Hello! Good morning! We'll take a quick shot while you guys settle down. So one thing I want to... Before I introduce my boss, which is always my favorite part of the conference, I want to emphasize the community aspect of the news challenge. We run the news challenge, it's going to be twice this year, and we would not be able to pull it off were it not for the people who raised their hands and come help us read, review, ask questions of the, in this instance, the 700 entries. This year we had over 30 people either come meet with us in Miami, gather at Mozilla's office in San Francisco, do bi-weekly video chats where we went through entries, and so some of you are in the room who did that. I just wondered if you guys could raise your hands up for a second, stand up you guys. You guys did a lot of work. So it's about a fifth of the community that took part in that for us. So thank you. So in introducing Alberto, I thought about the fact that this news challenge question ended up being very broad, right? It was a notion of how might we strengthen the internet for free expression and innovation. And as we wrestled with that question, and I said, Alberto, this feels really open and broad. I'm a little nervous. And I won't say, I won't quote him word for word, but I will say it's really nice to have a boss who doesn't just, who's not just comfortable with ambiguity, but embraces it and really does embrace openness and jumping into a project in a news challenge when we weren't really sure what we were going to get. So he'll tell you what we're going to get, Alberto. The fact is we don't really know what we're going to get. We know what we're going to fund, and then we'll see what we're going to get. Thanks, John. And what I want to do is I want to announce the winners of this round of the news challenge. And then I want to talk a little bit about open internet and about what's going on at the FCC and list some of your good minds in an effort to ensure that the internet stays free and accessible. I'll thank again our colleagues at the Media Lab and Ethan. As John indicated, when the Night News Challenge contest started, when we began to think about it nine years ago with Eric Newton and Gary Kebel, it was a contest to find and support ideas to use digital platforms to deliver news and information to communities. And I remember one of our trustees said, well, can you give us a notion about what you might fund? And I said, no, because if I did, then I'd be cheating. The fact of the matter is this has to be like a 12-step program. The first thing you do is you say, my name is Alberto and I'm an alcoholic. And you say, no, my name is Night Foundation and I don't know what we're doing. And you have to say, now, we happen, though, to have some money. Do you happen to have some ideas? And happily, a lot of people in this room did. I'm making light of it, but it really is serious business. It is serious business about not prescribing and about not saying, these are the things that we had an idea when we were talking in the office the other day, we have some money. Would you do it? The answer is almost always yes and that's almost always a bad grant. You need to be able to let go and I think that's probably the hardest thing in philanthropy. In the last couple of years, we've moved the focus of the contest from a completely open in general to somewhat more focus to networks, to mobile, to open government data, to health data and of course this one is on how to strengthen internet for free expression. And as in the past, we welcome the participation of readers and thank, I joined John in thanking them and I especially want to thank this year, Ford Foundation and Mozilla Foundation for their participation and thank them for their insightful advice, their hard work and their resources that they applied to the contest. It's always better with partners. I think you'll find that the winners, each in their diverse areas, work under the still broad umbrella concept.  So I'll announce the winners now and then I want to come back and I want to talk a little bit more about what's happening at the FCC with open internet and then Michael Mayness, my colleague, will lead a discussion with the winners about their projects. So here are the winners. The first one is check out the internet from the New York Public Library, bridging the digital divide by allowing New York residents with limited broadband access to borrow portable Wi-Fi hotspots devices for up to a year. It's half a million dollars and the project leads are Tony Marks and Jim English. I don't know if they're here. Tony I know is here. Congratulations to them. Code 240, ensuring the future of the internet as a diverse, inclusive public resource by opening more pathways for underrepresented minorities to top jobs in technology and bolstering professional support networks to sustain their success, $400,000. Laura Wideman powers as the project lead, Laura. Getting it right on rights from the Digital Public Library of America, creating a simplified and more coherent right structure for content collections from libraries, museums, archives, and other sources, along with best practices that institutions can use safely to make more content available to the public. $300,000, the project leads are Dan Cohen and Emily Gore. Global censorship measurement from the Open Technology Institute at New America, working in support of Measurement Lab, a collaboration that hosts a suite of tools for assessing the openness of the internet. Award is $350,000, and the project leads are Ben Scott, Thomas Gideon, and Alan Davidson. Internet to go from the Chicago Public Library offering Chicago residents Wi-Fi hotspots for up to three weeks at a time, in addition to one-on-one digital literacy and skills coaching and access to online tutorials. The award is $400,000, and the project leads are Brian Bannon, Michelle Frisk, and Andrew Medlar. I suppose the winners are here. They can stand up and wave. If not, we'll still send them the check. There you go. Onlinecensorship.org from Electronic Frontier Foundation, collecting information about online censorship incidents to explore concerns about censorship and preserve freedom of expression. $250,000, and the project lead is Gillian York. Ranking digital rights from New America Foundation, developing a system for benchmarking and ranking the world's most powerful tech companies on how well they protect the free expression and privacy of users. $300,000, the project lead is Rebecca McKinnon. Text secure from open whisper systems, safeguarding mobile text communications through a simple secure messaging application that requires no special knowledge from the user. I'm not sure what that exactly means, to be honest with you. But John will explain it to you later on after the program. The award is $416,000, which is a really strange amount, since it's usually rounded to, I'm surprised this wasn't $500, but it's $416,000, and the project lead is Moxie Marlin Spike. Who are the gatekeepers from Journalism Development Networks examining the gatekeepers of Eastern Europe's digital infrastructure by analyzing the ownership and connections of internet service providers and cable satellite operators, $200,000 to Paul Radu and Manuela Proteza. And congratulations to all of the winners. Congratulations to all of the winners. That's our complete list. You will see them, hear some of them in a few moments. So over the years, we've moved the night news challenge from topic to topic. We haven't yet decided on the topic for the next one. But we think that the subject of a free and universal web of a free and accessible internet is hardly exhausted with one attempt on our part, and that perhaps we should have a repeat and maybe a more, somehow more focused attention. And I will acknowledge to you that we don't have the answer about even what to call this or how to focus this. And the point of doing this next part here is asking for your help, your assistance, your good thoughts on what would be effective. And if you had this amount of money to invest in projects to ensure the openness and accessibility of the internet, how would you do it? Right now the FCC is considering rulemaking that could tier the internet. It could allow certain providers who are able to pay to have access to higher speed and quality of internet and others who cannot. The debate is on as to whether this tiering of access to internet is a necessary byproduct of our economic system and will provide even better services for those who can afford them or whether this is essentially anti-democratic since internet is the public square and there may be no barriers to citizens to join their public square. If you're rich and connected, you're okay. If you work for MIT, if you work for Knight Foundation or if you work for Exxon, you're likely to have the highest speed. That's just a fact. If you're on your own, you may not. If you're an individual developer or the people who use your programs don't have the money, you may not. We started about nine years ago looking for ways to deliver news on digital platforms to everyone in our communities so everyone could be better informed and determine everyone's own interest to foster engagement in those communities and thereby build an even stronger democracy. We wanted to build networks of emerging leaders such as yourselves who would champion those informed communities. Frankly, we had a sense of news dissemination which came from our newspaper background, newspaper and television where the delivery of news and information was assumed to be general, assumed to be cheap, or assumed to be free. It was not in the way of thinking of cable, which is expensive, or of tiering, which ups the ante even more. So in light of the real world, the hardball politics that's going on in D.C., I come to think that we were probably extremely naive nine years ago to think that if this thing worked that we could continue exploring a free and open internet with a free and open internet. I want to read to you a fairly long piece from Larry Lessig's wonderful review in the New Republic some years ago critiquing the movie Social Network when it first came out. And I want to read it to you because I thought it was, first of all, I thought it was as good as any movie review I've ever read. It was as insightful about the movie as it was entertaining to read. But I want to read it to you because his comments about the movie then and about internet are absolutely relevant to where we are right now. Remember, this was written as commentary about a movie, Larry Lessig. What is important in Zuckerberg's story is not that he's a socially clumsy boy genius and it's not that he invented an amazing product through hard work and insight that millions love. The history of American entrepreneurism is just that history. Instead, what's important here is that Zuckerberg's genius could be embraced by half a billion people within six years of its first being launched without, and here's the critical bit, asking permission of anyone. The real story is not the invention. It is the platform that makes the invention sing. Zuckerberg didn't invent that platform. He was a hacker, a term of praise, who built for it. He then compares Facebook to Nantucket Nectar which is another company that students of his, I guess, had developed. And he says that each step after the first along the way to giving their customers what they wanted, the founders of Nantucket Nectar had to ask permission from someone. They needed permission from a manufacturer to get