will you do it? Good afternoon. We are getting ready to start here. I am Len Sassaman, otherwise known as Rabbi. I've spoken in the past couple of depth cons about various remailor operator and remailor technology issues and one thing that always overwhelms me is the number of just general questions and answers we get it during the Q&A session about topics that I hadn't anticipated in my talk. So this year we're going to do something a little different. We basically have a panel here of a few of the prominent remailor operators and we're going to introduce them, tell a little about our backgrounds and then take questions from the audience. You guys are going to hear this this session here. A little bit about my background. I've been a cyberpunk crypto researcher-ish person for about ten years now. I've only recently gotten into anonymous remailors that actually was a due to a depth con talk from a few years ago where one of my fellow panelists presented about her experiences with anonymous remailors which finally inspired me to stop just being a user and actually get into operating them. I had followed the discussions about remailor development for many years but never really realized how challenging and interesting a field this was. Aside from the technical aspects there are a lot of operational aspects that really complicate the job of running a remailor and we'll talk about that a little today too. With me today is Robin Wagner a longtime remailor operator and now a lawyer specializing in anonymity, that sort of privacy issues. Ryan Lackie is next to her. Ryan has the distinction of having had a an extra jurisdictional area to run a remailor was able to field certain abuse issues differently than the rest of us. He's now doing Metacolo which is a company that does multiple extra jurisdictional colos. Mike Shin the operator of the not only a remailor operator and a longtime remailor operator from the early to mid 90s I believe but also runs the remailor operators list which he'll tell you more about where the various remailor operators many of whom don't actually like each other or agree with each other gather to discuss the operational aspects of the regular network and finally at the end Peter Palperter who is assisting me with development on the mixed master the non-material software he is also one of the remailor operators fairly low-key doesn't make it known that he's running a remailor but has been for some time. So I've been running a remailor since mid 2000 in mid to late 2001 took over the the maintainer and development role for mixed master which was unmaintained for several years. So now I am actually continuing to run my remailor and working on the software development side of it which poses two entirely different set of challenges but it has been rewarding. I've dealt a lot with various abuse issues law enforcement relationship challenges user advocacy aspects and simply technological and logistical problems with various other people who have been trying to attack the remailor network in number of different ways which we can talk about if you're interested in. I'm going to hand this over now to my other panelists who will introduce themselves and then we'll find out what you guys want to hear about. Robin. Okay so I significantly prefer noise I'm supposed to kill you now using my real name. I'm very sorry. I just like it better. Yes. So I gave a talk at Defcon 8 on anonymous remailors I was absolutely terrified when I gave the talk I'm a little less terrified now I'm also now an attorney which makes this all very interesting because when I talked to Defcon 8 I could just blather on and say well I think this is the case and mumble mumble and I'm an attorney so I have to tell you well what I'm about to say may or may not constitute legal advice and here's a disclaimer and don't ask me any incriminating questions during the panel because it would be bad and there's all these things that come with being an attorney but the side effect of being an attorney is I'm an attorney and I get to work on anonymous remailor things and that's really cool. It's especially cool to me because while I run an anonymous remailor which I did since the mid 90s like Mike Shin I never really had any problems which was really sad to me as a law student because I was already I was like please someone give me a subpoena please please Mr. Fed come knock on my door I'm ready and they never came they all went to Lenn instead so I guess all I can say right now is I am hoping that Sunday we will actually have an anonymous remailor case because we we keep designing these systems saying well if it ever you know happened we think maybe the logs if we don't keep logs okay well that's great you know it's subpoena proof we just make all this stuff up but we've never really had an actual court case that's actually gone anywhere using the current technology we just kind of make it up as we go along so I will hand it over to Ryan now saying if there are any feds in the audience maybe give us a year and then well hypothetically I'd really like a lawsuit hi I'm Ryan Lackey I've run a remailor since 2000 and been a user since pennant days in a long time ago and among other things I started Haven Co ran a remailor there without the approval of anyone else in the company which was very interesting and I'll tell you more about it on Sunday and now I run another remailor I have some data centers and other places around the world and do pretty much the same thing and I haven't really had any problems running a remailor the worst thing it's happened to me has been there were some IRA people that were sending bomb threats and they sent notices to the city of London police and then the city of London police contacted me all a flutter asking me to figure out how this person sent the message and I had lots of civil complaints but like companies and lawsuits and stuff and the things that cause the most complaints are legitimate uses of the remailor like this boss is stealing money from the company and somebody reports it that's the kind of thing that gets the legal cases that I've seen or the legal threats not the like really offensive stuff like I'm going to kill and dismember your children or whatever so yeah I will turn this over now to Mike Shin I think this microphone works yeah so I'm like Shin I've been running a remailor since I guess the mid 90s we were trying to figure out when I gotta love you noise it's so hilarious to have you on the panel I have been sued a few times but they never go to trial thanks to our good friends of the ACLU and Epic who have been fine enough to represent me in the few cases where this has happened and it's always corporations it's never bomb threats it's never anyone getting killed or being threatened to be killed it's this employee said this bad thing about my company so that's pretty much been my experiences so far although I will mention at least one time I've been subpoenaed by the federal government for a bomb threat thanks to our good friend the Patriot Act so we do tend to get a few lawsuits occasionally I have actually been subpoenaed or sent a notice that I was supposed to appear in federal court but I was out of the country at the time so I sort of told them to fuck themselves and then the trial was over and I came back to the country and it's all cool yeah unlike the rest of us that live in the United States we actually had to respond to that and the answer is simply what it always is we don't have any logs and this is the way the remailor works and so far we've never ended up with a case that went to trial everyone always walks away including I have to at least say something positive about the the feds so far the federal agents that I've been approached by have all sort of responded positively to the fact that well this is the way the technology works and we don't have any evidence to help you and they have walked away they've said all right well we understand that so for what it's worth even though the Patriot Act says they can get a lot of information the technology seems to work well enough that they're willing to walk away with nothing and I will turn this over to Peter who is one of the developers on Mixmaster and he also happens to run a remail thanks Mike yeah I've been running a remailor since I think 2002 no 2000 and well it doesn't it isn't in the US it's located in Germany even though I'm Austrian I've never ever had any problems partly because I'm a coward and run in middleman mode yeah that's how it does I think Len took over maintenance of Mixmaster two years ago and I've joined him shortly later main mainly doing maintenance work because the old code was ugly it's ugly but it didn't work as well as it could be and I think we've done a good job to make it even more stable not to drop any other message yeah I've also written a binger which basically is a directory server for anonymous remailors which collects information about which remers are out there and make statistics on how reliable they are which then in turn use our clients use to make up their chains and although there has have been several implications of fingers before I think mine is the best partner because yeah I mean 60% market share is something yeah a lot of people think Peter's finger is the best and I'm one of those people yeah just milk subpoenas for a minute there I actually gotten a I've gotten a nice subpoena once too but it was given to me several days after the court of parents stated on the penis so I was able to just shrug and not go to New York most federal agents are actually really understanding of the technology and understand that no operators are not the enemy that they're running the service and they are they can be as helpful as they can be and that's about it I have had some problems with FBI agents who don't particularly know much about computers or websites or modems or even what that internet thing is and that becomes problematic when they start hearing lots of techno babble and think you're just lying to them so it's always helpful if you're talking to law enforcement to be speaking to someone who can understand what you're telling them but yeah for the most part this isn't really a talk about abuse though we can discuss it but most part the abuses we get are either some corporations upset about a whistleblower or there's been a flame war on use net and somebody else somebody called somebody else at doodoo head which would have been acceptable under use net flame war etiquette except the thing is the remailer and that is just not acceptable and usually the people complaining or web TV or a well users I don't know that's really indicative of anything but it's a trend I've noticed so do we have any questions from the audience at this point and do we have a wireless mic testing testing that's not your question is it the question was did bomb-based sapphire respond to this talk and the answer is no but it's pretty tasty it's it's the choice of remailer operators everywhere well there's a rumor that the original mixed master code was written highly under the influence of Bombay sapphire but Peter and I have managed to bring it out of the drunken state that it was in and make it much more reliable and workable now we have a question in the front do you have any problems with spam thank you okay I have given remailer talks probably four or five maybe six times now and every time I turn questions over to the audience the first question is the first abuse question is a spam question it's not about death threats it's not about kitty porn trafficking it's not about all these other abuse things that really don't happen it's about spam apparently spam is the most egregious thing that anyone could do on the internet with remailers and I like that because that's the worst thing you can do they were pretty well off but no we're not having problems with spam thankfully we're not we're not well we won't ever have