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Thank you very much for your commitment! ====================================================================== Hi, so my name is Ben Dalton and I what I want to talk about is a project that I've already built, which was really trying to allow a room of strangers to share their free mobile minutes with someone. So through the power of a phone box. But in putting together this talk, what I found is that I was looking at what the phone box means to us culturally. And I want to make a case for trying to keep the phone box going as something that we can rely on. So this talk ended up being about what a phone box is. And it's sort of this space, a quieter space with semi privacy. It encompasses something of of anonymity in terms of communication. You can dial a number without having to verify your identity. And then also in the process of creating a new phone box that's sustained by a room full of strangers by a community. I was interested in this idea of the phone box in a public space and what the effect of placing something into a public space and having that public sustain the common good. What that does to the to the phone box. I'm a researcher at the Royal College of Art and also principal lecturer at Leeds University in the U.K. And my main research at the moment is Pseudonymity. And I'm interested in designing for Pseudonymity and the phone books featured only very briefly in the kind of history of Superman as a place to change from one pseudonym to another. But I think the fact that it very quickly stuck in people's heads as the place that Superman transitions privately from one pseudonym to another isn't a mistake. I think that's actually kind of a key feature of what phone boxes mean to us as a culture. And there's another thing that I've been struggling with a little bit, and it's the tension when talking about phone boxes between wanting to own them as a subculture. So I think within this context, some culturally we have a kind of great affinity to the phone box. It sort of represents something special to hacker culture. But if you want to try and build kind of rich, robust, usable, sustainable pseudonym tools or tools for anonymity in terms of communication, if you're constantly invoking this subcultural narrative around phone boxes as being for hackers, then you're kind of pushing aside a larger community of users. And so the other argument I want to make in this talk is about designing for the mundane, sort of presenting things in a language of everyday use rather than this kind of more exciting pirate kind of hacker culture. And I'm sort of illustrating my talk for a large part with clips of phone boxes featuring in in popular media. And that, again, I think shows our affinity with this kind of representation of communication in and anonymous in a private form, but in a public space, your own view when you're using a phone box, but you're also kind of hidden away. So a little bit of background to the project. I was invited by Drew Hemmat and the feature Everything team to submit an idea to their City Fictions exhibition. They run an annual event, The Future Everything Festival in Manchester, in the UK and The City Fictions was about a speculative but also functioning future city. And I'd previously worked with Feature Everything in the year before to create a project called Chata, which was a public, a physical public space, a cafe with privacy, violating properties, a lot like Facebook and Twitter in terms of their privacy policy and branding. We used guinea pigs to draw people into sharing more than they normally would publicly and online. So the space in Manchester for the city fiction was an empty building and I proposed to create the telecom system for this city of the future. And what I wanted to do was to try and engage people to create a resource between themselves. So by pooling the resources, these minutes that you get free with your phone plan into a common resource, we can offer a free phone service to anyone who needs to make a call. That was the idea, the proposal to feature everything. And here is a photo that sort of encapsulates the entire working system, the experience of using that system and condensed into one image. So this guy is using the handset of the free phone box to make a call. He's making a call to just a random stranger somewhere. Any low pay phone numbers or a landline or a mobile phone in the UK? In this case, it's someone in the same room. But that phone number could be anyone. And he's doing it by borrowing minutes from this guy's mobile phone. So this guy has chosen to allow the system to borrow call time from him. How does that work? What I did was to ask people when they came and sat in the cafe if they wanted to, to connect their mobile phones to the system over Bluetooth using the handsfree profile. So on your phone, the system just looks like a headset or an in car stereo system and you're just able to select it and pair with it. And then the system chooses one of the phones in the room to make the call. As you can see here, the phone box is virtual. It's created with tape very quickly. And the whole project for me has a certain kind of feeling to it of the fat labs around buttholes, speed projects in that each kind of component was sort of attempted in quite a small amount of time. The phone box was certainly assembled in less than eight hours. But as a project, overall, it doesn't deserve this speed project approved stamp because things took longer than that. So how did it work? As I said before, I was relying on this handsfree profile, which is part of the Bluetooth specification. This beautiful diagram is in the official documentation and shows that your phone using handsfree can connect to a headset, but also to a car. And the difference between the handsfree profile of the bottom and Blackfire and the one above it, the headset profile is handsfree allows you to. I'll numbers as well, which is what you want to do. We want our phone booth to be able to connect to a phone and dial the number and have it passed through the audio in both direct ions. There's another profile, the same access, and that allows a much more control, access to phone books, control over the phone, and that's used in cars as well. But I steered clear of that one. It was slightly more complex. And I also worried about the security implications of kind of people handing over more control of their SIM to this computer in a public space. How did I build the system? Well, I used a Debian installed on a sort of generic PC. I used the stable wizzy that was available at the time, and that dictated you sing blues, which is the Bluetooth stack, and that dictated using Debussy's as a communication channel. Between that