into his plant. They needed permission from a distributor to get into her network and permission from stores. You get the idea and he goes on. They made the slog and succeeded but many try and that slog and fail. Some for good reason, sometimes not. Zuckerberg faced no such barrier. For less than a thousand dollars he could get his idea onto the internet. He needed no permission from the network provider. He needed no clearance from Harvard to offer it to Harvard students neither with Yale or Princeton or Stanford nor with every other community he invited in because the platform of the internet is open and free or in the language of the day because it is a neutral network, a billion Mark Zuckerbergs have the opportunity to invent for that platform including all of the people in this room. And though there are crucial partners who are essential to bring the product to market the cost of proving viability on this platform has dropped dramatically. The tragedy of this film is that practically everyone watching it will miss the point. Practically everyone walking out will think they understand genius on the internet but almost none will have seen the real genius here because of the tragedy because just at the moment when we celebrate the product of these two wonders Zuckerberg and the internet working together policymakers are conspiring this is Larry Lessing I am a neutral foundation president I'm just saying just as we celebrate the product of these two wonders working together policymakers are conspiring with old world powers to remove the conditions for this success. As network neutrality gets bargained away to add insult to injury by an administration that was elected with a promise to defend it the opportunities for Zuckerbergs of tomorrow will shrink and as they do we will return more to the world where success depends upon permission and privilege and insiders return their souls to inventing the next great idea that was several years ago I cannot tell you how much I believe that is relevant today as a long time advocate of First Amendment freedoms I have spent a lifetime believing and working for the right to speak because we are citizens permission to speak or because we bought a license to speak and I believe we should do everything possible to ensure that the right to speak the right of expression on internet is just that a right not a license subject to approval so this night news challenge as John told you attracted more than 700 innovative ideas from journalism policy research education fields and as we go forward how do we design a challenge a question perhaps that will help keep the internet free we really do want your advice how to strengthen the internet to stay open to stay authentic how do we do this work at scale what tools can we build and teach to enable anyone to use the web securely and in the coming months we will do more work on a stronger internet we will probably make an announcement about what the the contest will be toward the toward the end of the summer but I really cannot more strongly encourage you to think about this this should matter to you this has to matter to you if you have ideas about this I want you to send them to me at ai at nightfoundation.org I promise you we may not do it but I promise you that we will consider your ideas seriously you might also want to look at this condensed version of the FCC notice at a site you've got the Dan Schultz and Matt Carroll built this over the weekend in the mozilla open web hackathon I just read it this morning it's a really nice summary of the background, the context, the issues and again I encourage you if you do read that and have an opinion I encourage you to speak up and give feedback I know this sounds this looks really inviting doesn't it this was done by somebody who believes in human centered design Ethan what have you been doing you should go down to the FCC and fix this anyhow this is an opportunity though quite seriously an opportunity for everybody in this room to have your voice heard and again if you have ideas for the contest I ask you to contact me directly so that's the end of the pitch now I want to invite Michael Mayness to lead us through discussion with the winners and also to talk a little bit about I think you're going to talk a little bit about the winners of the prototype fund grants, so Michael Mayness thank you, thanks Alberto so we're going to do, I'm Michael Mayness I'm the VP of journalism and media innovation at night and also the official lumberjack foundation so we're going to do a quick round of talks where we have each of the winners come up we're going to do a short presentation on it we're not going to have questions in this but you'll be able to find them outside and I hope that you do, especially to engage with a lot of this great work that they're doing so we're going to go one by one they're going to come up and do a little lightning round and we'll go through at that pace so first up we have Tony Marks and check out the internet, Tony Tony Marks, I'm the president of the New York Public Library and we're going to go to the wrong place 19th century institution, par excellence trying to transform itself for the 21st century with your help and I want to say thank you first off to Alberto, to John, to Michael to Everett at the Knight Foundation and to all the folks who've contributed to this project that we're beginning so we are still a physical library in fact we are the largest library system in America the public libraries of New York combined have about 40 million physical visits a year that's more than all the cultural institutions and professional sporting teams in New York combined and of course we have to use those facilities as best we can and people rely on us, a third of New Yorkers rely on us because they can't afford books, a third of New Yorkers rely on us because they don't have computers at home. We are massively increasing our educational programs and that includes in the arena of computer skills and access we're on the way to having about 150,000 spots for free basic computer skills training, we're the largest free provider of that training in New York, we're now offering coding instruction particularly in the south Bronx and in Harlem because we are in the poorest neighborhoods and that's an industry as you're going to hear from colleagues that needs much more diversity and more talent so we hope to contribute to that we're trying to be creative, we're the leading non-university partner with Coursera now so that we can do blended learning in the libraries as well as with Khan Academy and there's so much more that we can do when I first got to the library I was disheartened to learn that most of the commercial publishers were not allowing libraries to lend electronic books I envisioned a future in which a third of New York and people around the country relying on their public libraries to be able to read would simply not have access to books if they chose to read them electronically so that seemed like a nightmare scenario, a technology that wants to increase access was going to collapse it we happily are headquartered where the publishing industry is headquartered, we shame them no sorry we negotiated with them anyway and got the entire commercial publishing industry to let libraries lend licensed electronic books that's now a national opportunity for all libraries and that's fantastic and the coding and the computer skills is fantastic and we said okay now we're gaining more content we're working together with the digital public library of America as founding partners of their great work getting more of our amazing collections available we hope eventually everything online for free anytime anywhere that's the holy grail that we're all after but as we walk through towards that holy grail we noticed a more immediate threat right at home so let's see if this works nope wrong way there we go thank you so immediate threat right at home something like 46 so close to 50% of New York City households that have incomes below 35,000 do not have computer access at home in the city of New York roughly a third of all households do not have computers or broadband at home there in the neighborhood I live in near Columbia it's probably 90 95% saturation in the south Bronx and Harlem it's probably closer to 90% of non access people can't afford the razor blades and so they don't even buy the razors that means we could have all the content in the world and pump it out for free and people can't get it it's why people are lining up in the libraries to wait for our computers it's when we close the libraries during the evening people are sitting on our stoop to get leaked broadband that's when a light went off for us we said no we gotta be able to do better than this libraries are no longer constrained by walls our provision of access should no longer be constrained by walls so we said what can we do well it helps that we are in every neighborhood including in every poor neighborhood we said let's leak purposefully into those neighborhoods we asked ourselves what's the best technology you all will know this better than I turns out we think my five sell hotspots is the way to go $40 for a little gizmo and sorry I might allow to use that word in this group the $40 for a little gizmo and $10 a month for subscriptions we tried with a hundred to learn as we went and now thanks to the night foundation and we hope another million and a half dollars that we're gonna try to find we'll have 10,000 people or 10,000 households where we will give you this device we will pay the subscription we will give it to you in particular if you're involved in one of our education programs and the New York Public Library will soon have something like 400,000 people in education programs that in itself is a means test because so we decided that works we can supplement our educational programs by allowing you to do homework with this by providing you with access at home we're partnering with Brooklyn and Queens libraries we're partnering with Kansas and Maine Kansas and Maine because we want to prove that there is a solution to the digital divide that is nationally possible we want to prove this isn't just about Harlem or the South Bronx or the neighborhoods of New York this is about everyone in America there is something close to a hundred million Americans who do not have what we take for granted access to the world of information at your fingertips you can't even apply for a job without that access at this point we need to find a way to convince the federal government our friends at the FCC that we can solve the digital divide that libraries can play a role other institutions partners can play a role because there is so much more to do and it is so essential if America leaves a third of its population behind on the wrong side of the digital divide we simply will not have an economy that works and we surely will not have a democracy that works we couldn't be more excited to see how this works we're going to learn as we go it's a great partnership and we'll be happy to report back as we've learned during this year and I'm going to turn to our friends from night thank you Tony up next we have Laura widerman powers with code 2040 Laura hi everyone I am really excited to be here I co founded code 2040 just over two years ago we're a young organization and we really couldn't have achieved anything without the supporters the people who took for taking this next bet on us. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about kind of why after working in the tech industry, I started Code 2040 and a little bit about what we do. So Code 2040 came about because of two major trends. The first is an economic trend. Today, science, tech, engineering, and math jobs are the fastest growing category of jobs in the US, and 70% of those involve computing. So you've probably heard people say coding is the new literacy. It's really true when it comes to where the open jobs are in this country. And at the rate that we're currently graduating students who are qualified to take these jobs, we'll have one million jobs in tech unfilled by the year 2020. So this is a big opportunity. The second trend is the demographics of the US. Today, 90% of population growth comes from minority communities. The year 2040 is the year when people of color will collectively be the majority in the US. And at that point, 42% of the population will be black or Latino. So this is a new consumer base, and it's also a new workforce when we think about who's gonna be filling jobs over the next five, 10, 25 years. The issue is that this new economy and this new demography are actually quite disconnected. So currently, blacks and Latinos make up nearly 30% of the US population and earn nearly 20% of computer science degrees. But when it comes to the industry numbers, they're in less than 10% of tech roles. And when you think about who is creating these tools and platforms as we think about a free open internet, when you look at founders of companies in tech, less than 1% of those backed by venture funding are black or Latino. In short, we're leaving talent on the table. So we think about creating this inclusive, free, open, growing innovation economy in the US and we're missing what will be nearly half the population when we think about who these creators and entrepreneurs are. But just as importantly, when we think about the impact that tech can have on these communities, there's a pretty big opportunity here as well. Because these jobs that we're talking about are not just any jobs, they're actually really great jobs. So the average salary of a tech worker is more than the median household income of a black family and a Latino family combined. Which means that connecting this portion of the population to these open jobs in tech has the opportunity to lift individuals, families, and communities out of poverty and close the wealth and achievement gap in the United States. So at Code 2040, we believe this is the future of the tech industry. This is last summer's class of Code 2040 Fellows. These 18 students, black and Latino computer science students from around the country came together to spend 10 weeks with us last summer. They interned at tech companies and went through Code 2040's career accelerator fellows program as well. So when you think about the types of work that these students are doing, creating these platforms, we have students here who worked on creating SMS banking platforms for un- and under-banks communities. Students who worked on open sourcing parts of the code of their company's code base so that more people could access it. Really working on a lot of really cool and exciting things during their internship.  They get mentors, they work with coaches, they do company visits and get to explore different facets of the tech sector. We do a hackathon with them where they work on issues around diversity and tech and think about how they can use their skill set to not just kickstart their own career, but turn around and be mentors and role models and create platforms and tools that allow people from all different backgrounds to come together, get on the web and move the internet forward. The night support will help us this summer welcome 27 students to the Fellows Program from around the country. They are interning at 20 different tech companies in the Bay Area and they come from 23 different colleges and universities everywhere from schools like MIT, Carnegie Mellon, to community colleges and state universities and colleges from around the country. So we're really excited to welcome them and to see what it is that they're gonna accomplish over the course of the summer and then moving forward as we fold them into our network and empower them to help create new solutions and give back. So Code 2040's vision is a diverse, inclusive tech sector and we believe that we know just the people to make it happen, thank you. Hey Laura, thanks Laura. Next up we have Dan Cohn right behind me gets getting it right on the rights, here you go Dan. Thanks so much, it's great to be here and to be a part of this night news challenge on the open internet. Emily Gore, our director of content and the leader of this project for DPLA and I are just thrilled to be part of this attempt to strengthen the open internet. And as Ethan said this morning, we are at this anniversary, the 25th anniversary of the web but I'll just note here for you today that there were actually forms of human expression before the web. I know I just blew your minds right there. It is true, I was a history professor for many years so you could take my word for this and the web has seen an incredible flourishing of human expression and one of the ways really to enrich it that we envision is by bringing online and bringing openly available all these incredible forms of human expression from the past to intermingle with all the forms that are going on today. You know these forms include maps, they include photographs, they include artworks, they include manuscripts and diaries, all this wonderful content and that content is held in places like Tony Marx's New York Public Library. These incredible, wonderful, non-profit institutions that we call libraries, archives and museums and the DPLA was founded to partner with these institutions as a digital partner with them to help them bring these materials online to make them broadly accessible. We launched a year ago, we've had a great first year, we brought together over seven million items from over 1,200 institutions across the United States and we're still going strong, increasing that number every day. But we ran into a problem in our first year that really is constricting our ability to share our materials openly, allow them to be reused by people across the world and that is that these seven million items have 26,000 different right statements attached to them. You need a microscope here to look at some of these right statements that are attached to these items and that is because there's general confusion around these older materials about their status. If we look at them, we just simply can't use some of the things that we've seen on the open web that have really helped out with open expression like Creative Commons licenses. Those are available on a very small minority of the contents in America's collections but just a very small minority. There's of course lots of material that's still under copyright and we work with copyright holders and others to see how we can make that content at least maximally open over time. But this blue area here includes materials that are variously labeled as unrestricted in a kind of vague way and I'd even add a question mark there because a lot of smaller institutions in particular really don't know whether their material can be put online in an unrestricted way. They're looking for some guidance, some best practices from us and others about what they can do with this material and then there's just a giant blue sea of material that we simply don't know about. A lot of this in the 20th century that's sort of orphaned, we can't find the rights holders. We simply don't know what rights to attach to it so we can make it available to everyone as freely as possible. So this project is really simple. We are going to take these thousands of different rights statements and streamline them into one set of rights that will be comprehensible. You don't need a law degree to figure out if you can reuse these amazing materials from America's libraries, archives and museums and we're not just doing it here in America. We're doing it globally. We're trying to provide a way for that school child who is working on a report to create for instance, a collage of openly available materials from Boston. We'd like to see app makers come to our site and be able to reuse this content from thousands of institutions into apps like OpenPix that allow you to do a walking tour wherever you are and uses the GPS to signal shows historical photographs from right around you. And of course we want to enable accounts like historical cats which tweet out adorable pictures of cats from throughout history from our collection. That's a form of human expression. We love you internet. It's not Shakespeare but it is very important for people to find ways to do these sorts of things. As I mentioned, we'll be doing this internationally. We have a terrific partner in our sister project in Europe called Europeana. And to give you some sense of scale, Europeana has identified about 300 million items in Europe that can be digitized and brought online. And they've just gotten to the tip of the iceberg. We have 7 million here in the US that we've brought together there at 30 million. They started a few years before we did but only 9 million items from their collection are currently reusable in the ways that I said. So we're gonna work with Europeana to bring this together starting here in 2014. Again, we started in 2013 and if I could end by flipping the timeline around and hopefully inspiring you to get involved with our projects. We look ahead really at decades of work. In the United States we very well may have a billion items from small places, cultural heritage sites, historical collections in rural counties, up to large places like New York Public Library that we need to bring online and to assign openly available rights to in the best way we can. DPLA is fanning out across the United States as we speak to partner with more institutions to bring those contents online. And we hope that you'll join us in this project over not just this year but in the coming years to bring all of these collections together, make them available so that we can have the full range of human expression online for everyone. Thank you and thank you to the Knight Foundation for their support. Thank you, Dan. Next we have Alan Davidson with the Global Censorship Measures. I'm Alan Davidson with Measurement Lab or as we like to call it, MLab. Good morning. So MLab is designed to answer a kind of basic question which is how can we better understand what is happening when our connections to the internet don't work the way we expect them to work? So for example, a student here in Boston who's struggling to finish their homework trying to get access to the DPLA, no doubt, because of a maddeningly slow internet connection, an activist in Egypt who can't get access to critical election materials in the weeks before an election, a journalist in Pakistan or Turkey or China who can't post videos at politically sensitive moments. These are actually real world examples that we've encountered and they're maddening because we don't know why they're happening necessarily. In isolation it's very difficult to tell what's happening with our internet connections. But what if we could actually collect the data from thousands or even millions of internet users with their experiences? What if we could collect it and start to ask questions like is this happening because I've been placed in a slow lane by my ISP? Is this happening because I'm suffering from censorship from