problems with spam yeah there's problems with use net spam certainly coming through and use net trolls but the way mixed master works you don't general or way remailers in general work you're not going to get a bunch of messages sent out through the system it'll be somewhat rate limited by virtue of being somewhat slow and there being easier ways to send spam and it's only really worthwhile if you're sending it to a mailing list or to a mail it's just sort of multi-person distribution system like a use net forum another issue with spam is that the way an enemy systems work you need to behave like everyone else using the system if you do anything significantly different than what everybody else is doing you don't get anonymity you will stand out so if you're spamming use net with just one message and that reaches a lot of people you can do it it works and it's done if you're spamming via email and you're sending more than a few messages you will stand out because the majority of users are not sending lots and lots of messages this also applies to sending large files question about trafficking wears and so forth the same answer is spent you don't get anonymity with our system because you behave differently somebody watching the links can see that you are sending lots and lots of messages into the network and that at some point lots and lots of messages are coming out and they can correlate that we did actually have a problem recently where there was a Cuban expatriate mailing list that was sending mail primarily by the remailer network which is awesome and it's like exactly why everyone wants to have a remailer and I don't know who it was but somebody posted to the mailing list that the remailer operators use for operational communications saying somebody must be spamming from this address because they're sending lots of messages through our network and then the Cuban guy mailed like a couple of days later to the list saying oh it's a completely legitimate list we're doing this for this purpose and everyone felt pretty bad so there are problems in some cases with abuse requests or what looks like abuse not really being abuse and yeah yeah there have been problems with remailer operators that are less familiar with what their job really is trying to police and expose abusers and actually messing up one of our esteemed colleagues the the so-called frog admin entered this scene by doing just that stealthily running a second remailer in addition to his own and doing traffic analysis on people and out of the legitimate user luckily the Cuban case they were not using the remailer network for the purpose of anonymity but they were using it to sidestep censorship methods put in place by Cuba that would prevent them sending directly from their own IP so actually exposing them didn't really do them any damage but it could have that's a lesson that you know operators really need to take the heart do you have any knowledge of or experience with anyone but a remailer operator ever doing a traffic analysis attack on the on a remailer or is the existence of such an adversaries of our purely fair rate I've personally seen well I ran a remailer on a network that I assumed had upstream traffic analysis and the cool thing is a lot of the remailers now are using start TLS or inter SMTP protection so as long as you're running the remailer on a server that has a lot of other mail going through it you're actually fairly protected from being able to tell that traffic is even going to the remailers there's basically the state of the network now is there's between 20 and 50 remailers that that are reliable and public on the internet and you could you can get some information leaked just from the stats they release but as long as you remain within the parameters of sending one message every few days you're probably in a set of people that's internally an undistinguishable of I don't know like maybe a hundred thousand people or so per period of time and that's pretty reasonable I think I personally if I were trying to run it if I were trying to use a remailer if I thought it was actively under investigation already and my personal local upstream was tapped I'd be pretty wary of it because being as one out of a hundred thousand net users is a substantial reduction in the population of net users so I might use something like a hotmail to send it or some other thing to inject the message are already encrypted into the network but I think a lot of the most vulnerable traffic analysis of users is really on the the first hop from their local owner land and that's where the wiretap orders on users that are already under investigation would be placed and since we've seen that most of the serious abuse the things that people take seriously are like corporate abuse reporting a lot of people are kind of dumb and send mail to the remailer network from the office network so if there's like three employees at your company and you mail a remailer from your company and they get mail from another remailer threatening a boss or something it's pretty obviously the person on the local network who talked to the one of the known set of 20 or 50 remailers so you have to be sort of careful on the first hop into the remailer network thankfully there's a lot of ways to get around that using free web services that do email or using web forms or anything else that uses start to a less or ssl to another address yeah if you're worried about traffic analysis one really clever way to sort of eliminate that issue is run a remailer because if you're running a remailer lots people are sending traffic through your box so send your message from your box and you've got plenty of cover traffic that tends to be a method that's overlooked by a lot of users but the software thanks to Len and Peter and many other people's efforts is very easy and approachable now it's very easy to run it so if you're concerned about traffic analysis run a remailer it's the simplest way to protect yourself from from somebody figuring out what you're doing and there are configuration settings through your remailer where it can only really be used as a middleman for traffic and you would never have any abuse complaints it wouldn't even be apparent to anyone outside the remailer operator community that you're running a remailer and you should be fine you can run on a low-end modem and you'll be fine middleman means that mail is only delivered to other remailers you you are a remailer in the middle of the chain not delivering to end users so if there's ever an abuse that goes through your remailer it's never delivered by your remailer so no one can see they came from you and you don't get the complaints yeah middleman is probably best described as a stealth remailer you're completely out of the loop no message will ever come from your box so no one will ever sue you until the revolution comes and they track down all the remailer operators around the world and kill them and then you must take up arms my brothers and fight against them all I think this is a slightly related question I'm aware of a couple experiences where people link you know have websites that link you or introduce you into a remailer and I just think it's important for people to remember that you know the remailer is only one step and if they can track back and subpoena the person you know who had the link if that link is being logged by the sending message then you don't have any security either I don't know that I said that very clearly but if you could elaborate that be great yeah one thing to keep in mind with the type two network and even the old type one network and and the I'm not even going to mention the type three because that code is still being written three rocks though that's good yeah it is good although we're still debugging it so technically you shouldn't trust the anonymity but with the type two network what you want to do with response to her very valid point is you always want to make sure that you're chaining a message which simply means that you're sending your message through more than one remailer you never want to send a message through one remailer you never know the person operating the remailer may be incompetent they may be keeping logs they may have an agenda they might want to keep logs and we know some people who do that and the bottom line is when you're using the remailer network the premise that you want to stick with from start to finish is trust no one trust none of the links you want to add as many boxes through as many jurisdictions as you can so that you're able to defend against the attack she just talked about you someone will sue and you don't know how that box is being run the security of the remailer system is based on the premise that you pick a chain and at least one of the nodes in that chain is honest or at least that all the nodes in the chain aren't going to collude if you've picked two dishonest nodes but they're dishonest for different reasons that aren't going to talk to each other you're about as safe as if one of them really is honest and that's why you want to run your own remailer because the best way to create a chain is hop through your own box you know your box hasn't been compromised that's the best way to build a chain and I'm I really must implore this to everyone in the room if you really want to do this run a remailer in middle mode that's the simplest easiest lowest cost way of protecting grand anonymity run middleman I hope you've locked down your box bikes and saying that at that time now we're going to have like a thousand people join the remops list join the remops list I've got a question mostly about pinger but one of the problems is when there's 20 or 50 remailers out there obviously picking from that chain is extremely important and the way the attack of diluting the number of remailers by setting up 115 myself is something we keep talking about I don't obviously we don't have 150 remailers it's not that popular but when there's a system like pinger that says ah these are the trusted blessed remailers don't you think that adds a certain danger and have you thought about ways of trying to moderate the possibility of somebody outside gaming pinger there are a lot of open issues with how chains are selected how remailers are selected they go far beyond whether someone's actually doing any kind of attack against the directory servers though that of course makes it worse this is all not very well understood but we suspect it's bad again against a global adversary who can watch the entire network and observe all the traffic there are several statistical attacks that can be done against different people based on which chains they routinely pick or which pinger sites they're going to the rank which remailers at which reliability slot and really it all comes back to you need to behave just like everyone else in the network or you may stand out but the other side of that is most people certainly not everyone but probably most people are not concerned about this global adversary who can monitor the entire network and calculate useful data out of the noise most people are concerned about their boss or their spouse or reporting information they know about McDonald's chicken farm abuses or maybe even lower funded governments that don't have these kind of monetary capabilities but yes we strive to be secure against the global adversary we do not actually meet that because of a lot of these things that I assume people in certain people who have the ability to be a global adversary probably have much more research on that than public does yeah if land if I can add to that it's an excellent point that brought that land brings up you need to sort of ascertain what the threat is that you're trying to defend against if you use the military standard and sort of categorize things for information warfare threats you've got the unstructured threats which is most people that we would call