This is my TEDatINTEL talk. It has my 5 rules for building a startup inside a big company:
1) Be right about the future
2) Keep it secret, keep it safe
3) Always cheat, always win
4) Find some users and make them happy
5) Make an attractive corpse
@DystopianLiving wrote a nice blog about my Gove20LA ’13 talk. Here’s an excerpt:
“Some key takeaways for me were:
1) The idea that “information technology should be neutral” is a great explanation of why the US gov’t wants an internet kill switch. Professional politicians will always be in favor of squelching dissent, and technology that treats all information equally – including information that is detrimental to the status quo – will therefore be perceived as a threat.”
Hard-link to the complete post is here:
http://dystopianliving.com/darknet-guy-speaks/
I was invited by Alan Silberberg to keynote at GOV2.0LA on April 20th 2013. This is a really cool one-day event packed full of amazing speakers (thank god I got to go first). When individual talks are posted I will post the links here.
Alan gave me free reign to talk about whatever I wanted to (what on earth was he thinking?) so I took the opportunity to talk about the Darknet and, well, Everything.
Here’s my talk. I hope you enjoy watching it as much I enjoyed giving it.
The original Darknet paper is here: The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution
A neat 10 year anniversary retrospective of us publishing that paper is here.
The Michael Pollan article I reference in my talk, and that inspired me back in 1997 to examine nature as intrinsically dual-use, is here.
John Noveske
John Noveske was a shooter and rifle-smith. His company, Noveske Rifle Works, supplies extremely well-made weapons designed (and used) by spec ops and professional “harms way” shooters as well as enthusiasts. John died on Jan 4th 2013 in a car accident in Oregon.
I met John shooting the Thunder Ranch High Angle Rifle Training class in 2010. This HART was not a simple range-based class. Under normal conditions it’s a challenging class with very steep mountain climbing combined with challenging shooting positions, and you have to hump all your gear up and down cliffs each day.
In 2010 a spring storm came in and hammered the ranch for days before we started and was still at it when we arrived, so at times we were shooting in blizzard conditions. Far targets on the lower rifle range were sometimes obscured for seconds or more at a time, meaning we had to range or even shoot them using dead-reckoning off of trees or other landmarks (which was a learning experience in itself). Just the hiking would have been non-trivial, but with 60 pounds of shooting gear it was even tougher. To see the conditions we worked in, this photo shows the two of us on the line (on day one I think):
John Noveske (background, with the awesome hat) and I shooting Thunder Ranch HART in 2010.
And yet, there was John Noveske, climbing with a vanilla latte. I think that’s just how he rolled.
John was incredibly smart, a total smart-ass, a great shooter and while he didn’t insist on inserting himself into things he was not in the least bit reluctant to share his opinions once you were engaged with him. We spent some time riffing on things that we could do together someday and he remained one of those guys I always meant to call and get together with, but life got in the way. He was a really special man.
I wish I had made that call.
Heidi and Clint at Thunder Ranch are working on gifts and memorial. You can get more info on their Facebook page here.
You have some space. You want to protect it. We’ll call this your Home System, or HS for short. For ages your HS has been emitting light, and that’s a problem. If someone (say, me) decides they want to invade and subjugate your HS (annihilation is harder to solve) AND I have FTL travel I can just show up uninvited and the instant I do I will be able to see you (albeit a past version of you) but I will be invisible.
Yes, invisible. Not just hard to detect, but actually invisible. How? Because you’ve been emitting light forever, and the light I emit or reflect hasn’t gone anywhere yet. I wasn’t there to emit or reflect light (nor any other wave or particle).
So, practically: I travel at FTL to a light year distant from your system. I check it out and decide that I want to control it for some reason. I then travel at FTL speeds (meaning I’m ahead of the reflection of my armada, which will reach you in a year) to 179,875,474.8 kilometers from your HS. When I pop out of FTL travel it will take my light 10 minutes to reach you, and that entire time I’m invisible. All my readings of you and your HS are only 10 mins old.
Now I jump to a mere 17,987,547.48 kilometers away and I’m 1 light minute out from your HS. My sensors can now pick up activity in your HS that is EARLIER than my last reading (I know, that kinda cooks my brain a little bit too) and I diff things so that I can predict where everything was (most likely) and will be (most likely). I plot my targeting appropriately.
Now I jump at FTL again to as close a distance as I possibly can without running into something bad (like a planet). I deploy my munitions (beam weapons? kinetics? missiles? fighters? all of the above?). I’ve got all my targets pre-plotted and depending on how close I can get to you in my final FTL jump you’ll have something like fractions of a second to seconds to react before my incoming attacks start to hit your HS. I will then plot follow-ups in real time (missiles and fighters are great for this because they can be steered).