my government? Those are the kinds of questions that MLab was designed to answer. So MLab is a crowdsourced platform for collection of this kind of data about internet access. It was started in 2010 and it's designed to basically do two things. One is to let researchers create tests or experiments on a set of servers that run around the world. And then users, people can come and run these tests on their own internet connections and see what's happening. The data goes into a public repository that then anybody can take a look at and try to understand what's happening not just with an individual connection but at aggregate what's happening within a country, within a city, with a particular ISP. There are about 150 servers running right now in about 45 different locations around the world and the systems already generated 900 terabytes of data like just a sickeningly huge amount of data and people are just beginning to learn what we can make from all of that data or we can learn from all of that data. So let me put up a couple of obligatory kind of geeky slides. This one is just a quick look at where MLab tests are being run right now. This was from April, we're running about almost a half a million different tests being run each month now and you can see they're actually happening around the world. This kind of gets to see what we can do with some of this data. So the most popular test at MLab is of course the network speed test, right? Like so you can see how fast your internet connection is going and by looking at this data over time we can see how different country, the different kind of, this is I think median throughput for different countries over time and you can or different localities and you can see, I don't know what was going on with New York this winter but it was bad and we can start to ask, okay now that we can see this phenomenon how can we investigate and try to understand what's actually happening? The idea is not just to actually sort of be able to create graphs like this but to actually create some sort of knowledge that's actionable. So let me just actually skip through this one. This is a great one. Somebody went through and started to use this data to ask the question how neutral is the net in different countries, right? So this highlights different countries where using MLab data we've seen greater throttling or greater congestion of certain kinds of services and this is sort of a little bit of the tip of the iceberg. Here's actually another visualization I really like this one. It's actually, if we have video you'd see it's a sort of spinning globe and you can look at based on the most recent data coming out of MLab where the top throttlers are for a particular set of services and this is what we're doing right now but it really is the tip of the iceberg. So what's the future of MLab? I should just say we are deeply grateful for the support and honored by the Knight Foundation today and the grant that we have is actually gonna allow us to look at two of the big challenges that we face in expanding MLab. The first is transitioning it from a platform that's used by honestly a lot of sort of geeky open source developers and researchers into a platform that can be used by policymakers, by advocates, by journalists in an easy way. This is already beginning to happen. We've seen reports that people have used MLab data to study censorship in Iran to investigate the latest Comcast Netflix kerfuffle about congestion of Netflix traffic but the idea is to make it even easier and this grant is actually gonna be specifically to help us with improving the user experience and our user interface for MLab. A second thing and a really big challenge for MLab is how to expand the user base and this is actually something where all of you can help. So no talk at MIT would be complete without a homework assignment. Your homework assignment, your mission should you choose to accept it tonight is to go visit measurementlab.net and run one of our tests. Try the speed test that's actually really fun. Try one of the other tests. In doing that, you've added your data to this large collection that can be used by researchers to understand what's happening with the internet. Tell your friends. It's something we can all do to try to help the cause and I would just say MLab has been a labor of love so far by a collection of people both at the Open Technology Institute where I work but a community of developers and researchers who really care and they're motivated by this knowledge that what we've been talking about that in the next few years, we face a very serious global debate about how much freedom, how much openness we're gonna have online. Part of it is the debate we're having in the US that Alberto referenced. There's a bunch and it cites itself in a much bigger debate globally about these issues. Our hope is that MLab can shine a light on where we're actually seeing censorship, congestion, throttling right now and in doing so help us understand the internet better and inform that really important debate about freedom online. So we're deeply honored. Thank you very much to the Knight Foundation and thank you all, go try a test tonight. There's some easy actionable impact right there that Susan was talking about this morning. So next up we have Andrew Medlar with internet to go. Good morning. I'm Andrew Medlar and I am assistant chief for technology, content and innovation at Chicago Public Library and have I got a story for you. Once upon a time, there was a city of many communities. It was a beautiful city. It was a dynamic, engaged and connected city. But not all communities were connected equally. And in this city, there was a library. It was a dynamic, engaged and connected library. It was a library that was concerned with nurturing, learning, supporting economic advancement and strengthening all communities. And especially as the largest provider of free internet access for those citizens, it was concerned with how to do that even more and even better. And then one day along came a Knight Foundation and this Knight Foundation said, yes, yes, we too care about informed and engaged communities. And we want to help you tell and write your story. And rejoicing ensued. This is a group participation part. This is where you rejoice. Rejoicing ensued, thank you. Good, we're in this together. Well, of course, once upon a time is now. And that city is Chicago. And that is a city that led by Brenna, as we saw earlier, thank you for the setup, is involved with a dynamic technology plan that will accelerate citizens' connectivity and drive the economics of the city and the quality of life for the citizens. And that library is CPL. CPL is in every community in the city of Chicago. It has innovative leadership and a culture of experimentation and embracing of the future. And of course, that Knight is you. Thank you for being with us and making this possible. Now, here's how together we are going to move forward to write, I think, not a happy ending, but rather a happy beginning for many of the citizens in Chicago. Now, particularly, this will be for those citizens who live in the bright red spots on this map, which is where less than 50% of the residents have consistent and reliable access to the internet. We're gonna give them the opportunity to get connected by circulating Wi-Fi hotspots in a program called Internet to Go. And that will increase the citizens' comfort with digital technology and increase the awareness that the internet is relevant to them. Because, actually, that's one of the biggest villains in this story, the fact that many of those citizens don't even know or understand why or believe how the internet can actually be relevant to them. Now, this concept of the internet to Go is gonna build on Chicago Public Library's precedent and tradition of circulating information in many formats and also many tools to support information, such as the phishing polls that we circulate, the free passes to museums and cultural events, and early literacy backpacks, and most recently, 500-finch robots donated by Google, which we circulate to increase the ability for kids and adults to learn computer programming, programs and skills. And so just like all of these things, with the help of night and circulating the Wi-Fi hotspots with a single library card, any Chicagoan will have access to these in their home. We'll begin in January to increase engagement with the internet by rolling out 300 of these hotspots to three branches in targeted communities where we see that low internet use. And then, after just a few months of this pilot, we will double that number. We'll provide targeted digital skills and tutorials in these communities in partnership with the Chicago Public Library Foundation and our cyber navigators program. We'll support that skill development with a roadmap to digital proficiency. And what we'll be looking for is an increased ability by the participants, by those checking out these devices, to use these low-cost devices to access the internet themselves and begin to understand and see how it can help them with their personal goals, their career goals, their educational goals, their financial goals and why it is relevant to them. We'll survey participants, capture staff feedback, explore e-rate solutions to expansion and sustainability. And we will tell this story to others at library and other industry and non-industry events around the world. And that story is going to be one of how we reached 10,000 people in the first year, what worked and what didn't work and how, together with our Knight Foundation, we proved that libraries are agile and innovative and partners in the solution to provide internet access to all citizens of all communities, and that's no fairytale. Thank you. Next up, we have Jillian York, Jillian. Jillian's with the onlinecensorship.org. Hi, I'm Jillian York, and I'm gonna be talking about a project that I co-founded a couple years ago with a good friend of mine, Rumsie Jabber. So this project is called onlinecensorship.org. And what we do is we crowd-source reports, user-generated reports of takedowns and account deactivations on privately-owned online platforms. So censorship, but that's something only governments do is what I hear a lot. Well, in fact, as our conversations increasingly take place in what we think of as the online public sphere, we need to come to the realization that this public sphere is, in fact, owned by private companies, and that these private companies are making the rules. So let me give you a couple examples of what I mean. So Facebook, investigating the removal of a post from former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. What did she say? Was it something illegal? Probably not. Flickr taking down an Egyptian blogger's photos after the Arab Spring uprising and citing community guidelines violations. We've seen Twitter take down, repeatedly take down accounts belonging to foreign terrorist organizations. Is this against the law? Maybe, maybe not, but they're not transparent about this practice. And then YouTube banning a Tunisian media site from uploading content at all to their platform. And there are many, many more cases like this. And so Rebecca McKinnon, who's here today, has talked about these companies being the sovereigns of cyberspace. They make the rules, it's their world, and we just live in this world. And this is really fundamentally true if you look at the terms of service or community guidelines on these different platforms. They really do. So some of them