crackers essentially somebody without a budget a lot of time then you've got your unstructured threat which is organized crime corporations people with assets but not necessarily significant assets they don't have the ability to build in a global surveillance network and the last category is your national assets so if you're dealing with China or Cuba you're trying to send messages into a country that has significant and tremendous economic and human resources to spend on figuring out where your message came from you've got to do a lot more to defend so if you're just going to publish a vulnerability in something and you don't want somebody to know that you figured it out you're one of the developers of the software you know the threat is the corporation what can they really do to figure out where you came from the network is probably secure enough but if you're talking about the United States of America the threats pretty high and keep in mind what it is that you're doing if you're publishing a vulnerability in Microsoft software and the US government doesn't care and we all know they don't care because they don't patch their software so they don't care but if it's something else like you're trying to undermine the government of China they do have significant assets so you need to plan accordingly so paranoia is a good thing but in measure I'd be more afraid of a board network administrator for a major backbone than any national government but yeah well if you're it and it's an excellent point you bring up about pingers fortunately thanks to the effort of lots of people not to mention Peter sitting next to me here who I think makes the best pinger there is echo lot run your own pinger run your own pinger and run your own remailer and stress this enough run your own remailer if you really really really need to defend your communications you should run your own remailer because you know that you control that box to the extent to which you know you control that box right and of course that how well do you think you control that box so if you're clueful and you can really really really crank the screws down on that box you're much better off than you are when you're just looking at a network that you know how well do we defend our boxes you shouldn't trust any of us yeah that's the whole point and of course running your own pinger does make you different everybody else too and you're open to those tax again as well but I don't think that on your own remailer I also don't think that the panacea either but the board network administrator is a threat but not a threat against the mixed master network I don't think given there's just too much data and boredom only motivates one so far what I wonder what the remailer operators here think the biggest threat to the remailer operator network is if we have a question here that I want to get to but we'll get back to you I was I was here actually at Defcon eight when you gave that talk and you didn't seem that nervous and it was a great talk and you explained why the system has anonymity and it's just possible but not everyone in this room also heard that talk and maybe you want to spend a few minutes explaining why you have circles within circles and why this is a pretty sophisticated anonymity system I mean I thought maybe you remember from that back after there the law information hasn't gone into your head if Robin remember I think there are several thousand people like in the last couple of weeks that also realize why we need strong anonymity from corporations on the internet like the RIA lawsuits I'll actually let Len answer this since he's currently the lead of the mixed master project I think it's actually more appropriate for him to answer Len okay mixed nets in 60 seconds so you want to send an anonymous message you don't want the source address to be viewable to the person who receives it so first thought is send it through a third party proxy alright somebody watching the network they're just sending this traffic through third party proxy can see that you're sending it and where it's going to so the next step you add encryption there you encrypt the third party somebody watching that link doesn't know where it's going to go and then out of pops at the other end and hopefully they haven't put two and two together chances are they can put two and two together so what you want to do then is you want to have other people using that third party proxy and you want the messages to come in and leave in a different order so messages come in they're mixed around with other messages and they come out at different times so as long as there is a critical mass of traffic you can't distinguish one from another you have another problem here though you have to trust that proxy if that proxy is evil or subpoenaable keeps logs incompetent and they've been hacked and so forth you're back to square one they can monitor things going through and you're good you don't have anonymity so what you do then is you chain remailers you take your message and you encrypt it you set it up so that it's to be delivered to the end user and you encrypt that to proxy D then you take that blob encrypted to proxy C take that blob encrypted to proxy or node B take the last one encrypted to node A then when you send it in node A ships it away it says hey this is for node B sends it on to node C ships it away and so forth so any individual node knows where it's coming from where it's going to at next and previous hops doesn't know final destination or point of origin all right that still has an attack against it because people are sending messages of different sizes and you can watch messages go through and figure out who's got what message based on just the sizes of the messages so you want to make sure that all the messages are uniform they are split to a fixed size if they're too small they're padded everything going through is the same size that's very quickly mixed master there is another issue here where messages come in and they sit in a message pool which fills up to a certain size before messages are flushed this is done to prevent an attack where one can flood a node with lots of his own messages and one of the message he wants to watch and then when all the messages come out he just throws out his messages and knows this one message he can't see is the one he wants to follow so that's a very high level general description of the type of system we're talking about here does anyone have me that's the how but it's still not really the why and in a nutshell the why is you know back in the day before DNA and fingerprinting if I wanted to send a letter to Len and didn't want him to know who it came from I wrote it out maybe I even cut things out of the newspaper whatever I put it in an envelope and I dropped it in the mail and current email without you know anonymous emailers does not provide that there is a very nice trail of you know which server every single email went through so I don't really care why I might want to have an anonymous message to line the point is I should be able to and that's I guess the three-second version of why yeah the irony is if you want to send anthrax to the United States Congress you can do that anonymously but with email you can't no one ever sent a bomb through a remailer true and it's an excellent point that you bring up there Len we're talking about speech there's a fundamental difference between what you can do through a remailer and what you can do through the mail all we can do is push speech that's it it's just content we can't send you anthrax we can't send you a bomb all we can do is tell you your feet stink or whatever it is you want to say and ultimately it's only speech it's not action well you can also send commands to your bots running throughout the world to like detonate nuclear weapons and stuff through the remailer we don't want to tell anybody that yes no but it's a good point the bottom line is all we can send is data so for the feds in the room Ryan apparently has boxes that control nuclear weapons throughout the world yes everyone keeps talking about this man right here Len there's a guy up here who's got a question but yeah what's the question hey we have a question here so I'll okay Len you want to go first or okay go ahead let me tie two of the things together somebody mentioned the recording industry subpoenas I work at the electronic frontier foundation we're give them money give them money take a bow really seriously take a bow we really appreciate what you do so we are worried obviously and a lot of these you know we are working on that issue but it raises an interesting point which is that as I understand it mixed master is designed for and optimized to email traffic a lot of the traffic that requires anonymity today in the network is not necessarily email traffic and it's not necessarily HTTP traffic in fact it's not necessarily any particular higher-level protocol traffic so my question is to what extent are the lessons that you all have learned with mixed master useful to create a generic TCP proxy and in particular a generic distributed network TCP privacy and anonymity yeah well let's just say we at the EFF are looking to develop a product like that yeah and we love to see it in here yes download the source from it's been done before not to interrupt land at all but zks actually started it commercially and nobody used it so hopefully thanks to our friends at the RIAA that might change well it's probably a good thing that nobody use the ks because there's two fundamental different architectures for anonymity systems high latency systems and low latency systems if you need to have your message content whatever get through the network in a quick manner you face an entirely different set of challenges than if you're dealing with high latency systems if I send a message and it takes several hours to get through the email or network before it gets posted to a mailing list I really don't care email is a low latency system if I'm browsing the web and it's going to take me a couple hours to get CNN I care and I'm not going to use it this all comes back to what will users use a security system which doesn't have users fails at being secure because it doesn't actually provide security to anyone with anonymity systems that point is even more important because if you don't have users you don't have an anonymity set the anonymity set is the number of people in a group that all behave the same and can blend with each other less users plus anonymity set a better likelihood that an attacker is going to figure out who you are so you we can't have a high latency web browsing system with the low latency systems it is much more difficult to beat the type of attacker that we strive to beat in Mixmaster is there a use for this sort of thing certainly is Mixmaster the way to go probably not depending on what you want to do if you're talking about transferring large bits of data that don't need to get somewhere very fast yes it could be as long as there were enough different users doing this that they blended because right now you could use Mixmaster to send 30 meg files but would you stand out yes you would because you're pumping in lots and lots of little messages because it's all split down to the same size and out at the other end pops out this big message an attacker just treats the network as a black box and can correlate this now lots of people were doing that it would be different but also they can count the number of packets you're going in and estimate what size the message is going to be when it comes out so the moral is you really need to look like everybody else yeah you can play games like trickling in pieces over time so it looks like they're sending lots of little messages but it gets much trickier that way there's yeah let me let me add to that the bottom line is you've got to keep in mind who the threat is so we're talking about national