and any other software that I was trying to control the handsfree profile with. I found blues to be horribly documented. They delete their documentation when they move forward. And since they moved on from this version in there to their latest one, it was very difficult to actually discover how to change settings reliably. All of the things that people had written online before just weren't up to date enough. And so it's difficult to actually have the system respond in the way that it was documented online. Luckily, someone some Ravich had created a few years ago, this implementation of the handsfree profile server for Linux could no hands. When you read about this online, the project at the time is quite well documented. It has a back end and then a front end and a number of test programs to to try it out. But over time, it's kind of fallen out of use and maintenance. And there's a lot of frustration in sort of CA modding forums, trying to get this program to work again. There's been an attempt to fork it onto GitHub by a number of people started by Thomas Zimmerman. And that's the version that I started to play with. And even that I was finding, I could get the program to run, but it was unable to actually make the connection reliably. I was able to make simpler Bluetooth connections like streaming audio in one direction. Bu t actually creating this handsfree profile seemed a bit more complicated, thanks to additional notes from John Tapsell. I was able to actually find some settings and and by going through several Bluetooth dongles, I was able to find one that did actually work reliably with a number of phones over Bluetooth. The hardware, like I said, was a generic PC. I used a simple USB phone as the audio input and output and also the keypad. As you can see, again, everything's kind of stuck together with tape. And that's a running theme throughout the project. For the software, so the PC has the no hands software running, and that's controlling access to phones over device, that's where the commands are being passed backwards and forwards to blues. And so I wrote three Python scripts that also sit on on DBAs and allow no hands to do most of the heavy lifting and then just throw commands in occasionally to do things like pairing with phones as they appear in the vicinity of the Bluetooth dongle and also to find the key presses and work out what calls to make. And the resource of all the phone numbers is built from the phones in the neighboring area in the Cafe of Feature Everything. I also found just to mention briefly, this app Bluetooth Eskow tests to be quite useful in actually trying to fine tune the settings to get the audio to reliably play in both directions on the on the phone. I'm not going to show you much in the way of the script because it's just some sort of, again, held together with tape pieces of code to kind of pass certain instructions over Debussy's to blues and to no hands. Just two things to mention here. The big list of the beginnings of mobile phone numbers in the UK. It turns out that most free numbers or low cost numbers on people's phone call plans are easy to select. By the first two digits, only one or two 03 and 07. But there is a subset of numbers that look like no more mobile phone numbers, but are on various islands that are affiliated with the UK Gu ernsey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man and some call forwarding services that are premium rate but just look like normal numbers. And so what I'm doing there is just building a white less than a blacklist of numbers to filter any calls that are dialed. So I'm not passing expensive calls on to the donors who have offered up their free minutes. I basically only want free to mobile users calls to go through. The other thing I'm doing there at the top is connecting to the USB handset. It turns out that wasn't supported a standard on the version of Linux that I was using. And so I'm just using the human interface device rule access to pull out the key presses and translate them into the numbers that are being dialed and the call button that's being pressed. So this is just storing in the dialed numbers and then filtering them and passing them on to the the whichever mobile phone has been selected to make the call. So what we have here then is a functioning phone box that allows strangers to walk into a space dial, a phone number, which in itself is a little bit strange. If you grew up with phone boxes, you probably that feels quite normal. But now sort of a new generation of people aren't used to accessing people through numbers, but rather through address books and faces and IDs. But what's interesting to me is that the system is sustained by a social group in the same space. So Bluetooth has a like a range, which is roughly room size, which means that if this phone is to stay free and usable, there has to be a community and active community of people willing to donate minutes to it. Now, I don't think the donation seems like much of a problem. Most people have more minutes that they can use. It seems part of the mobile phone contract to sort of law under these minutes and you never really use them up. So most people seem quite happy with that. But, you know, maybe there's some other implications around being a donor or being a phone call phone box user. And I want to inv estigate those a little bit more. So one issue that I thought about a bit is this kind of issue of power. So the people who might sort of choose to donate minutes and the people who might choose to use a free phone box may fall into different groups. And that might be because it's like a pay as you go contract versus a a contract that gives you free minutes. It might be because you have no phone. Homeless people might find the service particularly useful to use as callers travelers. Again, maybe their phone doesn't work in another country. So you start to see this kind of weird separation between donors and users. And I was worried a little bit about that, especially since phone boxes tend to put you on display. If you haven't seen this for a film like Sabena, all of the references are down the bottom and the slides are online. It's about a man who gets trapped in a phone box. So what are the benefits to a caller to coming in and using this this free phone service? Well, obviously, it's free, but there's another benefit as well, which is that it offers you some anonymity. If you place a call through your home phone or through your mobile phone, you kind of have your identity tied to placing that call. If you go and use a payphone, you have a slight anonymity in the communication. The record is still made of where that call is directed to. But you're kind of reasonably anonymous, although, of course, you know, phone