[Applause]
thank you great to be here I I'd like to
start with a little story so the
Internet Archive started accepting
bitcoins in 2011 as donations I kind of
wish we hadn't sold those 2700 bitcoins
that we got then for mere $5,000 but by
2012 we were wise Ihnen up a bit and we
were getting these donations and we were
paying our employees optionally in
Bitcoin
we set up an ATM doing these things and
this I was getting interviewed by
Bitcoin magazine and the conversation
went completely fun and interesting
areas I was getting to talk with this
young man
Vitalik and I it was I now realize I
really it would have been a much better
article if I had interviewed him as to
his and gotten that on paper as to what
he saw and how he saw this whole thing
evolving but I I think it's actually
kind of great that when I wanted to
upgrade from Bitcoin - qti it was big it
was Vitalik himself that sort of said
yeah you might want to use these wallets
and and and the like and it's worked out
pretty well
ever ever ever since what I want is a
game with many winners
I want a game that evolves I want a game
that isn't monopolized isn't structured
in such a way that there are no room for
survive us or surprises and evolution
and coolness um I like games that are
fun and inviting and don't do what you
expect the only games that I have ever
known like this are fundamentally open
and by open I mean no centralized points
of control I mean decentralized games
and I've had the pleasure in my career
to be involved in a couple of them one
is the Internet itself so during the
night late 1970s and 80s helped
participate in putting this thing
together where if you just played by the
protocols you were welcome
there wasn't a permission-based you
weren't on somebody's platform it just
evolved and and mutated along in
conferences kind of like this called the
IETF and it worked very well there's
another game was the World Wide Web
where you could go and set up and just
be part of it just by playing by the
rules but then you could bend the rules
and you're welcome to go and transform
this thing of the World Wide Web for
many many years those who have been
great and they're real there were people
that were involved in those whether it's
Vint Cerf and oak or and I hope there
are thousands of us that were involved
in the Internet era of trying to get
that whole thing on to work I think we
felt very successful but we didn't
necessarily all get rich right that
there was just a way of sort of
participating in in this game with many
winners but not everybody was a winner
in the world wide web Tim berners-lee
actually never became completely wealthy
but he helped make something very very
important happen I think that this area
that this conference is based on is all
a base around making games with multi
winners and let's do what we can to try
to keep it that way because the internet
and the world wide web have seen some
real closures on some real collapsing in
the early 1990s there were 40,000 ISPs
in the United States but now there are
only really a handful that make any
difference at all so something's gone
wrong
now instead of the world wide web where
lots of blogs and the like that it's
collapsed down to Facebook or Twitter so
we have basically a it's not that the
web is failing it's the people are
setting up castles or closed gardens in
the open pastures it's something that I
think we really have to watch out for
and when we're looking at sort of the
structure of the Internet Archive what
we were doing we thought that we really
needed to be involved in building a new
game and that's what got us involved in
the whole decentralized Bitcoin world
and and beyond and that's what I'd like
to talk about
today so the Internet Archive I get to
work here this cool place we bought a
church in San Francisco and converted it
to be our headquarters and our mission
is universal access to all knowledge the
thing that I signed up for in the
internet is to try to build the Internet
into the Library of Alexandria version
two could we make it so that all the
published works of Humankind books music
video web pages software could be made
available to anybody wherever they were
forever for free how many people here
have used the Internet Archive oh yay
fantastic the wayback machine probably
did you know that we do books no I did
you know we do television so we okay a
few people okay so anyway we do a lot of
these other things on the at the
Internet Archive as well we basically
are trying to take all of the existing
materials digitize it and put it online
permanently we're trying to take what's
born digital and make it permanently
available because the average life of a
webpage is a hundred days and it goes
away so we have 300 billion web pages
and grows you know anyway a lot and but
what I'm going to talk about now is
these restructuring of the web itself
the web itself is but is being we're
being portrayed the Commons is being
poisoned it is the people that were
supposed to be trustful haven't turned
out to be and the real wake-up call for
me was Snowden to go and show that a lot
of the people that helped build the the
web had men turned to use it as a
massive surveillance tool then the last
election in the United States no matter
who you think should be elected or not
the actual process of it went very very