will say, for example, nudity is not allowed, but there are circumstances where we think that death threats are okay. And that's the kind of values that these companies are bringing forward. They're kind of all over the place. So what we came up with is a platform called onlinecensorship.org that takes reports from our users. Now we're focusing in the first phase on five popular platforms. That's Google+, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. What we want to do is capture these reports. Now users respond to a series of questions that we're working on reiterating and designing to get the best possible data that we can. We'll ask them to give us screenshots and other evidence, such as correspondence with the companies to make our data as robust as possible. And that data will contribute to research, analysis, and advocacy. So the project will be assisted by a team of expert and academic advisors. Now if anyone in this room is really interested in the project, we're looking for more people to add to that, so please come talk to me after. It'll be available in at least eight languages. So hopefully we can make this spread as far as possible and then add some on as we go. And we'll be enhanced by visualizations from my co-founder Remzi's team at Visualizing Impact. Now what do we hope to do with this information? Well, the first thing is we just want to learn about how social media companies are enforcing their terms of use. And then we want to do comparative analyses of how these companies define certain concepts in practice. So hate speech, for example. Most of the online platforms that we use every day ban hate speech, and we may or may not agree with that, but how are they defining it? What does that look like as they apply it in practice? We want to raise public awareness more generally of corporate limitations on speech. So this is something that I find that the more and more I talk about it, the less people seem to know about this issue. And so increasingly, as we're having these conversations on Facebook or Twitter or wherever, I want people to be aware of the fact that this is not a free speech zone, so to speak. And finally, we hope to engage with companies on ways in which they can improve their practices, their terms, and their processes for dealing with this kind of issue. So that's the project. If you've got any questions for me, my contact info is there, and you can follow the project on Twitter and Facebook. Thank you. Thank you, Gillian. And up next, we have Rebecca McKinnon and with the Ranking Digital Rights, Rebecca. Thanks very much. My name's Rebecca McKinnon. Thank you, Gillian, for the shout-out. I'm with Ranking Digital Rights, and we are going to be putting out a regular ranking of the world's most powerful internet telecommunications and other powerful tech companies on criteria related to freedom of expression and privacy. What are they doing to respect and protect their users' rights? And this is very much based on an issue we've been talking about all day, the fact that the relationship between people and their governments and their societies more generally is increasingly mediated by the internet and network mobile devices. And what we're learning, and the reason why this night news challenge exists, is the recognition that this might, this isn't automatically gonna turn out well. We have to make sure, we actually have to actively work to ensure that the internet evolves in a manner that is compatible with democracy, that was compatible with decentralized innovation, and that is compatible with human rights. We have to work for that. That means that we need to make sure that governments that are regulating and interfering with and surveilling our activities on the internet are held accountable. And we also have to make sure that companies, similarly, who are shaping what you can and cannot do with their platforms and services, that they too are held accountable and that we're putting the right kinds of pressures and incentives on them to make them move the technology in the right way. Now there's actually a number of efforts to benchmark what governments are doing. This is a Freedom House, Freedom on the Net report that they put out every year, and they've actually found that internet freedom has been declining over the past three years, and last year it took a particularly deep dive. Not good news. The web index, we have someone from the World Wide Web Foundation, Renata, where are you? She's somewhere around here. Anyway, Renata is with the World Wide Web Foundation. They put out the web index. They're also benchmarking nation states, governments on their performance. Sweden did best last year. The US and the UK, particularly on Freeman Openness, did really crappily last year. I wonder why. And so, but what about the sovereigns of cyberspace that Jillian just referenced? The platforms and networks that we all depend on, they are shaped by the personal ideologies of their CEOs, by the values of people who run the companies who are shaping the software, shaping the terms of service, the privacy policies, et cetera. There's no benchmark. How do these folks stack up? Not just in the United States but globally. We talked about sort of some global implications earlier today as well. That's what we're trying to do. And we're learning from the experience of a number of other projects that have been ranking companies on other issues behind the brands published by Oxfam is benchmarking the human rights impact of food companies around the world. You have the Access to Medicines Index, which is benchmarking companies on whether or not they're actually giving access to lifesaving medicines to the people around the world who need it most and have the least amount of money. So there's evidence that companies respond to these rankings and actually compete to improve. So we are drawing on those lessons in that experience. We're working with Sustainalytics, which is a global responsible investment research firm that specializes in doing these kinds of rankings and making sure that not only are we providing information to consumers and users who can make more informed choices about what they want to use, but also informing investors because we know that CEOs and boards really care about what investors think. And so this will help to provide yet another aspect in our theory of change to incentivize companies to be responsible and accountable. So where are we now? We are getting ready to do a pilot on our methodology. We've been in research and development phase and another piece of homework for you to add to Alan's homework that he assigned earlier is we've put out a draft methodology for public consultation. We would really love your feedback on this. So please go to our website rankingdigitalrights.org, check out our methodology, let us know what you think. Are we asking the right questions? Are we doing it in the right way? Once we have kind of finalized the methodology, we're going to be doing a pilot on it later this year and then hope to begin implementing the ranking on a regular basis starting 2015. What kinds of things are in our criteria? Are companies carrying out human rights impact assessments? So before a telecommunications company goes into, oh, I don't know, let's say Crimea and does it deal with the government there for internet access? Are they carrying out a human rights impact assessment about what their policies and practices are gonna mean? How transparent are companies being about what they're doing with your data, both in terms of their private processes but also how they're responding to government requests? Many of you have heard about transparency reporting. We're trying to incentivize that. Terms of service, what are companies doing with their terms of service? Jillian talked about that earlier. Privacy policies. You'd be surprised how many companies, big ones around the world, kind of barely have privacy policies. We're trying to incentivize not only existence of them, but good ones and good practices when it comes to what is in those privacy policies and companies being honest about what they're doing with your data. And security standards. What kinds of security standards are companies implementing if they're thinking about these things at all? Again, trying to incentivize all of these different types of things. You can go to our website, check it out. Another kind of just general request. Obviously we're in the research and development phase. We're gonna be launching the ranking next year. We're looking for partners, media partners particularly, to work on data visualizations, getting this data out. Who we're gonna engage with on the activism side to make sure that publics are really engaging with this data and making sure that attention is called to it and that change can happen after that. So thank you very much and I look forward to talking to all of you further. Thanks. Great. Next up we have Lillia Markham with TechSecure. Lillia. All right. Hi, everyone. I'm Lillia and I'm from OpenWhisper Systems. Today, so OpenWhisper Systems makes mobile communication apps like TechSecure that protect your privacy. Not that anyone here needs something like that because I'm sure you all have nothing to hide. But let's just say, for the sake of argument that some of you are journalists and you might occasionally wanna have a private communication with a source or maybe you're part of a group of activists who are organizing to protest against the government or a large corporation. You need to be able to communicate freely and openly together, but privately.  Unfortunately, the face of online security has not traditionally been a pretty one. In order to even get started with a protocol like OTR or PGP, you're gonna need some 10-page tutorial with screenshots and explanatory texts and links to learn more. Maybe if you're really lucky, someone will make you a video and post it online like this one, which was rumored to have been made by Edward Snowden for Glen Greenwald in order to teach him how to use encrypted email. And it still didn't work. PGP has failed what we now know as the Greenwald Test. So at Whisper Systems, we don't think it has to be this hard. In the security community, we know how to protect data. And in the developer community, we know how to make beautiful apps that people wanna use every day. And TechSecure is the marriage of those two worlds. It's a secure messaging app that looks and acts almost exactly like the messaging apps and chat apps that you use today. But it adds a layer of security that is almost invisible to the user. So how does it work? Well, if you send a message through TechSecure to another TechSecure user, whether it's text, pictures, or video, that content is gonna be automatically encrypted so that only the intended recipient can read it.  