boxes are in public spaces and can be observed. But there is some degree of anonymity there. And certainly that feature reoccurs is a theme in films as a way of delivering tip offs and hacking and everything else. And so there's an exchange there between some anonymity and public presence in this social space of a small group of people, which I think is interesting. So in a way, this free phone box is using is sort of mirroring the function of a mixed network node. So in a mixed network, the computer is taking email and forwarding it on and stripping the identity. And in our system, the free phone box is allowing you to take the things you're saying and pass them through somebody else's phone and sort of strip the idea away. So in a way, it functions sort of like that. And so then we start to think, well, what's the benefit for the donor if they're starting to serve this purpose, the purpose of providing some anonymity, they're not worried about the implications of of offering an anonymizing service to strangers. Is that kind of something that they might be worried about? Well, what are the benefits to donors? One of the benefits, I think, for me is that if you fail your phone record with the phone calls of strangers, what you start to do is to decouple the phone record from the your identity. So the mobile phone, I think gradually over time has become a symbol and authentication tool for identifying people. And if you can start to insert other people's phone calls into your record, then what you're doing is start to decouple that relationship between you and your phone and your phone record. And I think there's an interesting property there that we should look at a little bit further. This is a brief period, a fad called phone box stuffing in the 1950s. It lasted a year, and so to me, this is reminiscent of the idea of chaffe so chaffe, it was called window in the UK during the war, and people in Germany, both countries invented at the same time and didn't use it for several years for the fear that the other one might copy them. And the idea is that you're flying your plane, you drop a big cloud of small pieces of metal, little strips of metal, and as they sort of flicker through the air, they reflect radar. And you have this effect in the in the radar system where you're unable to see the plane because there's all this reflection, this kind of small pieces of of a distracting material. And what we're talking about when we're inserting stranger's phone calls into our own personal identity record is we're inserting data chaff into our record and therefore kind of obfuscating the sort of form of our identity a little bit. And so this, I think, is an interesting idea in terms of controlling how your identity is is monitored by other people or stored by other people. So I want to talk about Chaffe a little bit more. One approach to Chaffe that I've seen come up a couple of times. This is the first time that I saw it kind of presented effectively. This is a super villain either by any arrest in 2002. And what this did was to create fake email characters who would have email conversations late at night using keywords, you know, about bombs and nuclear material and biological agents and assassinations of presidents and subways and all those things. And because those keyword terms were passing backwards and forwards through this email system, they were sort of inserting this this chaff into the system to kind of slow down the automatic monitoring and kind of complicate the monitoring technology. But one thought I had about algorithmic chat chaff is that if you're creating it through some sort of program pattern, it may be that it's just as easy to remove it again. So if you're kind of creating this thing just through sort of simple patterns, then maybe it's easy to filter it back out again. So the alternative perhaps is to create social data chaff. That's chaff that's kind of created by human activity and therefore much harder to predict. And my favorite example of that is the A.K. Extreme Computing Festival in 2002 where they invited people to swap loyalty cards. There was a big box in the conference and everyone who arrived put their shopping loyalty cards into the box. And then as they left, at the end of the day, they took another one. And on their press release, they said, imagine the data processors bafflement when a healthy eating family of four suddenly turns into a single 33 year old male consumes nothing but satsumas and ready meals. So, again, you know, there's this idea o f by inserting a stranger's life into your own, you're able to complicate the the records that people are keeping. But, you know, by doing it in a social way, I think you kind of introduce this extra level of complexity. And I think that's what the free payphone is doing in a way, is it's offering social data so these strangers will make arbitrary calls to places that you weren't expecting. And that starts to insert this kind of level of deniability. Now, the deniability isn't perfect. So you are definitely in the room alongside this thing that offers this certain level of chaff. So people could easily point to the other phone calls that you made at the same time and say, well, those are probably you and these were probably strangers. But if you repeated this phone box in a number of locations and you put it places that you frequented often cafes, libraries, workplaces across from your home, you know, in the park, you can start to see that you could build up a regular kind of influx of of confusing data into your phone records. And that might have interesting consequences for the way that identity is measured. Critics of this, of wanting to do this, I've presented these two things, kind of some anonymity and some deniability is a relatively good things. But I think a lot of people would say if you have nothing to hide, why would you seek these things out? The sort of normal narrative and what I'd like to do next is to just sort of make a case for having deniability and having anonymity as being very normal historically. So it's not something that we're seeking out that's new, but something that's always been there that is just being whittled away at the moment. That sort of slow death of the phone box as it's replaced by mobile phones, I think demonstrates that we're moving away from systems of like everyday anonymity and communication. Another great example, like the phone box is the post box. So the post box is just a hole somewhere out in the world. And there's l ots of them. And you can choose anyone and you just walk past it and casually slip something in. And there's almost no record of you doing that. So it creates a very similar kind of anonymity to the free payphone. When you post a letter, the address of the