threats if we're talking about pushing lots of data through the Mixmaster network versus the United States of America yeah your host I'm sorry but you are your host unless you really really really and I can't stress this enough really really really really know what you're doing unfortunately we don't have enough experience with dealing with that threat but we do have experience dealing with corporate threats they do not have the ability to look at the entire network or a corporate threat like the RAA some AA ending association yes or the MPAA they all end in AA not the automobile association you would probably want to look at the whole network you probably want to look at on your routing that is the most promising a low latency system right now and you're all going to crush our boxes now with all of your bars or whatever you're going to push through our boxes but by the way the structured threat the corporations can't penetrate the network thankfully they're not good at it they can sue the crap out of the people that are running the remailers and they do do that that was my next point if you start running on your routing and it becomes you know you overlay Napster on top of it it doesn't matter if it protects the users if the nodes can suit out of existence yes that's why you all need to run remailers or you mentioned offshore did I did I mention that already please start running remailers please because there's only what do we have right now 30 some odd remailers that's 20 for the whole world that's it there are 20 people on the entire planet earth that are running remailers there's that most of them are the remailer operators are in this room yeah they're pretty much I if a bomb fell on this room the network would collapse I can't you not I haven't all the pingers that work would be gone the list would be gone I have an important point to add to that which is that more remailers in our network at this point is detrimental to the anonymity while that may be counterintuitive you need to have a balance of users to nodes that the number of users using any individual node is not diluted enough that you can pick out individual traffic so really 50 remailers for the amount of traffic we get right now is too many but there needs to be a critical mass of remailers so that shutting them all down simultaneously is not something that can really happen and I have to add though most of them are in the United States which is unfortunate that's not true right now yeah yeah so there's about a quarter to a third in the U.S. even more than that unfortunately keep in mind most of those operators don't want to tell you where they live most of the remailers are the majority remailers are in the U.S. and Germany if we lost the U.S. and Germany right now would be which is not hard to do we could lose the U.S. and be fine seeing as how Germany has a log and certain types of speech Germany is also more private privacy friendly I concur yeah but keep in mind the bottom line is we don't have enough diversity in the network the people that I think would do the most good for the remailer network would be people building applications on top of anonymity that would bring a large number of users and a large amount of interest to the network not necessarily people running service that is key getting more users is the key point once we have more users then we have the strong anonymity then we can start like we currently learning from what we have I mean keep in mind we've got a lot of people that are trying to build infrastructures for anonymity and they aren't looking at the anonymous remailer network we've been doing this for a long long long time we've been attacked we've been sued a lot and this young man right here because I got answers question but the bottom line is you know we've got to learn from what we've already done we've figured out most of the attacks that we're going to run into and most of them are structured attacks so this man right here has a question so it was mentioned earlier that you have not had a problem with spam in any sense but have you had a problem with viruses at all or anything like that personally spam no viruses yes viruses well the biggest problem actually is html content thanks to the wonderful male user agents that everyone runs called outlook not to bash Microsoft which I think is unfair but speaking to the largest volume of users out there they use outlook it's html mail so it's a tax against that and we see a tremendous volume of those sorts of attacks against those users no not really because the network isn't very good for that now it's it's not a good network that the latency is too low and it's too hard to use the network hi um going back to what you're saying about needing more users one of the things that I think would bring more users on would be more NIMS service possibly or make oh god yes absolutely right the only problem is the NIMS servers right now essentially rely on type one technology right there are a lot of there's a lot of work being done we're fixing that how to improve NIMS servers type three will introduce new ways of doing them servers and services will be more reliable and easier to use currently what we have in places they prove a concept that isn't really ready for prime time since you'd like to have more people using the network and what kind of clients are available I think I used something a long time ago called private Idaho is there any other clients that you would suggest my bird Idaho was not really ideal right now that a lot of the code that runs on windows is not as actively maintained as the code that runs on Unix if you're running a Unix client for your mail you can easily just use the mixed master binary to do all your stuff for you and it integrates well with a lot of male user agents like mutt the one that sucks but sucks less or pine or other miscellaneous male user agents yeah the geek factors high yeah the geek factors high I mean if you're really worried about your anonymity not to blow Len and Peter's horn here but you need to kind of stick with the Unix code unfortunately right now the windows code is not as actively maintained well there is one so private Idaho isn't maintained anymore there was Jack B nimble and Jack nimble too which were written by somebody who went by a pseudonym known as our process and he disappeared without any explanation we don't know what happened to a backcoat isn't maintained anymore there is a windows client called quicksilver which is actively maintained and is a gooey overlay on top of mixed master on OS 10 mixed master runs natively yeah quicksilver is very good for for the windows platform but if you're really paranoid you're gonna have to stick with the latest mixed master code if you're not quicksilver uses 29 beta 12 is that it right now there are no security problems with that it's just like I think it's great paranoid if you're not that paranoid there are like web forms that will submit to the remote network and will give you a reasonable amount of anonymity especially for just sending test messages that are not that reliable make sure if you're using the web remailers that they have SSL support and you understand that means that the web interface could be logging the message the IP address and where it was going right in order to get full security to do the encryption operations on your trusted machine using the web interface you're trusting the web interface are there any legal questions here for the lawyer on the panel maybe if you could go into the Patriot Act a little bit more and maybe it's a big lot of Patriot Act and like when they subpoenaed you and they invoke that like what do they say exactly what do you want to know from experience or do you want to hear from a lawyer what you should say yeah from experience the answer is hey guess what I don't have any logs from the lawyer the answer is call my attorney right the unfortunate hunting answer is if you're curious about the Patriot Act please see Cindy Cohen's talk tomorrow right Cindy please stand up Cindy is a marvelous EFF attorney talking about the Patriot Act tomorrow that's the AFF row right there folks everyone give them a round of applause and the other talking tomorrow please stand up Miss Wendy Seltzer yeah and by the way this young lady rules thank God for them to the man that keeps saying to get more of these out there why why don't you tell us why the ISPs dislike you won't allow him on their systems all the hosts won't allow them on their system they'll throw you off so how are you gonna get more well if you want my two cents the why the ISPs do it I can only infer I don't know having run actually yeah actually he might be the better person answered the question having run an ISP your margins are pretty small and remailor operators sort of if they cause one complaint you don't make any money off of that dial up customer for the next year so it's really just a pure practical these people cost you money and are slightly annoying and potentially liability people don't really understand the potential liability for the ISPs because it's not really defined yet and they're just afraid so they are on the side of protecting their revenue having also been the ISP business it does not make economic sense to allow remailors to run on DSL lines and so forth that there's still a low cost service however ISPs are perfectly happy to let you run your remailor if you're a Kolo customer or a T1 customer or anyone who's paying it's going to get a mount for bandwidth then the cost per abuse case isn't an issue but if you're going to run a remailor my suggestion well this is what I did I set up my remailor in middleman mode and ran it for a month there were no problems there of course because I wasn't there weren't any abuse complaints and I was not exceeding my traffic I made sure that everything was was fine then I went to the abuse department and I said hey I set up this remailor I'm running it I'm going to turn it on in full mode if you ever get any abuse complaints the headers say to send abuse to me but if ever they get them to you guys just form to me I'll take care of them right away they said thanks for telling us we'll do that once or twice a year I get somebody complaining to the ISP usually because they got called a do-do head on use that and the abuse department of the ISP forwards it on to me and I handle it and it's not a problem if you go and surprise your ISP by setting up a remailor and they get this abuse complaint and it's something particularly nasty that's forwarded they may just shut you down because they don't know what's going on they think you might be doing the abuse and so forth but having a dialogue with your ISP is important they are usually friendly to the sort of thing the ISP community is very open to this yeah the key Len is right the key is if you've got an ISP you want to call the help desk get elevated to you know tier two or tier three get to the colorful people and tell them what you're doing I've done that and it works bottom line is your ISP may not agree with it so if you're worried about abuse go middleman that goes back to my point of if you're worried about traffic analysis run a middleman run it through your box you know you control that okay we're out of time here so I'm going to ask our panelists to sum up their thoughts on their experiences running remailors and then we will wish you good day Robin the quick thing I can add about ISPs what I did was I was a university student at a state university state universities are bound by this thing called the First Amendment I checked into the AUP at my university and it basically said we're not really going to censor you because that would be against the First Amendment so as long as what you're doing isn't illegal you can do whatever you want to so I ran a remailer and anytime there were any kind of complaints I said not my department First Amendment and surprisingly they said