If and when that person decides to install TechSecure, all your messages from then on forward will be automatically encrypted. Another nice feature is that it saves your SMS usage. If at all possible, the encrypted content will travel over the internet, falling back to SMS as we need, as needed. You'll see we also support emoji, very important. Another feature of TechSecure, which was just added earlier this year is group chat. So you can make a group that has a name, a picture, and a list of members. All that information is part of the encrypted content, so the server doesn't know who's in the group, what it's for. And finally, whether your messages were encrypted in flight, they're going to be encrypted at rest on your phone, which means that your messages will not fall into the wrong hands even if your device does. Okay, so that's the dream, a messaging app that is self-explanatory, but also secure. And we've made a lot of progress on that. We have the axolotl protocol, which is an open encryption protocol. Anyone is free to build encrypted apps on top of it. It's a collaboration between Moxie, Marlon Spike, and Trevor Perrin to very well-respected minds in the field of cryptography today. Using that protocol, we've developed TechSecure, which you've just seen. It's a secure text and chat app for Android. We also have a secure calling app for Android called RedPhone. And those apps are out in the wild. They're free and open source. And we have a huge community of contributors who help us iterate and improve on them every day. But we're not done yet. We haven't quite solved the problem of secure communication for everyone. For one thing, we have no iPhone apps released so far. We are working on them. They're coming along. We expect them to be out this year. We're also going to expand to the desktop. We're working on a browser extension so that you're not limited to just using this protocol on your phone. You can use it from your computer. And down the road, we also want to integrate our text and voice apps into a single unified secure communication experience that's easy enough for everyone to use every day. To do that, we're going to need a little bit more help. Although we do have a lot of open source contributors, we have only a couple full-time developers who are shepherding those changes and contributions into one app. And that's a full-time job. So we're going to need more help on the development side and on the design side. And this night grant is really going to go directly to that effort and make it possible for us to bring secure communications to everyone in their everyday lives. So thank you very much, Night Foundation. You want Twitter handles? We've got Twitter handles. And I look forward to talking to any of you more about TechSecure later in the day and tomorrow. Thank you. Thank you so much. And finally, we have Dan Topolaga with Who Are The Gatekeepers? Dan. Hello. I will jump right into the story. OK, we are in Ukraine. It's case number one. Imagine yourself being in Maidan Square. And all of a sudden, you receive a message on your mobile phone saying the following, dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance. And if you don't leave in five minutes, you will be fined or being arrested. And this is a funny message. It's not a fake. It's very true. Case number two, we are in Turkey now. Imagine yourself, again, being this time a citizen of Turkey. You are waiting for the next election scheduled to take place in the following month. Every morning, you go to the internet, of course, searching for the news. However, on this particular morning, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, a couple of other websites are all down. What do these pages have in common? The fact that, until yesterday, they have disseminated articles and text criticizing the government. And here we are. And this is not fake, too. This is very real. I know that Susan is already very outraged. But this happened in reality. This is not an exercise of imagination. So what do these two cases have in common? Ukraine and Turkey. Can somebody point out what do they have in common? What we can observe here? We can observe the emerge of a new series of relevant actors on the ground, internet service providers, and telecom companies. We are not used to focus on these particular companies, but they started to play together with the politicians, as we can notice. So I'm coming from Romania. It's a country from Eastern Europe close to Ukraine, in the middle of Ukraine and Turkey. Fortunately, all this didn't happen in my country yet. But nonetheless, they can happen anytime. And why is that? Because we don't know the name of internet service providers and telecom owners. I mean, we know the name, but we do not know what connection they have with politicians, what connections they have with organized crime, if they have with corruption, and so forth. And this represents exactly the objective of our project. We are trying to map the ESP and telecom owners of the region. You see the whole region in Eastern Europe? We have Ukraine up there. We have Turkey down. And a whole region in Eastern Europe that could have any time this kind of problem. So you are asking probably yourself, why should we take care about all this company? And I will try to summarize a little bit. Because so long they remain unknown in the shadow, they can continue to manipulate and threaten the ordinary citizens. Two, because only by learning about them we will be able to put pressure on governments and relevant authorities to change the legislation or available regulation where it's needed. And C, three. But mostly because we should learn about these companies because we are dealing with the new actors playing in the ground and with a new phenomenon. And if you want to take control over the situation, I think we must first to be able to deeply understand it. I would notice that manipulating and controlling the access to information via traditional instruments, TV station, radio, newspaper takes time. And why not money? Nonetheless, politicians are always rapidly learning the new bad habits. And this will spread in the region probably very fast because of this capacity of learning by politicians, of course. And they already observe probably that they have the capacity to cut off completely the access to the information or to distribute instant dedicated messages. It's cheaper, it's faster, it's more effective to control over these companies. So I must express in the final my gratitude for those who support the efforts to improve the transparency of private and governmental affairs. We thank the Knight Foundation for supporting this project on behalf of my colleagues from Romania. And I want to thank all of you for your attention. Thank you very much. Great. So what if we give another round of applause to all the winners? That'd be great. Great set, I think. So we're doing something a little different this year, which is we're also announcing prototype winners for this. So we have a prototype fund that we've started at Knight Foundation, which has been around for about a year and a half. And we've changed it. We've had several iterations with it. But the notion of the prototype fund is that we give small amounts of money to start or create an early version of your idea. That is $35,000 or less. Shockingly, they're almost all $35,000. But we do it as a way of recognizing an idea that may not have an organization behind it and not fully baked yet. So this is always open. We have a deadline of August 1 for the next cohort of these. So if you have an idea that you're thinking about and you want to test it out and put a version of it out in the world, this is a great way to do that. We also, if you're selected as a prototype winner, we do a two-day human-centered design training with the rest of the group to help you engage with consumers and really focus on what the problem is for an audience that you have. So we've actually been moving prototype winners out of the news challenge. People who submit to the news challenge and we move them prototypes, we're doing that kind of silently. It was a great intake for us around that. So we wanted, though, to recognize, change out of it and recognize that we think these ideas are great and that we want to see them start iterating on it and building out of the world. So without further ado, what I'm going to do is just tell you the idea, the title of the idea that people involved with it a little bit about it. And when I call your name, just stand up in the audience and then we'll hold our applause to the end. So we have 10 winners. The first one is the Anti-Sensorship Alert System by Center for Rights. This is a series of tools that allows the public to see a blocked website. And the project lead on this is Tiffany Chang and Evan Greer is here supporting the project. Breeders by Swell Creative Group, a mobile app that helps parents navigate the technology and online content available for their kids. The lead on that is Philip Holmes. Serted Dig by University of Kansas, a system that enables secure communications and helps people verify information online. Michael Williams is the lead there. Check Desk by Medan, a tool that helps journalists quickly verify the source of information in daily situations and that's Tom True-Nerd right there. Inquisit by Whirligig, a tool that helps groups collaborate together on complex research projects and that's Seth Kaufman and Maria Pazzarotti. Poking the Bear, yay, by Satellite Systems, a new family of tools that can detect improved network neutrality violations. The lead on that is Bart Stidham. Report a Troll by Hollaback, a platform where victims can safely report online harassment and volunteers can respond. The project lead on that is Emily May and Deb Johnny Roy is here with the project. Safe Travels Online by Tibet Action Institute, resources that help new users learn how to safely navigate the internet. That's Nathan Fratus. Swarm Eyes by the Guardian Media Group, a tool that allows journalists to conduct research with the help of others. Matt McAllister is the lead on that. And finally, Threshold Future Incorporated, an internet-themed virtual currency that makes it easier for open internet projects to find funding and the leads on that are Elizabeth Stark and Mike Sofair. So a round of applause for our prototype winners. And if you, I would encourage you if you wanna learn more, seek them out. It's a great thing. Again, August 1st is the deadline so if you have something that you're thinking about doing, it's open. There's no theme, this happened to be theme because of the contest, but it's generally any idea that impacts media information and journalism. With that, we'll end our morning. Thanks for paying such good attention and we have lunch outside. Thank you so much.


MAPCreator is an international-focused organization and we do business all around the globe. We are a really fresh young company with an evolved product. It's a product that also changes together with the needs of the customers. MAPS4NEWS is our main product and with MAPS4NEWS we provide newsrooms with an easy-to-use mapping software solution. Besides MAPS4NEWS we have with MAPS4NEWS a proposition to small, customized MAPS for mailpieces. Three years ago we were starting using Superoffice, quite intense and we still do. Before we basically saved everything in files, in Outlook. We have a big amount of customers and potential customers and it was a big hassle to find all the details and the data of the past. And today we have everything on one location. I was convinced that Superoffice could make a difference for us and basically the easy implementation we had with Superoffice given the decision internally to have all our companies under this roof working with Superoffice. We have locations throughout the world. Our sales agents can work with Superoffice and having everything on one location in the CRM system is a big, big benefit. When I'm driving to a customer it's easy with Superoffice because you have your pocket CRM and you have the address, you have the contact information. Support and marketing are also working with the various Superoffice models and it keeps all the departments, all the people of the company very close to each other. We use Superoffice to create segments of our target audiences then we create newsletters or campaigns that we can really send to that specific group. We can use Superoffice to create those segments directly out of our core database with customer information. We really try to look at every situation as personal as possible and try to give them the best possible feeling because we know if they become a customer they will stay a customer for a long time.


