picked up on all this stuff. It is what the people have a lot of what we have said about consumer choice, which is always a term that we prefer more on net neutrality. Because what is net neutrality? I do not know what is. If you tell me the choice of the consumer, that tells me something. This tells me that you let me choose who and how.
In 06, we started filing formal comments with the FCC on all their broadband works, and we have done every time since they go out with .. "hey, we want feedback from you on a certain decision that we are preparing to do. " Again, it is all around open access, protect customer choice, protect privacy, requiring genuine consent before monitoring takes place and not what we have today.
The panelists talked about it. We live in a world where if you have a broadband service through Time Warner and AT & T here in Austin, you signed away in the service conditions the right to monitor what you do. AT & T says expressly that the data that you transfer to my network is my professional record, so if you are not encrypting it, it's mine. That's what AT & T said in their terms of service. There are things we've been saying. We are very pleased that all of a sudden now, people are listening.
The end of all this is to say that this is where we come from. We have an advocacy background for your rights, your privacy, your right to choose. Golden Frog was formed because we have grown very tired of waiting for the Government to act.
Last year, Ron Yokubaitis, who was the second gentleman here on the panel and is our co-CEO, he authored a vision document that I really took from here because I like the vision paper and I thought it really rings true with what we were talking about. The realities are that we live in the world, freedom is challenged by those who think they know better than us. This is the government. They think they know better than us, so they will do what they need to do what they feel they must do, and in doing so continue to challenge our freedoms.
Again, this is Ron's article, so here it is. Encryption is the second amendment of the Internet. In this digital age, encryption is the only tool we have available to us to protect our privacy, and the right to have secure communications in any company, whether the company or companies Internet age before Internet is essential for the freedom you 're able to communicate in privacy
the false promise of net neutrality -. So we lived for a while in that order the FCC open Internet, but now it's gone, and we do not really have a real hope that this will revive with everything that has teeth in it. Our response to this deafness of Congress and the FCC and the Federal Trade Commission to any unjustified surveillance, again, I've said and I'll probably say a few more time, this is the catalyst behind Golden Frog. That's why we do what we do, why we got involved, to create encryption and private storage solutions and network access solutions for consumers.
I do not remember who this quote is actually fired. It is in the document, and I did not in my notes, but innovation is the answer. I think it is very important, as it is with an Internet Business Age. If you stop innovating, you die. Privacy and security on the internet is no different. If we do not continue to innovate if we do not continue to make it easier and safer, we might as well not do it.
In short, and I promise we're almost done with the background that we are, and we'll get into what we do a little here. Our core beliefs have. We own and operate our own material, own networks. We manage our own switches. In some cases, if we have our equipment in a facility data Foundry, we have the dirt, and we own the building, and we have everything in this building, so no third party has access my servers that can let the FBI go and take things without us knowing, then owner, it is important for us.
encrypt. We encrypt as much data as we can from site to site, local storage, encrypt it. Minimize it. If there is no business reason to keep it, and I think it was said, perhaps by someone in the audience and here. If there is no business reason to keep it, do not keep it, and if you do have to keep it for a commercial purpose, get rid of it when it does not matter.
open. We will do our best, and we made several internal efforts at this time to be more transparent with our privacy policies, our data retention policies for how we handle your private information.
Finally, simplify. The user experience is so important in these things because as said here on the panel and was mentioned by many people talk about security encryption is that it is difficult for the average person. We are here to make it easy.
This is who we are, where we come from. Now let's learn about what we do. The dump truck was one of the first projects that we came out with, and it is a private storage platform online. Part of the problem we are trying to solve when we jumped into this - It was not the world as it is today when we jumped in, but at the time, one of the problems we saw was that many people, Dropbox is a great product that's been there, have been using the equipment others have been storing your data with other people. I can not, as a supplier, assure you in privacy if I literally stored on someone else's hard disks.
The second problem we saw was by using data deduplication, and the problems we have seen with data deduplication is that associations that between you and another person not because you actually know this person, but because you have the same file. Or depending on how people make storage, if they are things by sounding smart way to really get the most out of memory, if you have any similar files. There might be five of you who do not know each other, but you are all a lawyer for the same common principle, and you have this white paper you read. You may not know you have an association with four other people in a room, but these vendors de-duplicate your data can make these associations.