wrong that we had people trolling and
packaging and manipulating fake news
structures were rampant and they're
still around so we have basically
structures that aren't working all that
well what I suggest we need is a web
that's decentralized a web that has got
a peer-to-peer back-end on it
that preserves some of the values that
we wanted but doesn't go backwards but
it's going forwards into the
technologies that many of you are really
pioneering and putting putting together
to try to do this two years ago we put
together a call for the decentralized
web some it wouldn't it be great if we
could build a web that's decentralized
and Tim berners-lee and Vint Cerf came
but also the ipfs folks all sorts of
people were building this when we did
this again just last year a lot of these
people had startups that were well
funded it's on its way but it's still
not altogether there yet
buildings decentralized systems is
fundamentally - harder than MIT building
centralized systems and so we're all
trying to get there and the way that I
wanted to try to help was to be a
convener but also by going and putting
our own stuff online could the Internet
Archive make itself decentralized could
the forty five petabytes of the Internet
Archive store the three million users a
day that are using the Internet Archive
could we make that decentralized could
we make it so it could get to it from
anywhere and nowhere and so that is the
journey that I thought I'd go over today
and to list a bunch of the problem areas
that we're finding that frankly we could
really use help and it's not just we use
we as the whole web community the
Internet community could use help on a
laundry list of projects that I think
you guys already know the answers to
many of them building a decentralized
Internet Archive I realize there are
there about five central magic
properties that were based on that is I
think it's time to just take a little
notice of just like holy crap
the idea of content address ability is
wild it's sort of Merlin stuff that if
you just have a hash of a file you can
just call it from the universe and it
can come together and you can have it
and you can check that you have the
right thing yet the first time I think
you never you don't actually need
provenance you don't know who you got it
from as long as it it checks out with
your hash you know you have it right
this is a big interesting technological
step
the magic of encryption public key
encryption particularly is in a woven
into all our systems that yeah yeah yeah
but just take a moment it's pretty
amazing in terms of being able to be
built in a decentralized environment
private communications that are
extremely difficult to bug another
that's not quite technology it's
sociology and politics and economics is
a well connected internet but we're all
very much based on it and we have to do
what we can to try to keep it around and
alive yes there of these countrywide
firewalls going up and their problems
but in general we have a well connected
internet to more things the that we have
an ability now to have downloadable code
that's safe so we're used to be that we
had to wait for a Standards Committee to
come around to go and invent and then it
gets implemented and then it gets
finally deployed it's super slow
evolution especially in the web browser
space can we go and download javascript
to make my our web browsers into
something else and you guys are doing
within the etherium contract structures
with web assembly which is excellent but
this is magic in the sense that you can
evolve much much faster
and lastly crypto currencies how do we
get beyond the original sin of the web
which is advertising how do we do that
how do we make it so you can make money
by publishing on the Internet
right now you have to pretty much sign
up to Amazon or iTunes or something like
that to go and host your stuff can we go
and use crypto currencies and I think
that's the big opportunity okay I'm
going to do things something that they
always suggest not to it actually made
people in this in the conference very
nervous I'm gonna try to do a live demo
of a decentralized Internet Archive if
this works you're gonna have to applause
okay
okay I did try this a month ago in front
of a group and too many people went to
this website before and things crashed
it was kind of from so don't go there
yet
here I go this is the Internet Archive
website so just normal archive.org sort
of see what it is what I'm going to try
to show is a decentralized version of
this that is a lot like this so you kind
of say well are you gonna show the
anything new has happened I'm going to
go and turn on the JavaScript console
and show how much mechanism is going on
so when I change this to D webbed
archive.org it's going to bootstrap all
sorts of systems web torrent ipfs gun
yjs all in JavaScript not just as
clients but as servers of these and then
bootstrap all of that and then start
getting all of the assets to be the
internet archive site okay wish me luck
okay here just okay they boot it up
alright okay we've gotten out we got
them on banners up okay
so now we have the basic homepage up in
terms of all of these images let's try
going to get a movie so here again that
C's going and getting a lot of assets of
the Prelinger archives which is old
archival movies these are old