Salaam's COP 27 is underway in Egypt. We have early updates plus we look at whether loss and damages will become just a catchphrase or whether it might lead to an actual climate fund. What are the prospects for lasting peace in Ethiopia and why is a UK minister of trade visiting Taiwan? Prashantan Anish of People's Dispatch will join us on the show today to talk about some of these questions. First up, the United Nations COP 27 climate summit began as many of us know on Sunday, 6th of November, with attending countries agreeing to discuss a deal for richer developed nations to provide financial support as well as reparations to economically more vulnerable countries who are suffering most immediately from loss and damage due to human-induced climate change. The 27th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the UNFCCC, is scheduled to last for two weeks and also as many of us already know, is being held in Shamal Sheikh in Egypt. The summit began late because of intense negotiations regarding the agenda itself. But now the things are officially underway. Prashant, like I said earlier, is in studio to discuss with me what is up at this chronicle of climate chaos. Prashant, good to have you back in studio. Latest updates or early updates from COP 27? Right, Salaam. So, I mean, this is just the first few days of the COP meeting, the Conference of Parties as it's called, and we have a huge number of people, tens of thousands of people from almost every country in the world gathering, and lots of world leaders, about 120 or so. Now the first few days are going to be a largely about leaders speaking, delivering remarks about how it's an urgent issue. We are going to have all the regular statements that we expect, some political ground standing, people also playing to their galleries at home. We know, for instance, that Boris Johnson was also there, made some snaggy comments trying to make a political point. But the first few days are probably on the one hand, you're going to see this public phase of the event, so to speak. On the other hand, backroom negotiations also taking place. So, it's a bit too early to talk about conclusions as of now. But what some of the initial, this is also a good time to actually take stock of what basically the extent of the problem is, and this extent of the problem is quite bad. Because I think the most recent reports that have come out show that the proposal or the hope of reducing the temperature increase to 1.5 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels, which has been the hope for the longest time, that is going to be very difficult to meet. So, according to the current pledges made by countries to cut carbon emissions to sort of, you know, say ameliorate the impact of climate change, according to the current pledges we are looking at a 2.5 degree increase by the end of the century. Now, this is going to have disastrous impacts by the end of the century, of course. We'll talk about what's happening now separately. But a 2.5 degree Celsius is going to be disastrous, it's going to, you know, cause mass levels of extinction, huge rise in water, in sea levels for instance, droughts, fires. The very geography of the planet in some sense is the very nature of human civilization, which has remained more or less constant for hundreds of years in various ways, is likely to be under threat if such an increase takes place. And the fact is that unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be too much action that is taking place on the ground countries, making pledges of course, but that's really not enough. Now, that's one part of it. The other part of it of course is that right now, there is an ongoing disaster taking place and sometimes while talking about climate change, we really kind of forget about that because you tend to sort of picture it as a future danger. But the fact is that right now across the world, we've been seeing the impact of this. We saw the disastrous floods in Pakistan, which claimed the lives of over 1,700 people. We've seen droughts, we've seen fires, we've seen flash floods, extreme weather events of all sorts taking place, unseasonal rain, storms which are wrecking havoc, which are destroying lives across the planet. And all these are linked to climate change. And the fact is that, so it's wrong on the one hand to call it, you know, a kind of future disaster, so to speak. And that's one part of it. On the other hand, of course, many of these events are also contributing to what is already a grave crisis for a large part of the world's population. If you look at an issue like hunger, if you look at an issue like education, malnutrition, poverty, all these are being accentuated by climate change, of course. But all these are also, but combating and dealing with all these are also essential to actually deal with climate change because, you know, what is the point of a green, new deal or, you know, some kind of action on renewable energies, which makes small sections of the people rich through that process, while a bulk of the world remains poor and unable to, you know, hold on to any shred of humanity, so to speak. So I think these are all questions which are not really being addressed. And a lot of this is because the fact that technological solutions are important, pledges are important, but this is also a question of capitalism itself. And that is a debate which does not come into COP 27 at all. Because unless the way society is structured, which is right now, capitalism is changed, we are not going to, we are not seeing a solution to many of the core questions posed by the climate crisis. And of course, one important point to note is that this is also being used by Egypt to whitewash its image. Whereas, Al Abdul Fateh, tens of thousands of other political prisoners are suffering horrible, you know, conditions in prisons, Al is on a hunger strike, he's apparently stopped consuming water. So very important to keep a watch on that as well. Right. You brought up multiple issues there, Prashant, which also opens up so much space for conversation. But because we're limited on time, the aspect I think we can stick to today is, as an immediate counter to some of those immediate impacts, the global South and particularly like countries in Asia that have seen the most impact of these recent disasters, are talking about loss and damages. Now, it's a good starting point. How do you see this kind of impacting the overall negotiations? Right. So loss and damage, it's going to be one of those terms is going to become popular all across the world right now. So loss and damage is something that's been around for some time. It's basically the question of the demand is for financing, for money, basically, to sort of, you know, adapt to help countries adapt to the world is already existing right now. It's not about future changes. It is basically to help to compensate countries for the suffering they're already going through. So it's not surprising that Pakistan introduced the resolution on the behalf of the G77 plus China, it's called a group of countries. And now this is something that has been resisted by the West for the longest time. In fact, last year, it also came up at that point, the West made some noises, but refused to commit for a fund per se. They said, you know, we'll discuss it, etc. Now it's come back on the agenda. We can be sure that the West is again going to sort of try to delay it as much as possible because the moment you agree to it, you have to commit to money. Now an important thing to note in this context is that there was already a commitment that 100 billion dollars a year would be, you know, assigned or will be given for a climate fund. And that hasn't happened. In fact, what the amount that has been pledged a lot of it, the pledges have been inflated or the actually countries are not paying so much according to Oxfam. And equally importantly, the fact is that a huge amount of this money is in the form of loans. So basically, countries are going into debt and are being further trapped into that debt cycle while trying to adjust to climate change. And we need to remember leaders are already pointing this out that a lot of the emissions that we talk carbon emissions that we're talking about are due to colonialism, they're due to exploitation, they're due to the kind of industrial empires that the Western countries were able to build up by extracting resources from the global south. So in that way, it is a core question of justice over generations that we're talking about here. But the fact remains that there's been no the solution you offered by the Western countries and the rich is to further throw poorer countries into debt. And which is why one of the demands has also been for some kind of reform of the international financing system. Like what is the point if in order to support your in order to help your people who are suffering from climate disasters, you put more debt on them. That's horribly unfair. And I think this is a key question that's going to come up again and again. Now, whether by the end of COP 27, we are going to see an agreement on a loss and damage fund is a big question. If so, what form will it take equally big question? Because, you know, there could be an in principle agreement for a fund, but the clauses, the details, the values of the details could be so much that it won't ultimately work out to anything at all. So that's a big question to consider. It's I would say it's a good thing that it's by it's on the agenda. Something at least that's been asked for since the nineties. Exactly. And I think the globally across the world, there is a recognition of both the need for this as well as its connection to colonialism, imperialism, exploitation. But the I mean, it's a big question as to whether the richer countries which have been responsible for the bulk of the emissions. For instance, the United States is a huge chunk in this, whether these countries are going to actually sit down and say that, you know, what the it's our common heritage, it's our common responsibility over the centuries that we're talking about. And let's now try to solve this, whether that will happen is a different question altogether. Yeah, it comes back to like you were saying the structure in which all of this is happening. Absolutely. Alright. We'll ask you to stick around because we want also your insights on the next story back in a minute. A permanent cessation of hostilities has been agreed on between the Ethiopian government and the Tigrayan people's liberation front, potentially bringing to an end two years of war and horrendous atrocities, as things stand, the TPLF will disarm within 30 days and recognize the legitimacy of the government of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. But those who have been following the war have consistently noted that backed by the United States, the TPLF has created massive damage to the state and the people, including stealing aid, violating ceasefires and exploiting all kinds of ethnic conflicts to further its objectives. So what does