My ongoing escape by Bob Summerwill [ETC Cooperative] x Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress

so hi I'm Bob Sam hello everybody I'm going to be talking today a little bit about my my ongoing escape from uh Google and Apple so yeah over the last uh year year and a half I've finally had a concerted effort to migrate myself away from my Apple dependencies after a number of years of uh being in that world I uh have not used windows for many years so that's not been a problem but Apple have got very nice hardware and Google have got useful services so yeah just a little bit of a a story so we're going to start here in 1984 but it was my 1984 not the fictional 1984 which was the year that I started programming when I was 10 and it was quite a different world then um on the left here we've got the the wonderful BBC micro only really known to British people sadly wonderful system also we got the uh the zedx Spectrum again maybe a little British Commodore 64 uh well known but this is where I started back in the 8bit days and uh did have a a very early IBM PC well it wasn't an IBM PC it was a a PC compatible and this all started for me because my dad was a self-taught programmer as well and he brought computers home in the evening and uh and yeah it was a simpler time you had fixed Hardware proprietary operating systems proprietary but everything was just really in a local file system and even if you had proprietary lower layers they were very open platforms you know if you had a PC you've got your PC and you can run whatever you're running on it so um in terms of a practical experience you know no networking either it was really simple right you know you had stuff that you bought on tapes or you got uh your disc drives and you copying things around and copying was was a key thing right is is everyone was ripping off things nobody ever bought anything you know you uh uh you could you could copy everything it was it's very simple right everything's files and and and there you go you know so how does that work um my my dad's workflow in the 1980s is probably very similar to what he does right now running Windows you got files on your computer you back them up onto an external hard disk using Outlook my goodness he he does do uh website development though but of of of static stuff so you don't have a you know you don't have a it's not Web Two it's web 1 and talking to him recently he said I've never trusted cloud services and he doesn't really do anything online either and on the mobile side he's got a smartphone because he has to but he maybe does mobile browsing makes phone calls doesn't really text don't really use any apps this workflow is actually great for personal freedom uh because everything's in your hands right it's just files on a file system and there you go you you know it's all yours you're not reliant on any service provider on any accounts of logins anything um but but yeah that isn't what most of us do you know we've we've we've moved on you know you had web 2. n of uh of uh of applications where you know you are editing stuff you're contributing you your content is up there it's on you know it's on other people's computers you know the cloud is is really just other people's computers you know smartphones popped in and then the the Killer and it was Apple who did this right with the Apple Store is all of a sudden it became a closed Garden you know uh a w Garden a beautiful W Garden of uh of of applications that just work great and they you know they've got they've got a certain quality bar but you know you've you've you've become a digital sharecropper really and over time we've just had more and more of these things coming in which are you know really convenient high quality services that help us but you know also enslave us and then on the advertising model I mean that's really more Google than it is anyone else is all of these wonderful free services that we've that we have come dependent on but you know the model that was there in the' 80s switched over an awful lot and we kind of sleepwalked into it a bit so yeah you know you don't own anything Mo most workflows that people have got you know we've switched from this ownership model um and that ownership model really you can see that in physical media you know so cassette tapes everyone had you know tapes and you'd copy tapes around of your music and you know here I've made a mix for you made a tape for you um and you know or CDs or VHS videos you know all of this stuff it was really like a physical kind of ownership of the of of the media right you know you you you uh you've you've gone instead to revocable licenses you know you you you get permission to access uh the files so there's a a a very telling incident I had a few years ago where I was over in Europe for I live in Vancouver in Canada I was over in Europe for a conference and I got a call from my wife going we you can't we can't get into the the uh the movies on the Apple TV you know there's some problem with it and you know the kids are wanting to watch the movie and we can't and and what had happened and I'm sure this is still the case is iTunes bundled and and bundles access with kind of like um streaming so you buy a movie through iTunes and that gives you a license to watch it but they're also Al providing you know the ability to stream that content to any device around the world which is undoubtedly convenient but the two of them are bundled together and what had happened is my credit card had expired right I didn't owe them anything but because they didn't have that billing capability going forward they shut off access and and I'm I'm I'm sure this happens now right so you don't have an upto-date credit card so they can charge you in the future well [ __ ] you thousand bucks worth of you know hundreds of things that you've bought you haven't bought and and yeah like you know I'm I'm thinking you know we talk about self- custody frequently in crypto but you've got exactly the same patterns in terms of of files in terms of your data in terms of your you know your digital assets and your digital assets could be your you know your files your your photos um you know any any of your content right that that we're not self- custody right we've gone to a custodial setup