educational films that anyway they're
completely dorky and wonderful and
popular and so let's let's go for health
your posture you know gotta stand up
straight they're gonna tell you how and
okay this is going to bring in things
using ipfs gun and yjs and then the
actual video if it works okay we've got
one pr5 peers now so it's downloading
its five peers coming in
[Music]
so this is basically trying to weave
peer-to-peer into the web itself but
there's all sorts of other magic here I
know that you're all gonna really want
to go see this movie and I'll make sure
you're standing up straight and kinda
like but web torrent has was doing a lot
of this and so it's not only downloading
but this web browser is uploading this
file already can we go and make this
smoothly easy to do and how do we get
the bootstrapping system such that this
can happen in censorship in a censorship
resistant way the Internet Archive is
completely blocked in China for instance
and sometimes blocked in Russia and
occasionally in India and bla bla bla
bla bla can we go and keep things up and
available through these technologies and
I think so
but we're not quite there yet
so what's the benefits of going through
all of this work right we have ability
to go into our web sites or home pages
or whatever well I'd say there are four
big ones one is we can make things more
reliable they can be archivable it's
like git it's it's you can roll things
back you could fork all sorts of nice
things censorship resistant and even
works in poorly connected zones like say
a lot of the United States it offers
more privacy one thing that was really
spooky to me as the in the stones
revelations is the GCHQ of the the NSA
of the united kingdom stood in front of
the WikiLeaks website and recorded all
the IP addresses that came in and it
turned over a large number of those to
the NSA for further whatever they wanted
to do then the papers we don't know what
the NSA did with that but the idea of
people being rounded up for what it is
they read and had bad things happen to
them it had a very long bad tradition in
the library world so this is sort of you
know puts a big red flag of the idea of
just getting in trouble
for what your reading is not good enough
it's not how the world's supposed to
work so let's build a better system -
two more things is we can build a
business model that works better than
and advertising and we can make it fun
and malleable I think we could make a
system that works a whole lot better and
and does better okay here's my laundry
list of 13 projects that has been
evolving out of the decentralized Web
Summit and and the upcoming in the
summer next summer the deep web camp in
San Francisco these are areas that can
really use some help
for instance naming in the whole
decentralized web world if we're going
to move beyond DNS how should that work
that's actually a probably a very good
place for registries and Ledger's and
and and the like how do we do key
management on the D Web this is really
tricky it's um
Dmitry excuse me on Dietrich of Mozilla
talked yesterday of wanting to build
better key management into the browsers
let's help them let's try to figure out
what we should do to be able to do that
in such a way that it works well for
normal people
identity reputation how to do mutable
data at scale so when BitTorrent we
implemented bit torn on all our material
so we have 45 petabytes of materials
available bit to arm it's kind of cool
but it's also static and if any of those
files change if you don't get the new
torrent it will go and just continuously
download thinking that it didn't get a
proper version so we have problems by
having things be more immutable than the
BitTorrent or ipfs world's currently
work how do we do archiving in the
decentralized web do we need incentive
eyes structures I'm hoping that we can
get ISPs to go and make their own cached
decentralized web nodes even if it's
just to serve to their customers so it's
basically a content distribution network
that's open access so it's not
akamai that's only the big boys can
Netflix can go and put in that anybody
materials just get faster by they're
getting out there so the Internet
Archive can play a role but can we have
lots of different organizations play a
role in archiving and caching materials
reader privacy is notoriously hard if
Zucco says that privacy is sort of not
easy to get OPSEC absolute then it's
geez well what am you mere mortals
supposed to be able to do here but we
can make progress we can make it's at
least the GCHQ attack on WikiLeaks
readers is much more difficult to do
takedowns in the era of hashes rather
than URLs what does that look like and
should they be avoided are they opt-in
is it kind of like spam how does it how
is it going to work another row of
challenges again and what I'm trying to
do is is just trying to excite you guys
to help out say I think I've got an idea
on how to help on say web beyond
advertising I've got a puzzle for you
it's a crypto puzzle that I've even
posed to wit Diffie and he hasn't come
back with an answer is can you make a
deep urges on the D web what does I what
do I mean by that let that my kid is a
guitarist he plays songs and so he he
hasn't held them what if he wants to
make a decentralized website that has
his album on it the first ones free you
can just play it but the others he wants
