Hello everyone and welcome to Inside Leather History, a fireside chat. I'm Doug O'Keefe. I'm the producer and the host of the chats, which are a program of the Leather Archives and Museum. Today is Friday, March 11th, and it's 2022. I'm sitting down today with Mr. John Britton. John was the very first Mr. Classic Leather. What year was that, John? It was 1917. Okay. I was one of your judges, and that was a wonderful contest. It was interesting. Let's start at the very beginning, though. Tell us a little bit about where you're from and a little bit about your family life. Okay. I was raised in a small town of less than 5,000 people. We were fairly prominent. My father had a Chevrolet dealership. And then after he passed away, my mother remarried, and it was kind of the typical stepfather thing. He had been an army sergeant.  And my stepfather was 6'5", and typical army sergeant with the crew cut and everything. And so it was a love-hate relationship. He put up with me. In school, we had the largest graduating class ever, 72 people. And I've talked to many people that have had thousands in their graduating class. So I knew everyone, and everyone knew me, small town. What small town was it? Indiana, Ohio. Tell us a little bit about your coming out. You were sent to a priest for treatment, but he said something very interesting to you. Yes. When my parents found out that I was a homosexual because we didn't use the term gay back then, they sent me to the minister so that he could straighten me out. And during our conversation, he said, doesn't it hurt? And I said, doesn't what hurt? Because I knew, all I knew was being oral at that time.  And I thought, oh, I never thought of that. That begs the question why he did. Yes. Now, how did your parents discover you were homosexual? Because of fight at school. That someone decided they were going to fight on the queer. And I hate that word. Because that was a nasty word then. And I had a tooth knocked out. So there was no hiding the fight. And that's when they found out. And my stepfather said, if I find out you've done it again, I will throw you across the room against the wall. Even if it means losing my, losing your mother. Did he mean because you were in a fight or because you were homosexual or both? Because I was a homosexual. It didn't look good on the family in a small town. What were your mother's thoughts? She cried. And again, for her, it's what if the people found out about it at the country club? Oh, my gosh. So what did you do about it? I kept on going. Just trying to keep it a little more secret. Used to have fun with coming home and there was an abandoned car garage. And one or two or three or four of us would go in and started out with a peeing contest to see whose piss could go the furthest. And then it started with people getting erect. Other people had their penises out. And then I'd gone to Boy Scout camp. And they had made up a game or knew about a game or something called flip strip. And two guys plus a third one would flip a coin and you'd call heads or tails.     I was told to do it. So I did it. And that's kind of how I got started. I can't help but wonder what was going on in their worlds that they knew about that. I think they kind of knew about me. I mean, I wasn't the butcher's thing on the block. I didn't do sports. I was in the band. So, you know, I just wasn't the butcher's thing. And they kind of assumed that I was queer and wanted to use it to their own advantage. So how many people were involved at that time? Do you even know? Well, Boy Scout Camp, there was only three in the contest. I mean, the flipper and the two that were stripped with the two strippers. And at one point there were a couple others just watching. Okay. And thinking back on this, I never did see the coin, whether it was heads or tails, I was just told what it was. So I think it was kind of rigged. As a young boy, what were your thoughts on doing that? How are you feeling about that? It just seemed natural. Okay. But you said as you got a little older that you sucked off half the high school football team. Tell us about that. Well, it started with one on one. And when it was one on one, it was usually both ways.  Then it got to be two or three at a time. And there was no reciprocation. They didn't want anyone else to know that they had done it. And that just kind of got bigger and bigger. And more people got involved. There was never a lot at one time, maybe three. I think a couple of times there were four. My jaw would get sore. But that's just how it worked in half of them. I did half the team and half the team that I did did me. Oh, okay. As long as it was on one on one basis. Okay. But how did this even come up? It was with the pissing contest. And then starting to get erect. Of course it was because they were seeing other people's. Cox out. That they're starting to get erect, but they were still straight. Yeah. So. And then after the boycott camp, it just kind of seemed to be natural to happen. So during this time. Did you have any idea about homosexuality at all? No. In my high school, I believe there were only two of us. He was two years younger than I was.  Although a few years later. I did run into a guy that was had been the captain of the football team and a gay bar. Hmm.  What year did you graduate high school? 1961. Okay. Okay. So society in those days nowhere near as open as we know it now. Correct. Tell us about your very first visit to a gay bar. That was in Toledo, Ohio. Yes. I had gone to Michigan State to be a florist. I was doing on the job training in Flint.  