receiver is known in the system, but the identity and the address of the sender is a little bit more ambiguous. You could watch every post-box. You could look for writing style and those things that came later. But when postboxes started, they were definitely a system of anonymous communication. This one directional, anonymous communication. What effect did that have? Well, in the eighteen hundreds, there was a boom in pseudonymous. It was used a lot by authors, writing books and a number of different, really inventive ways. So the Bronte sisters used the postal system to hack the male dominated publishing world and publish incredibly inventive and creative texts through that system. And when they finally went to visit their publishers after they'd become a success and revealed the kind of big reveal that they were these sort of timid looking women authors, there was, of course, that kind of surprise in the reveal. And they were then able to change the system and build that change more permanently into into publishing. Similarly, in America, newspaper writers, this is Charles Brown who created this character, Artemus Ward, and he wrote newspaper articles under the character and really sparked the whole kind of era in the eighteen hundreds of pseudonymous newspaper writing that was used a lot for entertainment. Mark Twain was another pseudonym inspired by Artemus Ward. But the pseudonymity, as well as being a form of entertainment, also allowed political critique, critique, whistle blowing, all of the things that we associate with functioning anonymity and pseudonymity today. Just to give you another couple of quick examples, this is more actually pseudonym for Edward Decker, who is Dutch author, who used a pseudon ym and used these kind of systems of anonymous communications through postage and passing off to friends. He created incredibly, incredibly cutting critique of Dutch colonialism that really shifted the conversation forward dramatically at the time, again, in the kind of late. Eighteen hundreds. But this. Tool of the anonymous communication system in the post-box also allowed for great creativity. So this is Nicolas Bourbaki. This is a group of mathematicians who came together, created a single identity and wrote quite a creative approach to set theory and mathematics, using, again, the anonymous communication afforded to them sort of a guarantee of anonymity to over a number of years, publish a series of mathematical texts that changed perspectives on mathematics at the time quite dramatically by kind of pooling their efforts and publishing under a single name. So the case I'm making in those couple of slides is that pseudonymity, an anonymous communication of sorts, is very common. And I think perhaps given its multitude of uses, I probably don't need to persuade you much in this room. But elsewhere, we may need to keep having that conversation about why that is a useful thing to keep sustaining, and I think that it is difficult to sustain it. This is the response to the now deleted tweet, which revealed the pseudonym that J.K. Rowling was using at the time to write crime fiction. And so the kind of effects of storage and processing and networking are changing the ways that pseudonyms can work. And so I think it's important for us to keep investigating as the talks in the last two days have started to pull apart, how we can maintain levels of anonymity in terms of communication, in social context to keep the possibilities of of doing this open. Why do we need that? Well, the case doesn't really need to be made, but clearly, anonymity and pseudonymity player, a continuous role in the kind of powerful work of whistleblowing, particularly whistleblowing, is primary ev idence like the evidence of of torture in Abu Ghraib. And the role of these tools in the kind of work of superheroes is is important for us to be celebrating and thinking about what we do next in terms of the technical tools, but also the culture that surrounds the tool, the way that we present it to people. And that's what I want to talk about next. So this is the advice published a couple of years ago in Wired of how to leaked to the press. And the piece that I want to point to in the middle is when you go to a coffee shop that has open Wi-Fi and then you set up an email account and do your leaking now coffee shops with open Wi-Fi, the other things that turn up quite often are libraries with public access, free Wi-Fi, civic Wi-Fi, campus Wi-Fi. Sometimes those things get discussed as the ways that you can do what you used to do with a phone box, go and tip off a journalist or the police about something you want to tell them about without necessarily identifying yourself. The narrative is now around these places that have free Wi-Fi. But over time, what I'm seeing is a shift in the control of identity around connecting to the web in the UK, the library log in, the campus log in, and more and more obligation on businesses and private owners of of Wi-Fi are that you need to check identity before you allow someone to connect. And so the conversation about the public benefit of free Wi-Fi versus this kind of shifting of responsibility and closing down of access to anonymous connectivity seems to be kind of shifting in favor of of no anonymity, which is problematic are public spaces are sort of being stripped of the kind of messiness that allows all of those things we've just talked about in terms of creativity and critique to happen by kind of locking down identity to every kind of access point to this kind of immense, interesting space that we call the Internet and the Web. And so what I would say is that this demonization of of anonymity when it works is is always go ing to happen. So the problem is that any functioning pseudonymity tool can always be used as a threat against powerful corporations and governments that know they're doing wrong, those that are. And so there will always be a conscious and subconscious attempt to demonize those technologies, whatever they are originally designed for. And so there's this constant kind of issue about the way that you describe and present the pseudonymous and anonymous tools that you're making for communication in terms of trying to present them in ways that won't be demonized. And so, really, for me, that comes this idea of how do you design for pseudonymity sort of alongside the idea of creating technical tools through cryptography that allow for anonymous communication. How do you design the sort of culture around it, the cafe of people who are sharing their phone minutes to allow anonymity to happen? How do you make that space acceptable to people so it can be sustained and be ongoing? And I don't think the superhero analogy that I've pitched at the beginning of this