for everything right and we're doing everything online so basically all of your everything is by default for most people in a custodial setup where that that can get yanked away at will for anything and yeah you know big Tech runs the world top five companies in the world by market cap Nvidia Apple uh Microsoft Google Amazon and I mean that's changed over the last 10 20 years right you know it it used to be like Saud AR ramco and big Banks and so on um but yeah if you look at these big companies it's all it's all the same Playbook right you know they want to control the operating system they want to have an app store on it they want to force all of the Commerce through their through their App Store to have the 30% Thank you very much you know just just leave your things with us right we'll look after it for you it's fine use it anywhere but you become a digital sharecropper you know you're you're living at their whim so during 2013 to 2015 in a prior life um I was very involved with mobile Linux so um you had a a a brief period before apple and then Google uh raised everything to the ground where you had more variety of mobile operating systems you know like Blackberry I mean Blackberry God did they fumble the ball they were you know they were so dominant early on but you you had in this period a chance of having like a you know a third or fourth platform to compete in there um so mimo and Migo were from noia I mean noia God that they [ __ ] up as well um but also at that time you had a bunto touch you had Firefox OS so you had Milla and an auntu trying to you know trying to join in there and tyen is the one that I was most directly involved with there so that was actually a a uh a Linux Foundation project with Intel and Samsung were the leads on that and really what you had with Samsung is is like Samsung wanting to get out from underneath Google you know because Samsung are a massive company you know they've got their own semiconductors and uh and and mobile and washing machines and cameras um you know Samsung do everything so it's kind of ludicrous that you that they would like suffer all that [ __ ] to go through Google you know all of the Commerce on Samsung devices goes through the Google Play service right it's it's Sam it's uh Google who get the the money out of that not Samsung it's crazy so I was you know I was uh trying to see if that reality could happen right and that we could actually come out with a mobile Linux standard with you know a rich set of uh of companies and products in that where you would have an alternative um this is a great article that came out in 2013 and was re-released in 2018 which was talking about um Google's control of that Android ecosystem even though it's open source as in this whole bunch of like nefarious nasty [ __ ] that that Google do around Android to try and really lock that lock that down um and most of that really is a around Google Play services and around their App Suite so it's like right if you want to do an Android device you know you basically you've you you know you have to use Gmail you have to ship with uh with with YouTube and you've got to use Google Maps and Google Docs and if you know you you have to have those upfront um and and also the the worst thing is there this like carrier program thing that you have to be like to be in the Google gang and you have to promise that you're never going to like Fork away from them like you you you're not allowed to defect if you defect you will have your you know your Google license will be withdrawn and you'll be scorched from the uh from the ground so yeah this was this was what was happening you know uh Samsung were ready to ditch Android it nearly happened well it basically looked like what they were going to do is have two parallel product lines it's like right we're going to have we're going to have Galaxy devices for the west but we're going to have our own you know Linux based alternativ for the rest of the world and we're going to break free from Google anyway needless to say it didn't happen and it was all a disaster and you know we're all enslaved um this is actually where I started getting involved on ethereum as well was uh I was uh I was seeing if I could get the C++ client working on mobile Linux and uh SmartWatches and wearable and so on and my my company was double think talking about the uh 984 reference so yeah it failed you know critical mass was not achieved IOS and Android one you know mobile Linux is still around but it's basically like a hobby thing now you you can get a get yourself a pine phone or you can get a a a liberty phone from libram starting at $1,999 for a device that doesn't have any apps but it's freeish coming out of that I kind of got this conclusion that Android open source project was a useless battle right that you have got um you know this open- Source core to um to Android which you know various people have have built Android devices without the Google bits um you know Cyanogen modern lineage maybe one of the better known on so you know for a long time I thought well you know it's a losing battle it's you know why would you build on top of that Google stuff to try and get away from Google like aren't you forever going to be like playing whacka mole so for a long time I you know I didn't look at any of these things but something which again I didn't really think about until about a year or so ago is that having you know a a pure kind of free software view is not necessarily entirely aligned with privacy or security all of these are actually quite different axes and if you follow a free software Foundation kind of view that software freedom is put above privacy and security right that that Purity is put above a quality experience um but but yeah also above privacy and security and so if you if you look at the ethical giving guide you know these are the free software Foundation sort of recommendations of of you know don't don't you be using Mac or Netflix or anything at all what we recommend that you do is you run replicant on a Galaxy S3 because we we can run that without any binary blobs right you know we can we can we can do that however it was released 12 [ __ ] years ago you're running 12y old Hardware or hey you know have a free laptop that's from 2008 16y old