And he knew I was. And we made a trip to Toledo. To a gay bar, which I never knew anything like that. It existed. Oh, and I walked in. It was the scenic bar, scenic bar. Yes. Okay. And there were men dancing. And I was aghast because they were dancing with each other. There were no women. I had never seen or thought of that. So I joined in. It was just natural. Tell us a little more about it. What else did you see in the bar? Oh, kissing. But it was all, you know, just in the bar. It was not in public. So it was like a private club.  Kind of like coming out. Now, in those days, there was a lot of harassment of gay bars. Did you ever experience that in the scenic bar in Toledo? No, but when I moved to Buffalo, New York, I was technical director for a professional theater. And went to the only gay bar in Buffalo at that time. That would be in 63. And. No. 70. 1970. Okay. And the bar was rated by the police. They had nothing better to do that night.  And everyone had to produce their ID. They wrote down their names and everything. And the next day it appeared in the Buffalo newspaper. With the names. A lot of people lost their jobs. Yeah. Do you remember the name of that bar? No. Okay. Kind of the ironic thing was right across the street from the theater where I worked was a strip bar with women. Okay. That was okay. I remember that. Even though they had back rooms. And they never rated them. I got to know some of the women. And several of them were lesbians. But they did it because that was their living. Wow. Wow. Did you learn anything else about the local lesbian community then? No. I didn't. I didn't. I didn't. I didn't have any connection because there weren't lesbian bars. Yeah. Yeah. Now. As you were very sort of closeted at the time and not very knowledgeable about the community then. Did you have a concept on lesbianism? No. How did you react to hearing about that? Well, it's the same thing with me. That you're built one way. And if you learn to accept it, you go that way.  And I said to her mother, would you like me to get married? Be unhappy. Cause my wife to be unhappy. Probably my children. Or do you want me to lead the happiest possible life I can? I said, some of your friends may be gay, but not accepting it.  And she said, which ones? And I said, well, I really don't know because they don't know your friends that well. And they wouldn't tell you, that's their business. But don't you want me to be as happy as I can. And at that point she started to accept me. Oh, wow. Now around what age was this? That would have been, like I said, 1971. I see. No, about 1970. 69 or 70. I see. Okay. I was in Buffalo, which kept me away from really what was going on in New York City. So I didn't know about the pride parade. Okay. I was in the Stonewall. I was really, you know, didn't know much going on in New York City. Okay. But you actually were able to visit a bar in Akron, Ohio as well around this time. What was that bar? It was called Mothers.  Just very wonderful. I'm tacky. And I would go over there once in a while on a weekend. And one weekend I ran into my cousin over there. Whom I knew already was gay. Because when he was in high school, he knitted me a scarf. Oh. Right pink. How sweet. Something I would never wear.  No. It just was what he was doing. I was in theater and he was also in theater. We both went to Kent State Theater Department. Okay. Okay. Now you were at Kent State before the infamous shooting. It's correct. The year before. Okay. Yeah. I've gone to Buffalo. And I couldn't take the guy who ran it.  Who followed me around. He was actually when I went in the bathroom. And I was not interested in him. But he was interested in me. And I was offered a job in New York City with the New York City Marionette Theater. Oh. So I left Buffalo and moved to New York City. You would have been in New York City at a very tumultuous time. A very almost iconic and fascinating time. Yes. It blew my mind. Tell us about that. The subway stations, the Johns were packed. There were sex going on all the time. Mostly the lights were out. They would be raided. But everyone were just running. The New York City police didn't bother that much with it. Just they would break it up. And when you would go to the bars, there would be either back rooms or like at the spike and the eagle across the street was the West Side Highway which was elevated. And there were tunnels underneath and they would be packed. And that's where I first started to learn a little bit about the leather scene or the S&M scene. Let's take a step back though. How did you learn about the bars at all? How did you even know they existed? I had heard about them. Most of the other bars, the other few bars that I had been to were all types of gay people. I was not really into twinks.  