okay now I'm sure this was helped by being a law student and being very persistent but if any of you are actually interested in running a remailer and our state university students with good AUPs please talk to me I have lots of experience in this last two points number one if you run a remailer they'll shut not keep logs any logs rule number two do not edit any content ever feel free to ask me later why yeah my experience in running remailers basically is roughly the same but I usually run the ISP that's running the remailer so it makes it kind of fun to deal with abuse complaints because you get to like laugh at people the the thing that I think is going to help the remailer network the most is there's going to be some NIMS server improvements coming along pretty soon I have a paper at a conference where I'm sort of working on a NIMS server that's going to be really good and if real applications for the remailer network emerge where you're doing mailing list software that uses remailers or you're doing various forms of computer software that interact over the remailer network that would be awesome we'll build up the traffic volume greatly and then more people want to remail run remailer networks and everyone will be happy and now that we have a real threat from the MRA and MPAA as opposed to the sort of vague government threat people have much more incentive to actually use this technology so hopefully the next three or four years are going to be like the last three or four years only actually happen yeah I have to just add to that actually I sat on and founded the committee at the university I worked at that actually created the AUP and I can't stress that's enough if you're a university student look into your AUP if your AUP will allow you to do it run a remailer a lot of universities are very positive and supportive of that and ours was probably because of me but no no short measure due to everyone else and the fact that we actually codified it and a lot of universities are very supportive of that if you're a user everyone in this room is use the network every single person that sends anything through the network helps everyone else even if it's just a dummy message if it's nothing if it's just junk you are helping everybody else that has something important to say through the network and you know what we don't have enough remailer operators we lose them Len is right if we have a lot of remailer operators we end up with a problem but we don't have enough good long-term operators well my remail is running in a university network as well and I did ask them and all they told me is well we cannot allow you to run a remailer which was good enough for me because I didn't forbid me to run a remailer and so it's been running for three years and I hope it stays that way so just as a brief closing note those of you who are interested in being users and please be users if you're going to say I don't need anonymity we're the kind of users you want because this needs to be a legitimate network for legitimate use go to mixmaster.sf.net grab the code if you run Unix or os10 or linux if you want a windows client you can go to scuzz.net skuz.net dot net slash quicksilver and download the quicksilver client which is a somewhat difficult to learn ui but a good interface to mixmaster that'll get you started using it and please anyone who has any questions about this or any further interest we are around during DEF CON find one of us we're more than happy to help one of the best things for the remailer network is evangelism as Mike said his university was pro-remailer because of him that's largely what happens somebody comes in and makes this an advocacy point and you can turn this institution into being a pro anonymity pro-remailer community whereas they wouldn't have been otherwise so thank all of you for coming thank those of you who want to help for helping and have a good day


Everybody forced here ripping 20 22 select baseball hobby six bucks number nine random teams Here are the results for you. You can always find those elitonsportscards.com. Thanks for joining everybody good luck We go Got a mirror Garrett a 250 Reds jersey card there sparks Shohei Otani Thunder and lightning red socks Gerrinda ran nice short print going out to Boston You know, well, he might be the new lead off hitter man got silver Chris sale For the red socks as well Red Tim Anderson to 199 white socks Silver rookie concourse white socks Jake Berger Silver sparks Tim Anderson white socks tricolor Mariners Chris Chris flexing Rendon Got 249 Orioles Mike Musina light blue The 49 Jose Abreu on the moonshots Otto White socks on the Abreu Vlad senior white socks rookie Jersey Otto Romy Gonzalez To 99 Mariners or not Mariners word our Royals silver whit Merrifield Neon green white socks Tim Anderson to 99 tricolor Yankees Babe Ruth concourse for you again Again, everybody just one break left for tonight with spots available It is noir basketball dual case first off the line and hobby. It is a tiered random style break You'll get two teams per spot one from the top two value wise one from bottom two value wise three to go Silver diamond level rookie Padres Reese Canaire Patrick wisdom for the Cubs on the Carolina blue 35 D-backs Seth beer sparks Otto It's a 199 nice one D-backs was a l2. They Got blue J's Nate Pearson on it a 199 back-to-back acts with autos in them Silver rookie for the Tigers Matt Manning Tyler glas now neon to 99 rays Cleveland mile straw Jersey card to 250 moon shots silver white socks Jose Abreu tricolor white socks rookie Jake Berger Silver concourse for the Braves Matt max freed Red premier level Reds Luis Castillo to 199 tricolor for the Phillies Bryce Harper Dolis Garcia insert Phillies Jersey card Hans Krauss the rookie. I missed the fight Silver diamond level Dodgers rookie is Andre Jackson No, we do not break on what not yet. It's a 250 rookie for the Yankees Louise Heel Silver select stars Dodgers Clayton Kershaw tricolor Phillies Bryce Harper Neon Green Braves Ronald Acuna to 99 Mets Tyler McGill rookie Jersey Otto to 299 Curtis Terry to 99 rookie Jersey Otto Rangers Carlos Stanton or Neil Cruz is in this Silver for the A's Matt Chapman Red blue days Nate Pearson to 2 to 199 Chris's Forest Caleb's on late in gaming right now Okay, tricolor rookie white socks Jake Berger Got twinge Joe Ryan rookie Jersey So this Tyler McGill has like and that won't come off It might with a little bit more effort, but we did use a microfiber. We're not going to mess with too much We're going to send an empty box and wrap it to the Mets in case it Comes off and leaves a mark or doesn't come off or whatever it may be so you can get that one replaced zebra Houston rookie Jake Myers There we go astros Usually won a case on those nice short print there for do go for the Red Sox and the silver Neon twins Alex Kareloff to 99 Silver diamond level Mets Starling Marte And I gotta get you some crews here Phillies Luke Williams rookie Jersey pinstripe Angel's moonshot silver Jared Walsh Orioles tricolor Ryan Mountcastle Cardinals Adam Wayne right neon green to 99. Yeah weekend's been good Got tigers Matt Manning auto to 199 Just kind of relax yesterday Brent Honeywell. It's a 49 tricolor auto a's Trevor story if we ship international it's FedEx and shipping is free Not including whatever Duties or import taxes you pay 249 you Darvish Padres Or any fees like that Those will be up to you silver for the a's Raleigh fingers and again, that's FedEx we would use Mike Lucina Orioles to 199 on the red tricolor for the Cubs Billy Williams to 250 jersey card Bruce dark grader all Our jersey is that player war looks like an old old timey jersey and silver you Darvish silver concourse rookie mariners matt brash Gold Cubs rookie greg deakman to nine Nice one Cubs We go nine to ten concourse gold tricolor a's Ramon Laureano for the pirates kibrian haze the 199 Yeah, someone was saying that earlier mark Braves rookie jersey auto Spencer Strider to 299 another zebra concourse for the Braves charlie morton Two zebras in a six boxer Again, usually it's about one a case so More than one. It's crazy silver austin haze for the Orioles Mets patrick mozica rookie jersey auto to 199 chris Bryant louis seal yankees neon green and 99 rookie silver diamond level for the Orioles cal ripkin ashtros chasm a kormick rookie jersey card silver for the Reyes vedal brujan tricolor fillies erinola Shers are there Now kember haven't seen one yet, man matt brash to 99 rookie jersey for the mariners Whitmerfield I hope they exist We've ripped over 10 cases of it so far. I'm pretty sure since it released Maybe this is the box right here silver concourse, babe Ruth yankees Luke Williams rookie jersey card fillies at 250 And flago silver angels anthony rendone Tri-color for the rays tyler glasnow cracked ice rangers natelow to 25 Shane bas to 199 rookie jersey auto For the rays The reds jonathan india auto to 299 solid hits cincinati Rangers neon green natelow to 99 Guy yankees silver garret coal Vladimir Guerrero jr red concourse Out of 199 Tri-color reds rookie tony santi on mookie bets Giants camille duval rookie jersey to 250 erin judge And silver on the back is dodgers chris taylor. So we had two zebras. There was a charlie morton was the first one There's a gold greg deakman There's jake meyer zebra there nice rookie jerseys camille duval luke williams matt brash chasm a kormick bruzdar gradderall luke williams joe ryan louise hill ponds kraus Milestraw amir garret amir garret is still a red there All the ink we had jonathan india Shane bas patrick mzika spencer strider matt manning brent honewell Curtis terry tyler mcgill neat piercent Seth beer romigan zhalas and jose abray you and that'll do it. Thanks again everybody more select baseball coming up


Okay, so welcome to tonight's SOAS Centre of Taiwan Studies lecture. In a theory tonight is the last session in our contemporary Taiwan Indigenous Studies lecture series, that we've been running over the last two years. So it's a sad moment, but we are working to continue this series over the next few months, and there will be more, including our documentary on Army Hip Hop coming up, and we are starting to plan a, I think we'll have at least two more events this term, and we will have more into Term 3 on this theme of Taiwan's Indigenous peoples. For those of you that missed last night's remarkable talk, in last night's talk, Centre Fan gave us an overview of the trends of Indigenous literature over the last few decades, and she's going to build on that talk tonight. Centre Fan did her PhD in Chinese at National University, and now works in the Taiwan Literature Institute or Department at National Tsinghua University. And hopefully tonight we'll have a little bit, we kind of rushed the Q&A a little bit last night, but hopefully we'll have a little bit more time for Q&A. So let's give Professor Chen another big welcome to SOAS. Okay, thank you, all of you, come here in a beautiful Friday night. You know, when I walk around the street, I see a lot of people relax in the Friday night, so I really appreciate all of you come here, and I hope after my talk we have a lot of time to discuss this topic. Maybe this way we'll end the night more beautiful. Okay, this is my second talk about Taiwan Indigenous literature. Today I want to talk about this topic. The topic is three keywords, literature, native resurgence, and Aboriginal knowledge. We call it epistemology. So my presentation is divided two parts. One is to talk about the relationship of the three keywords, and the other I will share for stories to respond this topic. So this is my presentation. And if I want to talk about Indigenous literature as a way for future making, we talk about the four points of view. Yesterday we talked about the change of writing style, and the literature are transformed into cultural and creativity industrial. So we talk about this topic. This topic is focused