All of this basically sucks if you’re a HS. There are basically four ways of solving this problem:
You’ll be happy to know that we earthlings are getting much closer to number 4 based on several amazing breakthroughs in quantum physics.
We’ve suspected for awhile that quantum tunneling will let us do something to something in one place and get an instantaneous (meaning infinitely FTL) response in another. Recent experiments are showing that this may actually be how things work.
This is the most recent example:
How does this solve the above scenario? With FTL travel + a comms network based on quantum tunneling you can now build millions or even billions of what amount to solar powered quantum webcams. Once these are out there, far away from the HS, they are picking up light that is light seconds, minutes, hours or even more ahead of the light hitting the HS in real time, but they are reporting back to the HS in real time.
Now, if I decide I want to invade you, you can have a heads up that I’m coming based at least on how long it takes me to plot my targets – which ought to give you enough time to plot your defenses. You can start launching waves of kinetics now, hoping I find myself in a shit-storm of rapidly moving ball-bearings that weren’t there before. You can detonate nukes, get your own ships deployed in reasonable places, or launch missiles. You have choices. Options make the fight at least a little bit less one-sided for static targets like your HS.
Astute readers will note that once if you have FTL you ought to be able to do a hack solution for this based on physically moving objects from one place to another. For example you put an FTL drive on your webcams and then when it picks up something that the onboard computer thinks is bad (like my invasion armada) it jumps back to the HS and dumps the data. This might work but it’s got all sorts of impractical issues (unlike this deeply practical blog post). For starters FTL is likely going to cost vastly more energy than quantum tunneling. It’s kind of like those pneumatic tube systems. Neat but not particularly scalar.
So, let’s hear it for quantum physics! Solving problems you might not have thought about and will never have in your lifetime.
Science! Yay!
There was a lot of ambient noise (unfortunately) but I think this is a really fantastic homage to my father. Makes me really proud to be one of the people who knew him.
Jed and I went up into the mountains to do a little shooting on Sunday. It was a great day.
We started out shooting pistols at steel. Interesting ballistics note: we didn’t feel or hear any ricochet back down toward us with the 9mm but we got little stinging bits of bullet back at us with the .22. Always wear eye protection!
I’m working up to the Sniper’s Hide Cup in June and I’ve been building a .308 Savage for that. A big piece of motivation for Sunday (if we need more motivation than to just go out in the woods and shoot stuff) was to settle on the rifle and ammo I’ve been working on for the comp. I hadda make sure the gun wouldn’t blow up when I shot it (it didn’t), find out if the Georgia Arms .308 match ammo I use for my DPMS rifles is sub-MOA in this gun and zero it for that ammo.
The ammo shot plenty nicely which means I can now spend my limited practice time actually shooting between now and the competition instead of trying to find The Perfect Load. Why a .308? I hear you ask. Why not that .260 you built a couple years ago? Or something with more oopmh and better BC bullets, like a 7mm WSM or 300 SAUM?
Because I don’t have a .308 bolt gun, that’s why. Okay, the truth is that I do own another bolt .308, but it’s not here with me in the US. It’s kinda sorta in exile, but that’s another story. Below is a pic of this new rifle – I might give it a duracoat camo job. Depends on how motivated I feel.
Build notes:
Jed has shot .22 lr rifles and .223 at relatively near targets, but he’s never shot a .308 and he’s never shot prone, which is surprising because he’s a little bit sniper obsessed in video games (it runs in the family). You can see video of him calling shots on a steel plate at 100 yards here.
We spent a good chunk of time scouting for places to shoot with much longer distances than 100 yards. I think the area has great promise (safe, legal, less than 2 hours from home) but we were thwarted from actually setting up anything long-range by late-melting snow, which made the main logging road impassible. While we were scouting we found some gorgeous camp-sites and in one of those I found a new reactive explosive target laying on the ground. Somebody dropped something.
So not only was it a first for the above for Jed, it was his first chance to shoot a reactive target. I think it’s fair to say he enjoyed the experience.
As a bonus to the end of the day we found one tick each on us, one in the car (on Jed) and one on my chest in bed hours later (came in on my sweatshirt, which I had taken off in the car). No bites though. Must bring anti-bug next time…
And he got it on his first shot. Nice.
This was Jed’s first time prone and with a .308. Not too shabby for 1st time.
Me: hey Boo, can I talk to you for a minute?
Boo: speak, human!
Me: last night you brought four live rodents into the house. I appreciate your baser instincts, but you managed to lose track of one in the closet…
Boo: what? Me?!? I am shocked by your aspersions!
Me: we saw you chase a mouse under the closet door! And then you completely lost interest!
Boo: I never lose… hey, is that a bird?
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