talk and through it is really the one to draw on, because that's just the other extreme to the terrorists and the pedophiles. It's just kind of we sort of end up having this debate at either end of the spectrum. And really, we should be in the middle somewhere around all of those issues from the past, around sort of everyday use the just kind of general dependance on these tools as something that's a useful part of our society. And that, as someone mentioned, I think it was Nadia Henninger yesterday, she said we need to normalize burner phones. And, you know, even the term burner phones is sort of appealing to the subcultures of the conversations we have here, rather than kind of thinking about how it would fit into everyday use. But the idea of normalizing, I think, is an interesting one. One way to do that is to be playful. But then place play can also be sort of pushed to the sidelines. And so the kind of hacker nar rative can be quite playful. The art narrative that I used to present this idea originally also sort of struggles a little bit from that. You know, people can sign a sideline. It is just art. And really the question is how do we put it into the everyday? So first of all, what do we love about phone boxes? The thing that I think phone boxes represent to us is, is it is a space to escape momentarily. You're still part of the public space. It's not a dark box, kind of sealed away entirely. You can see what's going on around you, but you also have some privacy for a moment. There often feature in films as a connection to a loved one, something you use when you've just arrived somewhere new, a connection back to the known there, a sort of universally familiar. And a lot of countries have sustained that by having policies that enforce phone boxes being in all parts of the country. So it's sort of a common good almost by design. And they're also, you know, actually reasonably private. So, you know, there is some sound leakage and technology in terms of spying might change our relationship to those physical spaces. But historically, they were a relatively private space, a door you can close, a space that you make your own. I want to represent both sides to what we dislike about phone boxes. Well, I think one issue is that they are often broken and so they're so undependable resources. Another one is that they might contain sex adverts. If you go to London, the phone box is in the center of town near the business district to sort of smid with the glue of many years of adverts for phone sex. And they're also sometimes they smell of urine, which, you know, to begin with seems like a terrible feature, but perhaps sort of suggests that people find them private enough that you can do that private thing. So, you know, maybe that's a feature in disguise. And also, historically, occasionally they've been linked to bomb threats. You know, the anonymous tip off can also be the anonymo us bomb threat, which, again, we can think in the analogy to the remailer reason that a number of matters were shut down was through this kind of connection to bomb threats. And so we have to struggle with this relationship with how technologies and systems are presented. And the direction that I think we should go is to think about this in terms of social use and public space. So one thing that I like about the idea of rather than talking about free Wi-Fi, and there've been a number of very admirable and in some ways, you know, reasonably successful projects over the years to open up Wi-Fi network. That's one that was launched this year or last year. That, again, is attempting to make home networks a free, open Wi-Fi system. And I you know, I think that's the direction we should be going. But to have that conversation with people who are just coming to Wi-Fi as a concept through the the use of their iPhone for the first time, I'm talking about free Wi-Fi. The the the fear that a stranger will hide outside your house and use it for nefarious means is always going to outweigh outweigh the altruism of of wanting to to do some sort of public good. But if we talk about phone calls rather than data, should we talk about lending? A stranger, your phone, that is still a reasonably socially acceptable thing to do if someone comes up to you and asks, you know, I'm stuck and I need to contact home, lending them your phone seems reasonable. It's still a thing that socially we accept as a group. And so we can play with the fact that although phone calls are now just data like any other kind of data, the fact that we socially hold those in higher regard than we do the other kinds of data in terms of lending and giving and altruism, I think allows us to have a different kind of conversation. But I think something like this free phone by phone box project does is allow us to to go in that direction and. The other thing that I think the phone example does is it raises in our minds this idea of digital possessions. So advertising and contract packages by mobile phones over the last few years have focused heavily on giving you free minutes, like free minutes and free texts being part of what you're getting for paying this monthly fee. And what's that? What that has done is emphasized the idea that this kind of abstract sort of digital. No, you know, because basically providing text, for example, is very cheap for the network, but they've kind of sort of walled it off and created a piece of property that they've then given to you. And possession's, I think, is a much better word than property. So the intellectual property debate is bound up in control systems of corporate control on everyday use. But possessions are much more personal. And we have this conversation about your possessions, your free minutes and what you want to do with them. I think we start to have a quite an interesting conversation about kind of control and use of technology now, I'm sure buried in many phone contracts, if not now, than if this free payphone idea caught on would be this clause that said you can't just give your free minutes over to a system that gives them to someone else because they're not actually yours in the minds of a phone company. They're just a kind of a law. But they still they feel very much like yours, like your possessions, and they do to a lot of people. So I think there's an interesting kind of tool there to enter this debate around control of digital technology. That kind of narrative, I think extends quite nicely. Now, the phone lending, there's definitely a higher level of altruism, but people also have fears about phone lending and the kind of standard fare, I think, which is probably quite right in this kind of context, is if you hand someone your phone, you're handing them all of your personal data. And so I think, again, this