on the change, the change way, the style, and from realistic to magical realism. So yesterday we talked about this topic. I want to focus on the Indigenous writer want to continue the story. So they use different ways to tell the story and attract people's attention. So I think this is the way they want to attract all of you to be a reader. So they use popular ways or transformed into movies and some products. But today I want to focus on another part of the future of making. The part is I think some writers redefine the cultural identity and to think, contest, or to view in their literature. Maybe their ideal reader is themselves, is the tribal people. So I think their ideal reader is different. One maybe is maybe all of us included hand people and their tribe. But the other, and we will talk about this, maybe this literature, their ideal reader is tribal people. So I would like to show when literature focus on cultural identity and focus on the world of view. Maybe they talk about the topic of native resource by literature. What is native resource? I think I have some ideas from James Clifford. James Clifford is an ethnologist and he is a surprise book. The book is Returns Become Indigenous in the 21st Century. I think the main thing of the book is talk about the Indigenous people can't disappear and the culture of Indigenous people will not vanish because they obtain materials from deeply rooted and adaptable traditions. So to deal with this rooted and adaptable tradition, they can deal with the force of globalization and capitalism. So in this book, view it, the James Clifford insist maybe if Indigenous people want to have a good future, they have to come back to find their tradition. But I think the James Clifford says if the Indigenous people come back to find a tradition, but the tradition is not continuously and don't change tradition. The tradition is a process about engagement, about performance and translation. So according to him, native resource is a continuous process that involves these three tragedies. So with this tragedy, ethnic identity is not about returning to an essential and continuous tradition, but about a process of forming a new unity. In this book, I think when he talked about native resource, he suggests Indigenous people come back to find a tradition, but the tradition is a process, is a tragedy, to find a new way to form a new unity. So by the way, Indigenous people will find a new way to live in a modern life. If we take these native resource, we can talk about the tradition and epistemology in that way. I will use the example. This example is from Arkhead Island, Dao people. You see the pictures, the man to dry the fish. For these people, a man works every day and fish is the main work for a man every day. But when they have a flying fish festival, the man have to do a lot of things, like to make a boat to fish, to dry the fish and share this food. He has to tell some stories to their families about this ceremony. So this is a kind of a cosmetic life in the Dao people. But you see another picture. The picture is 1950, Dao people have their religious conversion. So at the start of this festival, Dao people will blessing in traditional way, and then they will give a blessing from pastor. So I use this flying fish festival to talk about the tradition and Indigenous people's knowledge. I want to share the Indigenous knowledge. This knowledge is practiced every day. Like I say, man fish every day. This is their culture. And practice in a holistic way, like flying fish festival, is a set of customs to have this ceremony. And very interesting, Indigenous knowledge does not mean traditional culture, it does not mean local culture. Because we can identify what is local culture. You see the Christian religion come to the tribe. Their traditional culture was mixed by Christian. So I think Indigenous knowledge reveals the kind of cross-culture characteristic. So what can we identify the Aboriginal knowledge? I think it is very interesting. Because we have to choose different way to describe it. And maybe every tribe have a mix, two or three cultures together. And then this is their tradition. That is their Indigenous knowledge. So this is a special way I want to talk the tradition and Aboriginal knowledge. By the way, I want to talk about the relationship the Indigenous literature and Indigenous knowledge. If we know the Indigenous knowledge is a process by tradition, local culture and mix some cultures from others. By the way, we can focus on three parts of Indigenous people and their knowledge. One is the primary world. The author returns to their tribe and starts to record family stories. The author organizes and summarizes the knowledge based on life experience and is described in new narration. So the first we can see some stories. The stories share a set of customs. This is the first part. And two, as Indigenous people live in the tribe culture and mainstream culture at the same time, their knowledge should have the property of being close culture. So Indigenous writers face changing culture and their identities. They have an opportunity to redefine the conception of Indigenousism. So the second part is like yesterday I mentioned. Maybe some writers use magical realism to tell stories because they think their Indigenousism is a mix of coastal mountainism. So this is the mixed result. So I use the diverse cultures to describe the second level of Indigenous knowledge. And the third, for the writing fields, we talked about yesterday for Indigenous people, writing is make a new world. They are not passive responders for astral environment. They, by writing, they could make a new world. By this way, they would make social space to define themselves. So it's full of energy and active. And when we see the relationship about literature field and Indigenous knowledge, maybe we can think interesting way. Some writers write a story. And the story is very special for all of us. So when we see this book, we clearly identify this is Indigenous literature. So when we see this book, maybe some writers and some stories have a cultural, social and symbolic capital. This capital would support some residents on native resurgence. This is three parts. I want to share Aboriginal knowledge, including the primary world, diverse cultures and writing field. And by this process and by this talking, I want to focus on Indigenous literature, show the Indigenous knowledge. But sometimes we have to notice that this knowledge, this Indigenous knowledge also makes a new way to tell the story. Sometimes we can see some story with the song, with some interesting style from the legends, from the stories. So if we, by the way, we can see the literature shows represent the Indigenous knowledge. But sometimes we find its influence on each other. We can see some words use special way from oral folklore or oral literature. So this is the influence by each other. And I want to share some story about this response the Indigenous knowledge, the story of time. The story of time tell a boy grow up. This story focus on it. The writer use this style to tell a boy from his birth and from his teenager to get in marriage and dance. In the whole of life, a man would have a lot of customs and a ceremony in one's life. So the writer use this style to tell the story of growing, to tell a story of time, to represent all of customs in a life. So a set of customs would be seen in a story. We can see a lot of customs, because this is the main thing in the story. And we read this story. We not only understand this ceremony, but also feel the emotion during the ceremony. So I think if the writer use this way, he want to share a man from the birth to the death. And maybe 50 or 60 years, there are a lot of ceremony in life. In this way, two interesting point we can recognize. One, how can the collective heritage be personalized of the purpose of literary writing? You know, this is collective heritage. But for a writer, he have to find a new narration to tell the story, even the story is full of customs and ceremony. So we may focus on be personalized, because this is the ambition for the writer. And second, how can we give mountain meanings to the means systems and the means thinking? This is very interesting. You know, in mountain life, we say the means is from ancestor, is old. But if we read this story, we have to find new meaning about this. So when we see this story, every reader read the story. He understand the ceremony, and maybe he would find new meanings to explain this custom. Although maybe he is hand people and he is not of a region. So this is the story of time. And this topic is traumatic, because everyone have the same situation about the birth and the death. The second, I think you are familiar with this. The second story is about urban witch. Yesterday we talk about witch, but today I focus on the urban. Because in Taiwan, Indigenous people live in cities. All of them live in the city. So if there are words, the literature always describe they live in the tribe, or they live in a traditional way. But in fact, they are live in the city. So the Indigenous writer use this story to share something, to represent Indigenous people live in cultural and city culture. So the story happened in the city. And to tell a difficult journey from a girl, this girl have to face the exam, but he be recalled to be a witch. I think this story is very interesting because the city for Indigenous people is bad, especially in the Indigenous movement. They think the city is evil because people have to forgive a lot of things to earlier living in the city. So the city is a bad meaning, but in this story, he transform this situation. The writer describe the girl live in the city use CD to study the tradition, like songs, like a ceremony, because she have no chance to live in the tribe. She live in the city, but use mountain ways to learn the tradition. So I think this is very interesting because this story shows the city become the place where the Indigenous people could assess resources and interpreted their tradition. They live in the city and find a new way to come back to catch the tradition. So the city have transform the meanings the city support a lot of chance, a lot of opportunity for them. And the story of urban witch, support and have a... maybe let me to think about which name we should to say. Because in the city, we have a lot of choice to be all kinds of people. Maybe the people live in the city like we, like us, we have a different identity at the same time have a lot of chance to be the person you want to be. So the writer change the image of the city to opposite the tribe. You know, the main thing in Indigenous literature, all people, all tribe people, all Indigenous want to go back home. The home is tribe. But now we have to rethink this topic. They live in the city and find a new way to make a new home in the city. So remember the James Cleaver, the topic of book is Returns As. So the Returns, it means the Indigenous people come back, come back to the tribe. But they have not stayed in the tribe. They have to come to the city or come to another place. And then they also come back to the home, come back to the tribe. This is Returns, the meaning of Returns. So by migrations on the state, the trace for the Indigenous people will be complicated. And this way we will make them to ensure which name should we say. So this is about the story of Urban. Another interesting story is about God. This story always ends with God, like this story. This story is about a girl.  