the settlement mean? What are what is the structure that it has? And perhaps most importantly, will the United States accept the prospect of peace? Prashant is still with us. He's been following the story closely and has all the details. Prashant, from what we know so far, what is the peace deal about? How is it structured? Right. So we have a very good detailed story from our colleague, Pawan, which is on the side. So this war has been going on for about just about two years and right now it was and the peace deal was signed the day before the second anniversary of the war. So basically what we, this context business, the TPLF, the Degree People's Liberation Front, which was in power for Ethiopia for 27 years from the 90s onwards, they were restricted back to their state, which is Tigray. In 2020, they started the civil war, which has gone on for two years. Huge human rights, huge disaster in terms of rights, in terms of humanitarian crisis. Finally, a peace deal signed under the leadership of the African Union, between the Ethiopian government of Abiy Ahmed and the Degree People's Liberation Front. Now, the key aspect, one important thing also of course, notice that the TPLF by many, many people consider it to be a proxy of the United States in the region. The US had back the TPLF strongly when it was in control of Ethiopia and reportedly continues to do so even now. So a couple of key things, of course, one is the fact that for all ends and purposes, this marks in various ways a surrender of the TPLF militarily because what the peace deal calls for is a disarmament of heavy weapons in a very short period of time and a complete disarmament within 30 days of the deal being signed, which is the first week of December or so, of course, could be extended. Negotiations are going on between the government and the TPLF. It talks about the fact that there is a recognition that the only armed force in Ethiopia should be the Ethiopian military. On the other hand, it talks about the possibility of integrating the TPLF into the federal and democratic structures of the country. It talks about the Ethiopian defense forces entering Tigray and assuming whatever operational control of the region and federal government control of the region. All of this is good on paper, of course. Now, big question, of course, how much of this will be implemented because we do know that the TPLF has a bit of history of agreeing to ceasefires every time it has faced military setbacks. And then at the right moment, withdrawing from them and launching a fresh assault. And we also know that, so that's a big question. So whether the ceasefire will hold is really something that a lot of people are hoping for it. But a lot of people are also rightly worried about it considering the TPLF's previous experiences and its previous behavior so far. Of course, also backed by the United States, which allows perhaps this rebuilding and successive offenses to then take place. So what does the future look like, given all of these factors? So I think two or three questions are very important. Dear one, the first of all is the question of whether, like we said, the TPLF will lead our arms properly, whether the TPLF will permit other democratic forces to work inside Tigray itself, which will only then will the true democratic process be meaningful. What does it mean? There's a lot of internal debate about certain other regions which are a part of the Amhara state, whether that the Tigrayans will try to keep control of those states, although they do belong to the state of Amhara itself. So there are questions of tensions around communities that are still not entirely settled. There is some amount of concern over this, some people have expressed concern over the fact that whether this agreement lets off the TPLF too easily without any real questions of justice, without any real questions of the TPLF leaders being forced to answer for whatever they've been responsible for. But it also does look, there is a general, nonetheless there is a general sense of, I wouldn't say enthusiasm but some amount of hope in the sense that because I think there's also the question of the TPLF also having to answer to its own internal constancy and the question of why this war even took place is a question that is going to be raised against the TPLF leaders. So that process is also likely to happen. So I think a lot depends in the coming weeks and months of how much of these processes which are defined by the peace agreement actually take place and in good spirit, that's very important as well. So if the disarmament takes place properly and there is then there is a possibility of successful integration of the state more closely into the federal processes. So Ethiopian government on the one hand will have to be watchful of any possibilities of rearmament or remobilization by the TPLF. On the other hand it will also have to make sure that it is also in that sense, it is open in the sense it is able to sort of give the people of Tigray the opportunity to sort of reintegrate as much as possible while say while moving out the rogue elements who wish to continue the conflict as well. So it's a bit of a difficult game for the Ethiopian government as well. So remains to be seen what's going to happen. Perhaps Colombia for example can offer a model there. And I guess it's also important from a regional perspective. Absolutely. The Horn of Africa bringing peace there, bringing regional cooperation there very important right now. Something the U.S. does not necessarily want because it would rather prefer some amount of conflict over there. Alright thanks very much Prasanth for all of that. UK Minister of State for Trade and Member of Parliament Greg Hines is scheduled to visit Taiwan. The visit follows a series of trips of course by US officials including but not limited to Nancy Pelosi the Speaker of the House of Representatives. These visits are seen by Beijing and also neutral commentators as diplomatic escalations that come together with the US's policy of encirclement that appears the best solution Washington could come up with to hang on to its waning global hegemony. And of course push the world into forever escalating arms races. Anish joined us via video conference to talk more about all of these subjects. Anish welcome back to the show. The visit in itself not the surprising part of the news point here as much as the level at which it's taking place. From what we've heard from the British government so far what is the sort of objective or purpose of this trip? The stated objective is that it is a trade talk between two countries or at least between two governments. Whether or not Britain considers Taiwan to be a separate country is a different thing altogether obviously it doesn't and its official capacity but it has established like many other western nations very close ties with Taiwan especially trade and commerce. Britain and Taiwan has something like 8 billion pounds of trade happening annually so definitely there is something that they would do this has been this is sort of like the fifth 25th I think yeah the 25th annual meeting and it is also the first in-person meeting since the pandemic started so but at the same time as you pointed out the level at which it is happening right now there is a cabinet minister visiting the visiting Taiwan at a time especially at a time when tensions are high in the region not just with China but also between the two Koreas it shows that there is something definitely problematic about this visit and China wants that sort of and coming just like barely a month after month or two after Nancy Pelosi the US House Speaker made an official visit to Taiwan it is definitely upping the ante in terms of how US allies are trying to deal with the region itself. On top of that there is another factor that matters in this case which is how the wording happened because obviously Taiwan is trying to keep it very low key or in the sense that it has not diapers a lot of details about how the visit will happen the two-day visit will happen what are the terms and conditions of the talks the agenda of talks but the British minister Greg Hans was already talked about these two governments being champions of democracy and free trade so definitely there is also this ideological slant behind this visit and it is also even if they do not explicitly make any statements like Pelosi did with her visit even if there was no statement by Hans in Taiwan it can definitely hamper a lot of any kind of attempt to lower the tensions for the region especially. So Anish we have talked several times on this show about how the US has been approaching and you mentioned Nancy Pelosi's visit as well how the US has been approaching militarily this creating this policy of encirclement with regards to China and how these diplomatic sort of offensive measures fit into that wider strategy with regards to China so from a neutral perspective or from a rest of the world perspective how problematic is it this constant creation of flashpoints in a region that already has so many political conflicts. Well it is going to have long term effects obviously because as the election we also need to know that much like when we talk about US midterms there's a midterm that will be happening in Taiwan as well local governments will be elected and that is also where a lot of ideological standpoints will be up for debate public speaking and you have the what are often called in the western media probes paging and the anti-bullying camps going head to head on a lot of matters. Taiwan being the champion of democracy there's a problematic statement to make so you're talking trying to say that it has a separate political identity as separate from China while you maintain an official policy that China as a poll includes Taiwan so that is obviously a problematic statement to make it also kind of puts a whole lot of other things into a volatile position especially when you talk about not because the one China policy at the heart of it is recognizing the sovereignty of China in dealing with its own conflicts so whatever conflict may happen between Taiwan and China it is something that has to be dealt with by Taiwan and China and nobody else ideally speaking but that is what that's not happening at the moment you already have nations making statements after statements making moves military moves even to supposedly prevent the Chinese invasion of Taiwan as they say and you already have Japan trying to talk about re-arming itself by 2027 you already have US shifting nuclear capable bombers to Australia and South Korea you have a whole host of other issues you have military drills happening joint military drills happening not just earlier all of these were concentrated just against North Korea but now it is something that is happening against China as well on a very on the largest scale so all of these factors definitely are going to impact relations entirely but also it is going to put tensions that are now all time high when it comes to China and not just China but China and western high powers. Right thanks very much for that update Anish that's a wrap for this episode of daily debrief we'll of course be back tomorrow same time same place until then for more details on all of these stories we invite you as always to head to our website peoplesdispatch.org and don't forget to give us a follow on the social media platform of your choice we'll be back same time same place like I said but tomorrow until then thank you for watching stay safe goodbye