Hardware you know God knows how old any software components going into that are you know it's the most insecure Dreadful kind of choice that you could have but you know I was thinking well it's one or the other right you can you can be you can you can have your freedom or you can have the convenience but that isn't actually true so graphine OS um I hadn't really seriously looked at until recently because of this this kind of history but what you have with graphine is it is a hardened uh privacy and security oriented um Android open source uh project and what that gives you the other here's another thing it's only available for Pixel devices so okay so you're running on Hardware made by Google you're running an operating system made by Google but this is still privacy and freedom like what the hell but the reality is I think this is the best there is and it's actually really good and and the reason why is that if you if you look at those you know 12 16y old Hardware versions you you've got something which is just chronically insecure you know if you think about running your own machine and going yeah like all those security updates I'm going to ignore that popup for 16 years like come on so you know the reality is that that all of the work going into Android both from Google but from many many other companies right is is delivering huge security and privacy uh you know benefits same with Upstream lenux kernel you so really you can't compete with this like you know there's billions of dollars worth of of effort going into that a and the fact is that um these large companies you know they're not everyone working in them is not evil all of the projects coming out of them are not evil um you you basically all open source Tech in the world major projects is getting funded by major companies because that's where the money is right but what you actually have happening um in that Android stack is there's tons of privacy and security work happening right which has got nothing to do whatsoever with uh with Google's own business model which is kind of layered higher up so what what you get with that is is really a very very high quality experience and you you can use Google Play services in a sandbox saf way where you need but for an awful lot of the time you you don't really need that so what you've got here is um you you can have multiple like user profiles there's about two or three different um ways of of kind of segmenting things around but this is what I've got so that's my my main profile on the left here but then you know you can switch over into a different profile where I've got googly things happening that I haven't been able to get away from so yeah this is my general stack I've got right now so proton I mean proton M's been around for a long time but they've actually got a whole bunch of other things now calendar Drive they've they've got um uh they've got like a password manager they' got a VPN they've got a whole load of things and it's and it's really getting decently close to being a straight alternative for for the equivalent kind of services that you have on the Google side um you know you can import all of your your Gmail in so you got your history um you you've got kind of like an auto upload of photos much the same um on the messaging front you know these are sort of familiar things various VPN options um so keypass and AIS are uh password manager and a 2fa sync thing an obtainium I think a a a really very interesting I I'll get to those in a little while um so yeah I mean that's proton ma Proton Drive and photos went to the temp one of the temples the other day it quite nice calendar there um I've been through various different VPN options on the left there that's ivpn in the middle is is mulad both mulad and ivpn are kind of pretty similar um you can set up that VPN without any kind of email identification or anything you know you just get like an an account number and you can pay for it in uh lightning or Bitcoin not sure if Monero but you know basically hey set up a VPN there you go without any tie back to you I've been playing around a little bit with Nim VPN recently that's kind of new um so what you have on Nim VPN are there's two different options you can you can run their fullon mixnet which is basically like a tour alternative which is perhaps stronger than Tor in in certain ways or you can just have a straight wi guard um I use orbit as well so orbit is uh is basically like a tour I don't know what you'd call it tour provision service thing uh which again you can you can run on any Android device as well but yeah what you have here is you can choose particular applications to to route through tour so you can I I mean uh with with the Nim setup there on the Nim VPN if you if you run Nim with the mixnet that's that's doing your whole device but orbit here is is just rooting particular devices through so different kind of model um so key pass here fairly standard kind of password manager but the interesting thing with key pass is it's kind of going back to my dad's model because what you have with keypass is you have a file called key keyboard database whatever it is that that key dbx so that's literally just a file it's a binary file on the file system on your phone so you know when if you're making changes that file is going to change but there's no cloud service here right there's no provider if you're not uploading this anywhere it's just like a file um that you have on your phone um agis similar thing so this is this is a a 2fa again you know there's no Central server no nothing you've just got files on your phone but then it's like okay so you've just got files on your phone like well how how does that work then like if you lose your device you like lose it forever or there's no security how that how that how's that happening and the answer here is is sync thing so what sync thing does is it is a a an application for doing synchronization between your devices so I have sync thing running on the phone but it's also running on my laptop and it's also running on my office computer and it's also running on a a second device I have so what you have is just when these devices happen to be on at the same time they are talking to each other hey you got any updates anything going on and it's