But the story ended with God. She carried this sense of guilt until he re-understand what was the best word by God. So I think this story is very interesting. Like we say the story of Urban, Indigenous people live in the urban, live in the city now. And Indigenous people are Christian. Most of them are Christian now. So you may argue what is their tradition. Because we also think the tradition is his original culture, tribe culture. But the Christian religion changed a lot, changed this way. Like we talk about the Flying Fish Festival. The start of this festival they use the Christian ceremony to blessing. So this story of God, the writer want to have a tension between the tribal culture and the Christian religion. By the way, the story also showed a special topic of this. I remember Duffy yesterday says a lot of scholars talk about the issue of Indigenous with faith, struggle and don't know how to do. So we talk in the first stage there are a lot of sad stories about this because it's true and Indigenous people have to find a new way to live in a modern world. But this story with God is special because the story, although the start of the story is said, by the end the character will be reversed when they meet the God. So I think it is very interesting.  So this story will have a new topic of Indigenous people literature like reverse. I think it is very surprise to me because reverse is not the traditional we know the folk local cultures thinking, reverse is from Christian. So when the story about God and have this special issue of reverse we talk about the original knowledge with diverse culture. This is the simple of the diverse culture. So we see the story of God and we also see the story of Rambo. I think this is another interesting issue because the Rambo issue is famous and popular in Taiwan. We have a lot of people to join this activity to create the human rights. And in this film the story about the Rambo about the gender issue for them for Indigenous people Indigenous guy will have a lot of conflict with a lot of situations like mainstream society like the father society. It is very surprise because Indigenous we all have a too struggle with Christian religion because in their tribe most of them are Christian. Although some Christian have an open mind, but most of them have this attitude to against LGBT. So Indigenous people if they are a guy, they will face a lot of challenges in Taiwan, especially in Christian region. So I use this as a movie but some literature have this the same character to say the story of Rambo. It will show the Indigenous ethnic group and gay mix and this identity will let them have a lot of change, have a lot of challenge in modern life. So I share these stories for stories like story of time, story of God, story of Rambo and story of city. I think this is truly this is the situation for Indigenous people in Taiwan now most of them live in a city, most of them are Christian and they are maybe I know a lot of friends, they are gay they have this choice. So I think this is not we call the tradition, but now we have to use different way to see this to see this tradition because the tradition is a process and now Indigenous people have this situation. So what can we define the tradition? We can say the tradition with local culture and city culture maybe yes, and we also have to say the local culture, the trap culture makes Christian culture and this is the true situation for Indigenous people now. So literature as a way for future making, I want to explain their relationship like this I think literature show and display their knowledge, their worldview and the epistemology redefine cultural identity. This knowledge have a double maybe cultural tribe from tribe and from mainstream this is the, I think this is all of the resource for Indigenous people to think to build their knowledge and by this the knowledge will define the cultural identity and the cultural identity will support Native resurgence I think this their relation is about this. So this is the main thing I talk, the literature will make a way for Native resurgence because this literature will ensure cultural identity and this topic of Indigenous literature their ideal reader is for themselves if they read this work they will feel yes, I have to redefine my cultural identity. Yes, I have to rethink which name that I would to say in the mountain life. So when the Indigenous people redefine their cultural identity they have the way to adapt in a mountain life. This is maybe this is our hope and this is my conclusion I think in the first stage we also use different way to say who I am like this picture we use the right way the right word, realistic style to claim the rights. But now by I describe all kinds of Indigenous knowledge maybe the question mark is full of meaning because the who am I question mark shows the attitude of choice if Indigenous people have the attitude have the choice, have a two choice which name he want to share with others, it means Indigenous people have a freedom their right to choose what life they want to do. So I give the question mark an active meaning I think it shows the return as returns the issues of choice and if the Indigenous people ask who am I and they follow the James Cleaver the tragedy they will choose the suitable way to live better and they will feel confident to choose the way they want to be. So I think in Taiwan maybe each man have a tool to share their identity but you know we have a different identity at the same time right? Sometimes we are ask who are you at that time we have a tool to choose one but in real situation maybe each of us have a lot of choice at the same time maybe we have two or three identity at the same time so if Indigenous people have a choice to say who am I and choose one of the identity I think this is the dream maybe this is the goal for the Indigenous native resurgence. So this is the literature I use literature to talk about this topic and I am very happy to talk about this topic with you. Thank you so much. It was fascinating. It was an even richer picture when it comes to the state of Indigenous literature. It was really built on your talk last night. I had one or two questions I wanted to start off with. One of them was to do with someone we touched upon last night in terms of readership. Now many of the scholars that have spoken on this lecture series are based in Dong Hua University. So something like half of their students are Indigenous. So while in contrast you are in a regular mainstream Taiwanese national university probably the number of Indigenous students is pretty low in your class. So I was curious about how your students back in Taiwan feel about the kind of work that you are doing. Do they actually enjoy this Indigenous literature? So let me just start with that question because at one point you talked about many of these writers you look at, you feel like they are writing for themselves rather than for mass audiences. So how do your students react to this kind of work? Thank you. I think this is a very interesting question. It depends on the students. I know the teachers you invite from Dong Hua and if the readers are Indigenous students maybe they will feel, yes, the book, the writer describes the wrong culture sometimes. Yes, because they use the different way to read the story. They will check what is true and what is maybe a really situation. But for me or for my students we are not Indigenous people and we are attracted by these customs, the storytelling and the viewpoint from there. Like we talk the story of time, you know my students are very interested in this story because this is different way between us. And in the story when a baby there is a lot of ceremony to do this. But this is very special for us. So my students are interested to read this special story. It's different between us. I think this question is very interesting because it means some writers write this topic become their cultural capital. When the book, when the story wants to be discussed, maybe they have two thoughts on this and we will buy the book and talk about this topic. The writer and the story have the cultural capital. I think for different readers have a different feeling about this story. So my students like this story but some of them didn't satisfy this kind of story. Because the story with most of the story use the realistic style. And my students especially for young students they like to read magical realism or read some fantasy story and they want to they want to get happy mind when they read the story. Sometimes. So I think it depends on the students and I don't know maybe in all your experience when you see the story it will let you think a lot. When we read a happy story we will think a lot too. So I think the story, if the story is discussed a lot maybe this is the writer's real hope. Very illustrative of certain dynamics involved and I want to suggest that you in your own presentation have illustrated another aspect of that in the way that you use English which I find both unconventional and also beautiful. The way in which you pronounce words would immediately confront a certain kind of top down structure within languages. So in England we will be taught how to pronounce the language which is other than the way in which it can be pronounced because the English language like all languages, like the Chinese languages can be pronounced in a number of ways and often the case when you would use a word like bestowed the way you pronounce it would force us to confront what it actually means and how it has been put together and I think that cuts in very well with this idea of the multi-polarity of identity in terms of how we come to understand it because often the case identity is always presented as a static medium but as you suggest it's one which if it's to be properly embedded has to be an enlightened medium. It has to be one which is based around self reflection and I guess in indigenous communities like in minority communities one of the real problems has been the sense in which existing practices are often presented as being the actual identity formation of that particular group without any proper reflection on how they come to be and I think this is part of the necessary progress that we need to make in liberation struggles. Thank you for your comments. I agree with you and sometimes when we talk about the topic of identity it is very difficult to talk because we also think Indigenous people have a layer of identity but I argue if in some situations the Indigenous people like teenagers they don't want to talk the topic of identity because they think the identity is so politic and they live in the modern society and sometimes they will show their identity but sometimes they don't they want to live in the same way and not to be identified in different situations and identified in different ways. So your comment let me think an interesting experience. Some Indigenous writers write the customs and they write traditions to make their clear identity but some of them don't like to do this they write the novel in common way so when we read this novel we can identify which one write this story and we see this is Indigenous writer so I think this is another tragedy because it is a tragedy as well thank you I think it is very interesting because we also want to clear the identity but some of them don't do this because for them maybe in my hope we want to be the same with others and have the equal right have an equal view point I remember last night you talked about your definition of what is Indigenous literature and your key defining point is it is written by Indigenous writers but if there is no Indigenous connection in the content does that still pass your test? Yes yes yes you wouldn't say that you won't force the writer to say particular kind of thing you have to talk about English afternoon tea but actually I think David does have a point there because in the English literature case often what is happening in England is English literature exists as English literature in the way you describe but then when a minority group also engages in it then they are expected to have their minority form of literature but at the same time you can't say they can't do it of course Catalyze us tragedy Thank you very much because