to sell so he wants to sell for some
amount of money what I imagine is we
would encrypt those songs with a key and
then if then it would go and advertise
on the decentralized web page put a coin
in this slot and then you'll get the key
to go and unlock the song right you
could go and rip them off by going and
you know unencrypted and it's passing it
to your friends or whatever but that's
always the case but at least if you
wanted to play the game can we make it
work without any Amazon or iTunes or
even an escrow agent and I can't figure
out how to do that because it requires
having a secret key that lives say in a
public contract
and then I don't know enough about zero
knowledge proof to be able to figure out
whether that works but anyway if we can
crack that then you can feel confident
putting a coin in the slot and knowing
you're gonna be able to get some
decentralized content that's for pay can
we make the decentralized web work in
the browser itself I'd say one of the
cool things that these guys did in the
area of the decentralized Internet
Archive that you just saw is there was
no extension there was no new browser it
was it works on your phone and actually
now go ahead please do go to do a
archive.org and just try it out
because you're gonna be basically using
everybody else that's here to be going
and starting to access the internet
archive site so can we make it work in
browsers completely unchanged and I
think the answer is kind of but we're
gonna need some help from the browser
companies themselves but can tweak you
really get going
storage and they decentralized web is it
gonna be file point it's going to be the
Internet Archive how are we going to do
a larger scale storage than what's
actually on a blockchain governance in
the Deep Web I'd say this community is
thinking harder about governance than
anything I've ever seen in terms of
these did the whole Dowell thing is
terrific that we need many models to be
played with what are we going to do
about the D Web and that the standards
that are kind of evolved in that space
and who can help
and lastly can we define our
decentralized terms
I mean I'm old enough to remember II
when II was supposed to be in something
or open remember open seem to have some
definition at least Stallman had some
real definitions of what free software
men he had principles and I think we
need the same kinds of things around
decentralization or it could just become
a marketing term that is just wasted and
we sort of would have built up a lot of
goodwill around a term that'll mean as
much as organic and so if we can go and
do something in that area I think it
would be a very good long-term
investment and of course rethinking the
UI in u.s.
because I don't know about you but I I
always have these cool things that I
want my wife to use and they're just if
it's not actually working well she'll
just sort of she's my good QA Department
it's like not good enough to survive so
let's go and make the d web a fun and
interesting area to play in to help
I would suggest what we what I've been
doing is I've been trying out the puzzle
if you're driving around or in a shower
blank but decentralized so just try it
out on your favorite piece of tech I
think Google Docs is freaking magic it
is an amazing technology but it's creepy
so anything that's creepy I want to go
and think can I make blank but
decentralized Google Docs but
decentralized Google Maps but
decentralized slack but decentralized
Twitter but decentralized Facebook but
decentralized we just bought a Tesla
which is kind of cool and it is like
driving a phone it is really strange it
is a connected device the company knows
everywhere we are it is it is creepy so
how do you make cars that are as cool as
a Tesla but decentralized it is
absolutely possible to do and one thing
you might want to try out is your own
thing that you're doing and I know if
you're doing things and decentralized
tech you say oh well I'm already doing
that but maybe your homepage is it maybe
your blog isn't so how do we go and make
all of this work I wanted to say thank
you to Mitra and the Internet Archive
engineers that made this demo all work
and thank God I did a web tour and ipfs
Gunn yjs and others really pertinent a
lot over the last year to make this work
and they're continuing to make it so
working and censorship resistance and
for masbath back uploading and
replicating petabytes of information
let's build the web we want and the only
way we're gonna do that is together I'm
hoping that this was somewhat useful and
I look forward to talking with you any
questions
[Applause]
was I really that unprovoked --iv
rooster this isn't like a question per
se but I work with ipfs on a like almost
daily basis and my company I have I
believe solved already some of those 13
challenges oh that you so my question is
would we be able to like talk to you
after absolutely you can talk to any of
a number of people because it's not just
me it's now groups of people and we're
trying to basically put these together
so yes if you have real clues as to how
to make progress on these they are this
sort of the outstanding less fantastic
thank you yeah a great talk thank you so
much I'm wondering how you think about
incentivization for obscure data stuff
that like from the 50s these movies that
probably nobody will never really look