The solutions, I think, for these two things are obvious. You have storage. You won the network. You own the data center. You own the land. I'm not store your stuff on the equipment from someone else, someone else on the solution. And de-duplicating data. Sounds like an expensive proposition, but the reality is that if you do not want these dangerous associations, a government can walk in and just take off with, you can not go in the way of de-duplicate your data with someone else and data to form these associations.
it was actually brought to light someone with Kim DotCom where they spoke "oh well you gave it to me, then you must know that it is five or ten people because we -dupliquer data, but they all have the file as well. "it was very clear that, yes, this is a problem, and people see and use it there.
VyprVPN, for those unfamiliar, is a VPN consumer product where you can travel, be home, be at the coffee shop and connect to one of our POP around the world to protect you, to encrypt your data so that people around you are not Snooping on you. Your ISP snooping on you do. AT & T, the thing business record, VyprVPN said, AT & T, you can have business records of a bunch of garbage that you can not read. Among several of these cases for a VPN, you be able to geotag somewhere else in the world, again, you privatization.
The problems we examine VyprVPN resolution about some of the topics that we discussed here are the anti-espionage, the problem is that the ISPs and the government spying on you. I do not think I need to add something about it today. I think you guys have heard enough, but another problem in real life is a guy in a coffee shop. You are on a Wi-Fi I do not know ... in fact. I know this guy out there, but do you know if everyone in this room on the same network. I think I left my Wi-Fi.
The solution here, which is where we bring to VyprVPN using these algorithms tested and encrypted using the highest possible. Really, the way I see things, the way we look at it as you move your point of trust your ISP, your network point, a Golden Frog presence of data center where we are before us and you saying this is what we are. This is what we do with your data. This is how long we will keep your data, and by the way, if that changes, we'll let you know.
Throttling is another question that you find with many more home networks, and it is quite common. I do not know if it's on purpose sometimes. Sometimes I think that it is simply practical shotty - ISP throttling your video or other traffic. I know here at Time Warner I have always had problems to YouTube when I arrived at Time Warner. Watching YouTube was a practice we normally hit break, then go do something else, come back, now I can hit play and I can watch. Otherwise it will stutter, pause and all because Time Warner sends me through caching systems shit they is destroyed.
The most common problem that you hear now is the ISPs and peering poor in associations with leading content providers. For us, I look at an ISP as I pay for a service, to provide me with access to the Internet, the best access to the Internet, you can. Why my horrible YouTube? Why I can not watch Netflix in HD? Oh, because they will not pay you too? I thought your client.
So Golden Frog and VyprVPN, A, help with some of this because, A, encrypts you, so they can not say you do [230 down 00:19:35] and, you YouTube? I can not send you to the caching servers because I do not know you do YouTube, so you go through our network to go to YouTube. And because we have the infrastructure and we really care about the customer experience, we make the appropriate network management. We ensure that we have the bandwidth to your Internet service provider so you can get to us, and we make sure we have the bandwidth to Netflix and all these different content providers so you do not have these problems. We're not going to Netflix and go, and saying "hey you have to pay me if you want my clients to reach you." This is not what we are.
We start to hit a phrase that we consider being your VyprVPN virtual ISP. It moves your ISP where you are physically with us, so that you take with you your ISP. Go home, your ISP. You can travel abroad, ask your ISP. It is a known entity, known quantity.
Another issue that helps VyprVPN is anti-censorship. There are many, many different kinds of censorship around the world, and VyprVPN really help many people. I've heard people talk to me, I was traveling in China. In fact, a guy who used to work with us way back in the days Texas.Net I saw here today, and he mentioned that he was in Iraq, watching his Netflix, that you do not get to do in Iraq. VyprVPN will help you punch through the firewall.