this is an extension of yesterday's talk so can I combine the both talks and ask some questions first of all we did touch upon before the talk did deny that although the fundamental conclusion I can tell is this kind of the journey to search for who am I leads to this kind of future building of their own identity and a more constructive and also quite positive way but in this journey I only see men's voice and this is a very one-dimensional future building so if this is the case where is women's voice and I was you did mention one particular one and as a mother and as a grandmother not as a woman so can you elaborate a little bit what has been done or hasn't been done another question Thank you for your question I think this is an important question I think to ensure cultural identity is one way for Indigenous people to find the native resurgence and yesterday and today we heard a lot of stories from men right and sometimes in real situations writers not men the writers maybe we can think is yesterday we talked about although he write his mother and grandmother and his family are invoked by his marriage even though I think for women if it is very difficult to to give up their identity of Indigenous I have asked Awu because his family is clear but he said even though he always said he she is aborigines and then she said women so I argued maybe you can do you are women and then Indigenous how about men they never thought about that this is why I told the story of gender because it is the same situation for LGBT because in Taiwan LGBT is important issue sometimes the Indigenous people want to support this social movement but when they come back to their tribe they can't really tell their story because first they are Indigenous and then they are LGBT so I think this is interesting but when they are first Indigenous does that mean that in a sense Indigenous within their local community also being LGBT would come to be something else so of course you can be any number of things as one identity but if in the first identity those who are part of it would then say oh but then if you are Indigenous you can't be LGBT is that what you mean yes yes you know sometimes I think the culture of LGBT or the feminist is very different from the Indigenous culture a lot of tribes is father society and the women didn't do any judgment in the family most of them also do this so sometimes they want to talk about something in their works we hope in the future maybe they will be they will stress their families in their literature what is tradition is bad tradition is it worth keeping does it matter I don't know if this is a question or if I am just adding to the confusion but does the problem of identity actually come from the intersectionality of it when you have to choose between being from a certain ethnic identity and also then being a woman and then when you are already in a minority group it's harder to sort of let yourself choose that individual perspective as compared to the society which is anyways a small part of a bigger capitalistic wonderful picture of course it's context isn't it in a certain context it's important to be Indigenous but in other contexts it's more important to be a woman so I don't think it's necessarily only one or the other that's true and it depends on the situation the women are like now Biyu is a teacher and when he comes back home maybe I'm still but I think for your questions I think each one has a different identity to choose or be chosen the point is that within a minority grouping of whatever kind the identity only comes to be recognized when other people tell you about it because some black boys will say they only found out they were black when everyone noticed it when they were only encounter difference I don't believe it because you're usually fighting for the mic we did kind of rush you a little bit last time yes especially language today's focus is a little bit different so I don't know if I can phrase the question but of course today's talk is also very interesting there's two things that are occupying my mind one is literature as future building which certainly resonates with me if you look at the issue of the struggle for Irish independence it's totally bound up with literature the same in Scotland the same in Finland which only appeared in 1918 and a lot of that literature was seeking not just those three countries but it's quite a European wide phenomenon actually going back to the past I'm very often going back to the pre-Christian past because many people kind of feel that Christianity has been more harmful than good for us Europeans and a lot of the great European works of art I'm thinking of art now I'm thinking of a lot of Picasso that actually were created in outright defiance and opposition towards Christianity so I'm a little bit concerned because indigenous communities embracing monotheist religion is a bit like Turkey is voting for Christmas sounds a bit mixed up it's a very important idea that helps people to find a place and to proclaim their identity and not have it proclaimed for them by other people from somewhere else and the other thing was commentating what was the other thing that was Christianity yes that's two things because Christianity the traditional religions in Taiwan are shamanistic traditional religion in Korea is shamanistic and before Christianity all over Europe there were various forms of shamanism and indeed people are not aware of how persistent a lot of these beliefs have been and you know, take fire festivals which you have in Scotland we were down to one, Christianity almost stumped it out we were down to one particular festival but during the later 30th century when the grip, the hold that Christianity has had on society has relaxed a lot of space for the celebration of some of these beliefs not necessarily going back to the beliefs but the celebration of some of these beliefs to research to come back I want to reply with you thank you for your comment I think you mentioned an important phenomenon is Christianity in this region about the indigenous people like feminist I think this issue is also important to discuss in Taiwan most of indigenous people are Christians they also have the Christmas Day but something very interesting they sing the song with their mother tongue even the music is from the west but the language is mother tongue so it is the mix situation in the tribe so I think this is a good example to focus on the mix culture because indigenous people don't give up their mother tongue don't give up their local tradition but they are Christians they have the ceremony to celebrate so they use the suitable way to be an indigenous Christian so I argue if maybe the first they are indigenous or the first they are Christian you know sometimes in the topic we talk about the first identity is indigenous people and then he is a woman but I argue maybe the first identity is our Christian of course I am not suggesting that influences from other cultures is a living thing and it does indeed come from Latin the same root is viticulture agriculture just what concerns me is when one dominating a form absorbs another then it is all lost that is what worries me two or three or four or five or many more things coming together speaking from my living personal experience which is mainly in Central America and Brazil it is extraordinary how you can get hybrid religions so the Christianity has given way to voodoo and connoble in Brazil and so on and in their places of worship you can see the primitive chanting going on in the church they often take the seats out and they just sit on the floor and so on and strangely enough in my knowledge of southern Mexico the Catholic church has more or less accommodated to this it is the Protestants who fly in from Texas with their air mail from God and so on they are the ones who really try and resist it and they want a monotheistic Christianity but of course the hybrid is extremely fascinating with its fetishism and voodooism and its own symbolism and music as well could I come back on a further question that I thought the story of the rainbow part of your talk was quite fascinating I was curious about the you talked about the film Arifu what the response to that was like when we're thinking about how many indigenous people we've got two quite distinct groups those who live in the city and those that don't and do you have any sense how that was received was it roundly condemned by certain groups in Taiwan this is something that you followed yes and I think this is maybe this is the issue and recently appeared you know indigenous LGBT this topic this group is the least in the tribe and in the city but they don't identify to others they are LGBT because if they do this like the movie Arifu they want to the character want to change their social their sex change to a girl a boy from a girl and the movie shows is when he come back to the tribe he feel a lot of conflict from his father his family, his tribe and even the tradition I think although it is the same situation in the group in Taiwan LGBT group in Taiwan but for indigenous people most of them have a tool to challenge the Christian religion maybe this is big difficult for them thank you for your presentations your presentation gives me ideas about how I can do my research that's really great I'm interested in you talk about indigenous people and Christian I'm not really know the situation in Taiwan so these indigenous people became the Christian just in the urban area or also in the tribal area in tribal and urban all of all area so why they became Christians not the other religions a lot of research about it because what I think most important reason is indigenous people in maybe 50 years before they are very poor because in Taiwan society we treat them differently so they have a no financial and they have a good material for them to have a good life so at first at the beginning the Christian give some money, some food for them and I heard a lot of people say at first they go to the church because they will give their food and their money, their clothes like people in Taiwan in 1950 at first this is the main reason and then you will find some pastor use their language, use their mother tongue language to teach them the Bible they write their mother language and to try to close to them then the pastor will build help them to reconstruct their tradition, like language, like house like some culture so if we say the Christian is bad I think this is maybe for LGBT they don't like this region but for most of the indigenous people the Christian help them a lot of things even though until now indigenous people admire a lot of pastors and the pastors spend a lot of years to together with these indigenous people they build a close relationship with each other and I think you remind me why indigenous people didn't close to the Buddha or Muslim maybe this is about the history of the region, especially Christian into the China and into the Taiwan this is about the history about it in 1950 a lot of Christians come to China and come to Taiwan to share ideas of God and they go to the tribe because this pastor believes in tribe, they will find really people that God want to choose we did have a talk on religious conversion in indigenous communities and I tried to rack my brains to go back in time but do you remember does it really get going in the late Qing dynasty it's quite a historical process but I'm not entirely sure we have missionaries coming to Taiwan in the late 19th century and through into the Japanese colonial era but why it's more effective in indigenous communities is still something I need to go back and look at Scott Simon's paper did you want to add something on this? thank you I just want to say that I find your way of speaking English perfectly normal you are easier to understand and adapt it thank you on that nice compliment continue our discussion over some wine