at how do you keep those around how do
we how do we do deal with the long-term
preservation of stuff that the longtail
right then you know the Hollywood movies
are gonna take care of themselves just
fine how do they deal with the longtail
I think it's by filmmaking compatible
systems that are easy enough to use that
even libraries know how to use the cool
thing about libraries is they're paid to
give stuff away it's about a twelve
billion dollar a year industry in the
United States it's about a 21 billion
dollar a year industry in the world
they've just haven't modernized so the
Internet Archive I think oh it was
pretty modern but the library system
hasn't modernized but boy are they up
for it so when the last election
happened I got worried about being in
the United States and said gosh let's
accelerate this make copies in multiple
places so the Internet Archive has got
two copies in the United States partial
copy and Amsterdam and a partial copy in
alexandria egypt for real actually it's
kind of cold but we've also then said
how about Canada again what can we do
there so I went around to our Canadian
friends and they said sure sign us up
we're up for spending money and our
universities to go and help back up
hearts if not all the whole thing but I
didn't have the tech for them well yeah
the idea of having just dead dumb
storage someplace is a good but not
great you really need continuous
usability so they wanted to go and have
copies of parts of the collections but
also serve them that's I think the
opportunity of a decentralized internet
archive so if we did this there's plenty
of money for keeping oh I don't know
mere exabytes alive which basically is
everything written plus basically
published we're 45 petabytes of data and
we're small so it's it's I'd say the
long tail we can count on that part of
the system as long as it's compatible
with the thriving commercial system the
library world is difficult to go and
drive forward technologies but it can
ride other people's technologies it's an
idea thank you actually sorry regarding
this just disgression I get the system
at the theorem San Francisco hackathon
it's called laser growth which is a
decentralized optical storage system
precisely for this long-term archiving
sign that man great we need more ideas
than this and I think it's a lot of
these things are bottom-up if we just
wait for the library Congress to do
something it's going to be a long
fricking time so it's going to be
bottom-up and that sounds like there's
freedom box there's a bunch of other
boxes that people have have tried to
make let's make them useful and used yes
your answer about moving the archive
thank you in the Trump moment was part
of my answers part of my question the
question is in the Trump boom what
projects maybe that you didn't even
mention here should we be focused on
slash what norms give you pause what
projects should we be focused on now
there's a lot more excitement around the
nonprofit sector than there was even 10
years ago and people are just trying to
make some crappy app and you know buy a
house for cash or whatever just yeah so
there
a lot more interest in these the ef-s
public knowledge
Wikipedia Internet Archive they're our
biggest donations from ever other than
from from me have been from the crypto
world actually the pineapple fund gave
us two million dollars a theory a
foundation give us a hundred thousand
handshake gave us a hundred thousand I'm
nice ago gave us 30 thousand we've
gotten a lot of support actually so
that's that's my Schilling moment here
but there is interest in these spaces
and I really feel and I you know I was
invited here I think it's kind of cool
because we're really from a
non-commercial space we are for the
public good and that that's being
involved in the conversations I think is
a really good good sign in terms of what
to actually do is I've got a list of 13
things that if we solve those I think
that we can crack through and make a
lawful lot of the websites we use
decentralized and you wouldn't even know
it that would be the best case it's like
oh yeah of course it's decentralized
it's like of course it's HTTP all right
of course it's and just how do we go and
make it all just go decentralized my
question is kind of two-part you
mentioned earlier about China and not
being able to access I wondered if the D
Web archive.org is accessible in any way
in a place like China that has not yet
China is actually really difficult to
crack it'll probably be easier in Turkey
or Iran or some of the other places that
were blocked I think no more often in
Iran now so there's a but because you
have to go and get rid of every access
to the DNS for instance and that is
challenging so China blocks us largely
by messing with our DNS and by blocking
things going to our IP addresses so we
don't have that
yeah and it's a lot of the bootstrapping
problem and that I think is going to
require either browser manufacturer
cooperation or extensions okay that was
part of my second question when you
mentioned going beyond DNS I just wonder
if you could expound more on um Mitra
who's been working on this has been
making a cool system to go and make it
so that if you have D web in your domain
name D web archive.org
it mutates that into AD web me slash
arc-flash
archive org or something like that and