Nothing against some of the personal preferences. And so I heard about the men's bars. And I heard about the eagle and the spike and the ramrod. And so I started going to them, which was the S&M bars. Yes. On Sunday, it was S&M stand and model. All the pretty boys with the bodies came out. For Sunday afternoon. Sometimes it was sequenced in mascara. Oh boy. But on Friday nights and Saturday nights, it was men. Though the time you are depicting, the time frame you're depicting is the stuff of legends. Yes. Tell us your first impressions of these establishments. What did you see? What did you feel? What did you think? I saw men acting like men. Looking for men. And I seem to enjoy that. Some of the unusual parts of it was when the bars closed. There were a line of taxis out front waiting for you guys. Us guys. And we could either sit in the back seat and pay. Or sit in the front seat and not pay. Now, how often did you sit in the front? As often as I could. Depended of what they looked like. I think that future viewers of this interview would like to hear a little more about the bars themselves. What sorts of things did the bars have in them? I do box bartenders and pictures of men. There were a few bars where you could dance. But they weren't that popular then. They were just straight up and up masculine bars that I went to. Any dungeon material? There were crosses like I said, across the street. In those tunnels. There were. Swapping and spanking. And there was also what was called the trucks. Which were semi trucks. That. The truck part was gone, but the semis were backed into like a near a loading dock. And at night. They were wild. And you would hear spanking. Talk. Dirty talk. And then someone got creative and set up a card table. And would sell poppers. Wow. Wow. Those were the good poppers in those days. Yes. Yeah. Do you remember what they cost at the time? No, because I didn't like them. And. I'm wondering about the heavy SM scene at that time, which we've seen depicted, of course, in movies like cruising. Did you experience those kinds of places also? I went to a party with a guy that I was dating. And he said, come here, I want to show you something. And we went into a bedroom and there was a gentleman being fisted. And my eyes were just like that. Like. Oh. Oh. And. That was my first encounter with that. But in the bars, there was. Going home with someone was when you really found out about it. That there was one gentleman that I went home with. Very handsome. Nice body. We got to his apartment.  With three legs about this high. And wanted me to sit on it while he put his face underneath it. And then for me to shift on his face. Well, all righty then. Yeah, that that was not my scene. I got dressed and left. Wow. Almost everything that was happening was a shock to me being from a small town and being very naive. Some of it then seemed to be more natural. For example. The fisting. The dirty talk. Domination. Some water sports. All seemed to happen. And I enjoyed them. Now. You were involved with the gay pride parade in New York City. Tell us about that. I had just moved to New York. And I heard there was this big day parade and party. And I thought, well, girlfriend, we're going to that. Good. And we were marching in the first pride parade, which again, I had not known about Stonewall. And as we're walking up the middle of Fifth Avenue. There was two guys holding hands in the middle of the street.   I'm normal. Wow. I was in the open. Watching people being themselves. Marking up a main street in New York City. With construction workers on the sidewalk. Yelling things at us. And we weren't afraid. And there were lots of police protecting us. And I then decided to work on the second and the third. Parades. And during a meeting with the second parade. I had to go to the bathroom, so I went in. And the gentleman followed me in. And turned to me and said, what would you like me to do, sir? And.  And then he took me home. And his name was John. His lover's name was John. And they taught me a lot. Sometimes I would be the bottom and. They would make me do some things. Sometimes I would be the top. And that's where I learned a lot about. That's an empty scene. And then a couple of times I took the original John. Out to Fire Island. And stayed at the. Oh, it's the, the mansion or whatever it's called. It's the hotel. And it's a big old house filled with antiques. Rents out rooms like a hotel. We would do our scene all weekend out there. Tell us a little bit about Fire Island. As you know. You'd have to take a ferry boat out. And it's like you go into a fog and come out. In Brigadoon. It's a completely different. It's really hard to explain because. It was just so natural. So open. And there was the pines. Which was where the rich people live with. Large cabins. And then there was the grove. Where us every day people would go. And I remember getting off the ferry when you had. A. A lot of people would go to the. Getaway cabin there. You would name it. Oh. The very first one I saw was. Thank you very much. And. Then it was the four seasons because it had four different. Enterances to it. They all had different names, but it was just. It had disco. Had grocery store. Just a complete. Different. Feeling. I mean you were on an island, but you were really. On an island away from the world. Now. When you were in New York. Doing the work with the pride parade. Yes. You had the privilege. Of seeing none other. Than that. Midler perform. At the continental baths. That is historic. Several times. Several times. Tell us about it. The producer of federal on the roof, which she was. One of the daughters and federal on the roof. His brother owned. The continental baths.  Come up. To entertain. So as soon as they learned the roof was over. She would run out. Getting a taxi and come up the continental baths. Of which we were all dressed formally. In towels. There you go. Some didn't even wear a towel because they were in the. The swimming pool. Which is where she entertained. And of course. She was so happy. That she realized that her accompanist was an unknown piano player called. Barry Manilow. And that's how.  