doing uh uh an AR sync between all of these devices so in your file system here I don't know if any of you guys were at amir's talk just recently where he was talking about people gen Z people not understanding about file systems anyway on Android there is an application called files and you can look at your file system and you know you you DCI DCI is is kind of like you know it's like a camera photos thing but you've you've also got a bunch of these others so what you have is on the sync thing i' I've got a folder called sync thing with subfolders for particular devices and then if you look in the AIS or keypass you you've just got files there so AIS is doing a daily kind of backup and keypass is not so so what you have is is both for these these two applications but also just for General like photos I'm taking on my device or whatever um that they're just getting background sunk but not to the cloud to my other computers so I'm kind of doing what my dad did and does of just having files and having a backup routine right there is no there's no service provider there's no intermediary it's just me it's straight peer-to-peer so yeah all all you do is you you sort of set up folders that you want to be synced and for a given folder you can say well hey where do you want this thing to to go across to so you don't have to send you know everything everywhere but then you know just for these given folders you know you can see hey are these up to up to date for this device you know like what's going on how many files right you know so there's whatever four and a half four and a half gig of stuff going on and you know at the moment all right the my phone is connected to my computer 3 and those are good these others are you know offline or what have you but the end result is that you have something which feels basically the same as having a cloud service but there's no Cloud app store is kind of an interesting one because again the App Store was this thing that popped in and changed the idiom right is all of a sudden you've got this intermediary sitting there saying well hey what apps can you have and also thanks I'll have some money in the middle of of using them so there's this great thing called obani which is an alternative to an app store and what you have is the applications that I have here these are just getting pulled straight from the releases from these projects cuz all of these projects are open source projects that are nearly all on GitHub and what you're doing is you're just pointing to the release folder from GitHub and so here for example it goes whoop the obum oh it's there's a new one there's a new one got the icon up there because I've got 1.18 installed and 1.13 is has come out so you know here here we go click the update Boop there's your APK pick it and and off you go so what you can have with ob tanium is that same kind of experience of oh new releases are coming in is there an update but none of this [ __ ] is going through an intermediary it's just you to the app devs um I'm also using dark IRC um so dark IRC is part of the dark F project um so dark F if you not heard of it is uh a layer one uh Anonymous smart contract platform so Amir would call them uh you know Anonymous ethereum but uh something that's happening there as well as the straight blockchain is they're actually building tooling for everything so there is a peer-to-peer layer which all the tools are running over so uh the IRC there is using um the IRC protocol but over well this application on mobile is actually it's running over tour so the application is an IRC client an embedded dark fine node that running over tour and rendered on the device so with dark IRC you have a completely unlinkable anonymous uh messaging um platform which is pretty much like anything unlike anything else um I've been using status as well if you know status I am which has been on the Brew for as many years as I have like those uh where where I was doing the uh the the mobile Linux um uh CPP ethereum Jared was doing um ethereum J Android at the time it was called Sing Sy y n g uh become status with so the vision really of of status is to be uh an everything app um kind of like we chat but decentralized so uh so status has got a wallet it's got um you know coms and it's and it's really working now it's taking a long time but it's working so yeah I mean talking a little bit about escaping Apple so as I've gone through this it's like right my Mac is going away my iPhone is going away well what does that mean for Apple accounts and the thing I found parental controls you have to have an Apple device to do parental controls amazingly they could obviously do that by a website if they wanted to but they don't so that sucks however I do have a wife who has an iPhone so that can happen Apple TV I haven't got away from it yet I don't know if I want to or not you know it's just entertainment right I don't know there's a lot of surveillance happening on me by having that um but yeah everything else is gone and I do miss my iPhone camera cuz it's a [ __ ] [ __ ] superb camera it really is and pixel not really doing it but there you go Google but you are still using a Google pixel and Android open source project yes but that's okay it's not the surveillance parts of it there is there is a clear split and you know you can't get too puritanical cuz those companies that's that's where the development's happening I have not deleted my Google accounts yet yet they're just sitting there fallow um cuz honestly deleting them it's not deleting them we all know it's not deleting them right if I delete them it just means I don't have access to the data right so anyway fellow I think is is is fine and good my remaining filthy addictions yes I quit Facebook three separ times and I have returned because old people use Facebook non-techy people use Facebook my old friends in the UK who I haven't seen for many years use Facebook if I don't have Facebook I lose contact with people so and I mean I think that's a big problem with all sort of social media right you know um if you look at at um if you look at Blue Sky and Nostra and many of these other new things there's nobody there right yeah you hav't got the network effect so that's that's kind of hard I don't know what the answer