idea of a pay phone that arbitrates in that process, you're lending someone your phone without handing over the ph ysical artifact and an access to your personal information. I'm sorry, this is running a little bit slow, I think sort of detracts a little bit from from the experience. But I think we can use the the strong sort of feeling of people's perspectives on phone lending to outweigh these kind of niggling fears to a certain extent. And so the questions really that we come to is creating a free phone box that's sustained by a room full of people opens up a conversation about digital access and communication that includes these elements of anonymity and deniability with a much larger community of people. If you install the phone in the right place in a in a in a popular use park or cafe or library, the benefits of providing free phone calls and have a community sustaining a resource together, I think quite easily outweigh in people's minds the kind of niggling fears. What I'm interested in proposing this project here today is how people might counter that, how this kind of inevitable demonization might happen. I'm kind of interested in studying how that conversation will go. The direction that I've thought about already is the obvious one. Someone walks into this space, uses the free payphone to place a bomb scare, and that starts to kind of cut away at this idea that we're just creating this common good. But I think there's an interesting balance in the fact that Bluetooth has the short range, which means that it becomes a sort of social negotiation. So just like using a payphone on a street corner, although you're anonymous, you're also on view. And so there's kind of a form of anonymity that's not absolute. Often when we think about cryptography, it's it's very binary. It either works or it's totally broken. And I think by placing these tools back into a social negotiation, something interesting happens that I'd be interested to try and see whether we could map that to other sort of environments and communication systems. The kind of two other ideas that sort of sprung t o mind for me from this idea of altruism is taking that idea of charitable giving further. So in terms of kind of deconstructing the way that digital identity seems to be more and more sort of stuck into these kind of network systems and archives, one of them is to ask the question, what does anonymous charitable giving look like? So if if you want to, as people do now and have for hundreds of years, donate to a cause without saying who you are, you have to strip away your identity from that financial transaction. And all of the records that have been put in place to track money start to kind of come up against this sort of tradition of charitable giving. And I think it's a good case where you could take the upper hand by asking how do we still give anonymously to charities? The other question I want to leave us with is how do you give to people who have nothing, including any form of authentication? So at the moment, giving things to people who live on the streets or have lost everything is quite easy because you can just give them physical things. You could give them money. That's an anonymous currency that they can spend somewhere else. But if we bind money and resources and access to welfare and benefits into identity systems, how do we maintain giving to people who've lost access to those? We can talk about biometric fingerprinting, but I think that conversation, again, provides the upper hand. And for me, this talk has been about learning about what kind of social context could you create in order to talk about the things that we're talking about every day and these kind of contacts and these kind of conferences about anonymity and about pseudonymity working well, but placing them into a social context. Thank you very much. So thank you very much and I have to say something. The Irish Sea and the Internet and Twitter want to say a big thank you to you and to tell you this talk was awesome. So one thing. The thing that was often noticed, your T-shirt is awesome , thanks, I see. So for our Q&A, we have a lot of questions from the Internet and maybe we have some questions from here. So line up behind the microphones where we stop off some Internet questions. Hello again from the IOC. Besides being an awesome talk, there are many, many questions on all levels, like practical questions on how it does work, but also on law and like politics behind it. So I start with the more technical ones and maybe just some summing them up so you can just explain the technology behind it a little bit together. Like they ask whether it's possible to always not send the caller ID from the person who bought the phone or the phone minutes. Whether it's possible to also share international calls of the contracts, allow it, whether there's a limit for the minutes somebody wants to share and whether they have to activate it every time. Yeah, that's. Yeah. Okay. So the perring, what I did with the Python scripts was to when I recognized a new phone entering the Bluetooth range, was to immediately identify it as trusted and to give it the same pin for everyone. And so the effect for people entering the room, entering the cafe was very much like pairing with a cheap headset. It just had a default pin and you just choose it from the menu and pair it and then that pairing lasts. So Bluetooth has a sustained identity and I maintained a list. I wondered about whether the system should maintain a list of donor phone numbers over time or whether it should have some sort of purging system. I think I would urge on the side of purging, given that one of its sort of properties is this kind of property of anonymity. But there's some balance. There may be kind of over a some period you would choose to delete. International calls are not in the UK. Seen many free minute plans that include international calling. But I think with the shift in EU regulation around cheaper international calls within the EU, maybe there'll be some motivation for that to change. I've al so seen a lot of plans recently that have shifted from some free minutes to unlimited minutes. And I think there's an interesting dynamic there for a few years before we entirely shift over to what's happened and the other kind of calling systems to kind of play with those free minutes in interesting ways. The final point about caller ID, I thought about trying to find I think that the problem is that each mobile phone company has different protocols for how you turn on kind of anonymizing the outgoing call. And so I didn't come up with a kind of simple, easy way to do that. I thought about putting up instructions for people to do it themselves. But in the end, I just kind of put a note to