We are acting effectively with our Chameleon Protocol go further than just a VPN connectivity. They go further to try to hide so that the people you are connecting through do not even know you are doing a VPN because somehow these great firewall begin to catch and say we'll just block VPN. Whenever we find a way to VPN to come through, we will block a VPN. So with Chameleon, we're basically looking at how we can play the running game to continue to stay ahead of how regimes and others who want to censor what you are oppressive.
The opposite side is, once you are connected to us, we will not censor. We have our own DNS servers. We will not block your access to things via DNS. You do not go to the firewall through another way. We take the world back to ISP over a common carrier in a legal sense. It is a pipe. It is your pipe. You pay for the pipe. Use it as you wish.
If innovation is the answer, it can not stop there and be happy with what we have. We must think about what we do next. On 10 March this year, South by Southwest, Edward Snowden, bouncing through several proxy servers around the world, spoke at SXSW interview with two gentlemen of the ACLU. This is a statement that Snowden made in this interview. I want to play a short video here for you to Chris ACLU of which I will not even try to pronounce the name because I did not check before coming, what was his response to that question. Of course this would happen. I know exactly why this happened. I Muted earlier when the email was dinging you for the panel
Male :. Moreover, it was actually one of several people who had TED talk in the last few months, everyone talks about Internet privacy issues that our government has created. There are at least three of them
Michael Douglas :. I saw the robot in a picture the other day
Christopher Soghoian :. [Video] Now, this does not mean that small developers can not play a role. It will be hot, new communication tools. WhatsApp is basically out of nowhere a few years ago. What I want is for the next or the next Twitter WhatsApp to be encrypted using, communications from end to end. This can be made easier to use. This can be made usable, but you need to put a user experience development team on this. You must optimize. You must make it easy for the average person.
If you are a startup and you work on something, keep in mind that it will be more difficult for incumbents to provide secure communications to their users because their business models are built around advertising services exploited. You can more effectively and easily deploy these services as they can. If you are looking for an angle here, I think we are slowly getting to the point where your customers say, $ 5 per month for encrypted communication, nobody can look at you. I think something that many consumers might be willing to pay. [/Video]
Michael Douglas: Meet CYPHER. We were actually very well in development of our own application for encrypted communication from end to end. Mobile is where we start. When the interview SXSW went live, and I'm sitting in my office listening, and I'll just continue to talk, guys. He continues to say exactly what we think, what we say, what we do. Just a couple of points he made was that he wants the next to be encrypted communication. This is a key core of the CYPHER is. CYPHER is private encryption key. You own and control the key. We can not read your key. We can not see your key. We can not decrypt your data. I do not know what you're talking about. I, as a supplier, not having access to your information.
Make it easier to use. It is the new email. Make it easy to use. This is what we do. VyprVPN is a very clear understanding of what we do in terms of making it easy. We internally UI / UX people that help us to keep things easy, keep things understandable, keep clear to the end user. VyprVPN VPN are not easy to implement. For people in this room, VPNs are probably really trivial to set up, but imagine call your mom and say, "Mom agree, I want you to download the VPN. You need the ARC. No, no , stop. "
with VyprVPN, which is really how we are all user applications and the platforms we support is we make it easy. What I would do is, Mom, I want you to GoldenFrog.com. I want to register, download the application and install it. You just have to use a username and password. Then just click Login. That's all you need to do. We bring the same type of desire, which makes things easy to use. It is not awkward. If you go out and look at the world of private communications today, applications are just frustrating, and we take very seriously the call to make it easier to use.
Another thing is Chris says he thinks it may be something you are willing to pay. I heard several people on the panel today say that same thing. People will be willing to pay for services that keep their private communications secure. We certainly hope that's true, because part of why we CYPHER is so that we can continue to make these types of developments, and developers are not, moreover, cheap. It takes a lot of money to produce these types of applications, and we want to continue to do so.
I just have a couple more things. I want to talk a bit since I am LinuxFest with a whole bunch of computer people here, talk, some of the technology we use at Golden Frog. Did you all know that we have our equipment? I'm not sure you're doing yet. Again, this is part of who we are. We control our destiny. We control our privacy, your privacy.
We are long-time UNIX geeks and longtime fans of Linux, and we use all kinds of Linux open source projects to operate our services and to provide what we provide.
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