is to that Beyond you know I don't do a lot on Facebook it's posting some photos really like that's about it I am definitely addicted to to Twitter that's that's bad that's bad what can I say um yeah Apple TV has mentioned telegram a lot of people are using telegram for a lot of things like you know I don't think it's hard to like not use telegram even though it's obviously very compromised and bad now I would urge everyone to use signal like it's not bad now it's it's improved and yeah YouTube YouTube's a really tricky one um if you don't use YouTube you miss out on so much stuff right it it's just become very ubiquitous I guess it's like I mean another one I could put here is GitHub you know the world is very very addicted to GitHub you know it's a horrific point of failure for most open source projects um but yeah so yeah you know conclusions really I didn't really talk about lenux but um you know parallel Journey I've had here for for for going from to Linux for my for my laptop and desktop that was a lot easier actually the the uh the desktop side um you know pretty pretty comparable so yeah you know minimizing Apple and Google use is possible but it was a lot of work to transition right mainly because finding all these different types of apps right just like working out well what am I going to use instead you know how do I transition my things across and just time and so on and and yeah you know local file copies and backup stuff is actually it's quite simple it's quite quite simple to do and we just sort of Forgotten so yeah I mean this stuff is a lot of fun but it's it's not so easy and sometimes you know I worry am I Ling am I just Ling are we all Ling doing this stuff does it really make a difference maybe I think you've got to try right you've got to try if you don't try you've not tried anyway I don't know how we are for time do we need to finish I yeah we have one question in front there was one here that's why we'll take and then we we'll jump on to the next thanks for the talk I uh and thanks to this conference this conference is the reason I tried graphos because that little the Flyers of what people use I was like oh graphi someone said they use that and so I put graphi like I went through the stuff you went through but you didn't talk about a couple things that bit me in changai a the keyboard which keyboard are you using on your phone curious okay uh because the Google keyboard is very very good and the all the open source versions are not in terms of little details and then what do you do for maps oh yeah Maps is a [ __ ] right story so Google Maps is [ __ ] great it really is so good right and you don't realize until you haven't got it and it's obviously that good cuz they're spying on everyone all the time right they've got so much information and metadata and everything and um so so yeah what sometimes I'm using Google Maps in the browser right not the app but I'll I'll do a bit of that I have used uh open street map as well it's good but it's [ __ ] for looking up names right you know like if you know if You' got a street address works great oh yeah yeah good luck with that um also what one thing I am doing is a lot of the time when I need Maps I'm actually in my car so I've actually been using the really [ __ ] maps in the car built-in stuff which most people would never do anymore right you you you'd be using carplay or Android and you're going to be using your your phone Maps so so yeah ship Maps there trying to use open street maps yeah the real question I try to do it without Google Play services sandbox I wanted to test that out and webo N pass Keys is what Google calls their implementation of webn does not work uh with the browsers I've tried you have to have play servers has installed even with that the experience with like yub key NFC and pass keys with graphing OS has been spotty at best so did you have a problem with pass Keys did you use pass keys with your browser whichever browser you use on your graphing OS and how was that experience we have one more question after that here um generally no like as you say that I I did something to try and use a UB ke on it and it kind of didn't work but I I wasn't really using like keys or UB key much on my mobile before anyway so I'm just really doing that on on desktop and it's and it's all right but yeah like I I I've really very much minimized what I'm doing within that Google play like sandboxy area which is essentially like uber parking apps not I'm not tapping to pay either so yeah I'm I'm just doing Less on my phone phone generally but yeah there are there's there's some bits that just don't work Bob that Less on your phone doesn't uh Not a Bad Thing per se we have one more question here thanks uh I'm part of the team that did the presentation before you and we're focused on Real Time collaboration and endtoend encryption and the exercise we do is okay the leap to a healthier internet and I love the presentation and the practicality of it and if we pick 10 people outside this event and we try to to have a journey and a road map for them like that how long would it take and how many you think will arrive at the end where you are because at the end of the day this is what matters most in my opinion which is you take 10 people out there and they should aride that with the experience and the Privacy uh concerns and the the self sovereignty part and all these things have you thought about this next part as well thanks I mean I think if you've if you've got a Target end stack if it's like saying okay what I'm doing is probably good enough right if you were to go with that assumption I don't know that it's a great deal of work but I think most people have just got such a like [ __ ] low level right they they're just like reusing passwords that they're just they've got no [ __ ] clue what they're doing to be honest um and if you're in that place then any of these like impedances I think they just like going to be a killer they're just going to be like I can't even do this so so that's hard but but I mean I don't I don't think this stuff is necessarily like way worse but you have to be willing to like go through a bit of proactive effort and I think most people just they they've got no [ __ ] clue so there's no no hope cheers everyone