say that these kind of IDs would be passing through. The other idea I had was to run a system like Asterix that would when you placed a call mentioned to the person before the call was put through, that this kind of exchange was happening. So you kind of frame it in a context. But again, I think that sort of overcomplicated it. OK, we have two people at the microphones and we have a lot of more questions from the Internet, and I think I will just start with you, Mike one, because I don't want to see you standing there much longer. I have actually two questions, but they are short of first question is what kind of information is on the telephone of the person who is giving the minutes? Three minutes. And the second question is actually tied to the first question. Have you do know what kind of legal issues a person that is giving their minutes may have if their minutes are used to journalists or somebody like that? I don't know the legal implications of of a phone being used in a number of ways. I think in the U.K., the one kind of hard and fast rule is that if your phone service and someone tells you about a bomb plot, you have to immediately report it. But because you don't have access to the call as a donor, I think there's kind of an interesting gray area that probably hasn't be en fully investigated. The first question about your control and the record of the call passing through your phone, you can, of course, just turn off the Bluetooth connection at any time you want so you can disrupt a call on most phones. When I watched it happening in the cafe, that the phone wouldn't necessarily even switch on when it was reaching the call because it's used to being sort of in this mode where it's in the car, you know, and you're using the hands free kit or something. So actually the phones tended to stay quite kind of mute screen off, no vibration or anything when the call was in progress. I suppose, you know, on some phones, you might be able to turn on speaker phone and it would kind of mirror the call because you're constrained by the range of Bluetooth. You know, you'd be in the same room as the person making the call in the phone box. So it could be awkward. So there's some kind of sort of constraint in that in that direction. OK, so for another question from the Internet, yes, it's also related to that, it's in terms of our lawful intercept and how that impacted your phone books at phone box idea, like like do you think about that or does anybody from interception teams already contradict you or does it at all influence you? I don't know too much about lawful intercept. I guess the idea is that you pick up a phone to target and you ask permission to target that phone. It's a system that's shuffling your calls out to strangers, would do interesting things to trying to track one person's conversations. I imagined originally that perhaps rather than a phone box in a physical location, you could build this into a phone. So there would be an app that would allow your phone to be the the headset and another phone to be a downer. And you could run the same kind of system just on a on a train by turning your phone into a certain mode. And then you could see this proliferate into lots of different social spaces and conventions. But the sort of Blueto oth programing for you to get that to work is kind of beyond my grasp at present. Yeah. OK, OK, Mike, to say once again, really nice idea. I really like that aspect of mixing connections between people socially, probably of what I see as a problem from the usability part is that I need to go out and use and basically no use the number myself. And you have the numbers in the UK, for example, just if you thought about the way to make it easier, maybe use to Bluetooth devices and they can use the one, as I had said, but actually it's using the other one which goes to another phone or something like this. Yeah, I thought about it. I think it would be quite easy to do. You would just kind of need to Bluetooth dongles. So one person's using their mobile phone as the handset and another person's using their mobile phone as the donor. And there's kind of things just creating the intermediary. Although this talk was a love letter to phone boxes and I quite like the physical aspects as well as having to go stand up and stand in a space and kind of use the handset. But yeah, no, I think that idea has more longevity in it. But remember, a single phone number nowadays than years ago used to me too. And people would get their mobiles out to like copy out the phone number into the handset just to try it out. So clearly that's not going to function. But then I also like this idea that you're not having to rely on a digital trail. You know, if you went back to remembering some key numbers, you could go to the service with nothing, you know, just your memory or a piece of paper. And there's something nice about that dynamic as well. So I'm kind of torn because. Yeah, thanks. OK, the Internet again. Yes, so we have another question that goes more into the anonymity part of it and also about like, yeah, law enforcement, maybe because Jacob Appelbaum, he's a security person, like you all know him. I don't have to explain. He believes that every phone call is being voiced, fingerprinted, and at least in Spain. And probably if you look at all the other interception methods, maybe else on the rest of the world. So there's a video online of a talk that you gave last year in Berlin and Zubaz where he mentioned that this is possible, that you can just hear a voice and then just say which person it is. So interception would be even more possible. How does this. Yeah. Interfere with your project or what do you think about that? Yeah, I think so. Voice fingerprinting, of course, totally breaks the kind of promise of anonymity using voice as a form of communication if it's your own voice. I wonder about the success of voice fingerprinting. I think it will be a partial success, even in well-funded government systems, because of the ambiguities of the way that the voice works. At the moment. You can hear suffering from a cold. And I think that does things to the dynamics of of tone, maybe, maybe not in the longer term. I've been thinking about other ways of designing for Pseudonymity. And for me, the Bourbaki Group Nicolas Bourbaki, created by that group of mathematicians is an interesting group to think they were many people performing a single character. And when you mix many people into one identity, what you get is a mix of different fingerprints. And that sort of blurring of fingerprints together is not chaffe, but this kind of other sort of layering up of of multiple identities. And I wonder whether that starts to mess with fingerprints. I don't know. I have a way of doing that