it'll do it for any prepend like that so
if you have d web in any domain name
it'll swap these around and it then
looks it up in us in a sequence of
databases to find who has the authority
for that part of the subtree is there
something we can read more yeah it's all
open source but I'm not sure it's the
perfect thing but people are trying and
to basically build a sort of DNS that's
open and resilient and doesn't have some
of the problems we saw the last time
around I think hello and whenever I
should get the yank
please yank me but yes yes sir
Sam for the dog and who this who can
upload content to the Internet Archive
you can Holly the content go burn or
curated it can't get the Layton's on how
who is okay in the platform how do you
upload to the Internet Archive and can
it get deleted somehow is that the
question so on archive.org there's a
button upload please hit it please hit
it now just hit hit hit hit upload and
just try uploading something it's a
little clunky it's worse than what you
but it supports YouTube its videos and
books and all sorts of things and makes
it into lots of different formats and
keep tries to keep them alive forever
but we do take things down and we do
under US law we've tried to push back
but we are under US law so if people
make a valid copyright complaint and
prove it then we will make it not
available publicly if you want to go and
use the archive at scale use s3 archive
data
we're trying to be bug compatible with
Amazon comms s3 cloud s3 amazon.com so
you can use your bucket and upload
things at scale please let us know if
you're gonna do many terabytes or many
petabytes but we're very interested so
we you that's how all of the materials
we get 23 terabytes a day coming into
the internet archive all of it comes
through our s3 implementation so you can
use s3 really easy or just go to the
website and hit upload and and please do
okay thanks yeah thank you for the talk
I thought there were a lot of really
great points that you made
I guess it's this last question so in
terms of you know just trying to get
more people can it be the second to last
question okay sorry yeah so more people
from around the world accessing the same
internet trying to not move in this to
internet parallel that's emerging with
nations like China kind of having a
separate internet yes so how can we
prevent that with better interfaces /
what could we do to it like you said
earlier you have to take some things
down based upon US law that seems to be
you know both a good thing in terms of
preventing malicious content but then
also a bad thing in terms of potentially
having a burning down of the Alexandria
library yeah oh man like how do we
prevent that I I'm not sure I've talked
about this in public why we're blocked
in China as best I can tell so in
general company countries will come to
us and go and say this particular thing
is not legal in Germany or whatever
under our expansive copyright terms and
so if if they basically make a good case
that it's illegal in their country then
we'll block it for users in that country
and that has allowed us survive very
well the u.s. is actually pretty liberal
unless you talk about child porn or
almost anything dealing with Muslims but
otherwise the United States allows a lot
to be put out there in China there were
some uploaded videos to the Internet
Archive and they came and said you have
to take them down and we said
are they illegal in China and they said
yes those are illegal in China we said
fine we'll block them in China and they
said that's not good enough you have to
block them for the whole world and
because they said that we said we can't
do that that's not how we operate and
they said okay chunk so 45 petabytes
went offline including millions of books
digitized by the Department of Education
in China that have been done as a
collaborative project so I think we have
to um for those of us there work within
the governments and the like is we just
have to make sure that we're not
overstepping our bounds and allow some
of this experiment to continue that's I
bet that's the only thing I can think of
and make multiple copies all right
Brewster I know he's gonna hate me so go
fast
okay I'll be really fast this is the
same question I asked you the last time
you gave this speech which is if
advertising is the root of all evil and
getting people to pay for it will fix it
then what do we do about the fact that
we have a hugely unequal world and the
ability to pay is very very widely
dispersed and that all the stuff you pay
for right now is just as abusive as the
advertising stuff Netflix buys and you
Apple locked you down and so on damn
IIIi think I've got to go now
so yeah how do you even have payments
work in sliding scale structures and and
having an equal world when there's vast
inequality in wealth she I don't know I
think we need a lot more experiments
going on than the few that we've got
going and I just want to see more things
happen out there it monocultures don't
work very well
advertising based systems end up with
newspapers television Facebook Google so
that's not good enough
I'm I'm I'm Oh generally a free-for-all
kind of guy there's ways of making that
work I just like to see some more tools
in our in our tool box
sorry not be more satisfying thank you
very much we're around for the rest of
the day
you