with voice on its own. But it's something a direction that I've been thinking in for other forms of communication, like writing. I mean, that's a big problem also for browsers and everything. So, yeah, one thought I've had is that they're just directly correlated between how much identity, you know, sort of uniqueness you can have and how anonymous you can be. So you can either say something with meaning or, you know, you can be anonymous. Maybe there's just you know, you can onl y have one or the other. You can just say arbitrary things and no one will know who you are or you can make a point, but then something will give you a way. Maybe you're just kind of tied. You can have one or the other, which would be sad. But perhaps I mean, as always, it's also depending on the threat level you face. So I still questions. So one is a weapon. We buy the T-shirt. It's a beautiful T-shirt. So this is from David Wiley remembering names. But I think that's right. He's the animator who has made a number of very beautiful animations that you should seek out online. And he has a T-shirt store called Something Like Stupid Things, or I'll put a link up on the talk page. But yeah, they're all beautiful. They're all badly drawn. This one's called mouse character, which is lovely. On another level are some things. I just posted the last question and then we can close with the room. OK, great. So it's a more technical question again or more mobile phone carrier question because I mean, it's forbidden for many people to share their Internet connection, but gathering from the phone to the computer or to other people computers, are there any similar things for minutes? And do you have any feedback from carriers or from people talking to you about that? No, I have not had feedback. I don't think anyone thought about it. So at the moment, I imagine the restrictions aren't there in most cases. Some people may in some carriers may argue that some other restriction could apply in this case. But I think because the weight of the phone lending idea is quite strong, I think perhaps if if it were to catch on, there would be this interesting kind of dynamic that you don't get with the data sharing where it's really only something that the people in these countries might, you know, sort of understand the conversation about. Can I lend my phone to a stranger is one that I know lots of people who don't care about technology would be willing to fight for. So I think there's an interesting dynamic there, though. One more question there. So, yeah, thanks to me, your product looks like a Tor to a degree. Yeah, so first thing, did you ever consider creating a mash like toward it and second thing is this, you think, well, can you explain it to me, how you protect yourself from a, well, a person that's a donor and wants to to create some statistics about your calls or whatever. So, yeah. So it's it is a mixed network like Tor. It's only one node though, and I think kind of chaining them up is cumbersome and also, you know, might as well just be done through kind of talk like why do it through physical systems when you could just kind of reach it through to maybe there's a reason to do it through physical systems. But I don't know in terms of protecting yourself from malicious donors, one property of the system is that it's selecting people at random from the social space that you're in. And so, you know, if your strategy was to make lots of calls, then you're kind of spreading your bets a little bit in terms of analysis, traffic analysis and the like, TOR and other mixed networks. If someone were to fill your cafe with at least 50 percent, you know, malicious donors, then they would be able to to traffic analyze you. But then you'd have a pretty boring cafe. So, you know, whatever. Yeah. Thank you. OK, thanks a lot. OK, we have time for one or maybe two more questions. So on Mike two are could you speak about what happens with incoming calls and hazmats messages on donor phones so that the the way that I handled it for the for the exhibition, the certifications was just to deny them when they came in? So what what that means is that people would be missing calls on their phones and then they would see the call in the log and could just ring back later. But it didn't call through the handset. So there was no way that things would come back to the the phone box. The SMS is just arrive as normal. They're not passed on to the headset. If you are us ing the same access profile, then there would be this kind of transfer of data. But with the handsfree profile, it's just the calls that get passed through. That's not ideal for people to lose incoming calls. And it's also slightly confusing for someone who gets called through the system and rings back immediately because they see this unusual number. So there's some kind of interesting dynamic there, which, again, I was thinking about trying to solve with the server that would leave a message saying, hey, you've just been rung by this person using a donor phone, you know, a stranger's phone, you might call it. They you know, they couldn't reach you. They'll try again later or something. But yeah, well, for me, it would be not I would not hand over control over incoming calls to a system that's unknown to me. So, yes, yeah, there's a lot of issues with with trust, but it turns out that there's a lot of issues with trust in Bluetooth. More generally, I think the strategy would be to to make this phone box a shared resource in terms of maintenance. So you would need to open the project. But, of course, you know, how do you guarantee the software and the hardware is just the eternal question in conferences like this? But yes, pairing with a headset seems reasonably benign in comparison to, like, simpering. And you can see on on modern phones which kind of pairing feature you're opting for. And you can therefore choose how much control you're giving. But, yeah, you know, a malicious version of this payphone could just ring premium rate numbers, you know, as fast as it can go through all of the donor phones at once or something, you know, but yeah, I think. OK, we have have do we have more Internet questions or no, we don't have any more Internet questions, but just just came to my mind, I was recently in Cairo and Egypt and there's the traditional the use of using of strangers phones all the time. Like like everybody just ask you, can I borrow your phone for a minute? I have to call somebody. So father's quite relatable. Yeah, great. I think it's a it's got a long history in lots of places, so hopefully that lends some kind of momentum to to using it as a lever back into the conversation of other things like Wi-Fi as well. Yeah. So thank you so much. Also from the Internet, again, thanks a lot.