Really got. To be backers of that midler and how she. Kind of promoted that. Throughout what she did. She was. Glad to accept us. Tell us about the show. She was singing. And making us laugh. She was just hysterical. And. She had a routine. Set up. And it changed each time I saw her. It was different. Wow. Now. What were your thoughts when she made it really big. Oh. I didn't miss a thing. She did. She was in Cleveland. And. I saw her there. And. Ran into her. The guy that wrote her. Comic stuff. He was on. Hollywood squares with all the hair. Can't. Think of his name. He ended up being. Fairly big. As a comedian. And. I'm not sure I know who you mean. Do you remember Hollywood squares. I do. Yes. But the comedian I don't recall. Lots of hair. Hmm. Oh, well. I'm a disease. Wow. I can't say that very many people can tell it. I can't. I can't say that very many people can tell us. About seeing that Miller live at the continental bags. So having you tell us about that is. Totally amazing. Yeah. New York, of course, was a very. Open place for a lot of things. They. Last time they had created a bar was before I was there. And that was the stone wall. Yeah. And there was so much pushback from that. That he didn't. Raise anymore. Wow. On a more serious note, though. You've been HIV positive for many years. How have you managed that? How long has it been? It's been probably. 34 years, 35 years, something like that. And. When it was first diagnosed. I went through. The period of depression. Because at that point you had six months to live. And. After a few weeks of being diagnosed. I. Said to myself, you know, life is going to be short. I'm not going to do it. Depressed. I'm going to. You try to be as happy as I can. Enjoy life. Life is going to be short. I'm not going to do it depressed. I'm not going to be as happy as I can enjoy life. As much as the guy can for as long as I can. And. I think that has helped me. Through a lot of the. The things that have happened to me through my life. That's a very strong statement. Yeah. In fact, my sister just called me a little bit ago. Her husband had passed away. And she said, what do you do to pull yourself out of depression? And. I don't do anything. I just. Decide to. Smile. And go forward. And enjoy whatever happens. I knew what she was asking. I couldn't give her any other advice. I don't. No. Brush my teeth and feel happier. I just. Make myself do it. Wow.  Now. To people who are newly diagnosed with HIV. Tell us about that. I did it to your course. And people. Who were newly diagnosed with commando our classes. We'd go around and introduce ourselves. And say how long we had been diagnosed. And at that point, I think I was like. 22 years. And. It was interesting to see their faces because they too thought. Six months. Yeah. And when I would say 22 years, it was like. Wow. Yeah, I can have a life. Yeah. And so I've been able and had the privilege to mentor. Several people. Do you still do it? Yes. How wonderful. How inspirational. Yeah. But. For the price of God, go on. But now. Yes. Mr. Classic Leather. Yeah. A little bit about that contest. It's very unique. And. There's an age limit on it. How old do you have to be to be Mr. Classic Leather? You have to be. 50. And then the leather. Okay. Now. A lot of the people that. Go to IML, but Mr. Whatever leather they are. Are young, pretty things. And I would say to a lot of people think you have to be. When I went to IML and people were saying, well, what's Mr. Classic Leather. And I would explain it to them for men into leather. Over 50 years old. It's go, wow. I never thought of that. And it was just very. Something I'd never been in a contest before. I never thought. I was young, pretty, or any of that. Didn't have a good body. Always skinny. And. Never thought it would work. And I was talked into this. And they're going into it. Everyone said, oh, you need to go into it. Oh, you need to go into it. It's just for you. It's for you. And. I did. Who talked you into it? Rick. Tina. Rick Cardero. Several other people around. That just they heard about it knew what it was. And. Just kept telling me and egging me on. Where was it held? It was held at the stallion, the leather stallion saloon. Here in Cleveland. And. You know, not too many people knew about it. And I'm. I just had to. Do like everyone else. You go before the judges. And. You go before the audience. In different attire. And. Then you're judged. What were your thoughts on that? On the contest. Yes. You're winning. All of the above. I was nervous again, because I'd never been in a contest before. I'm a very open. Person. I mean. I've accepted that I am what I am what I am. I am. And so when I went before the judges. Which I was told I talked too much. That. I just, I answered their questions. And I was told to be myself and that's all I can be as myself. I can't pretend to be anybody else. Yeah. So. And then winning. It was a privilege. Because I was. Went to IML. I was. Acting. For older. Man. I was. Representing Cleveland. So I had two things that I was representing. Where other people go. They're representing. Their club. Or their city or their bar. Yes. What were you representing? Older leather man. Okay. Cleveland. The bar. Myself. How old were you when you did IML. I was 72. The oldest contestant ever. Wow. I was very proud of that because I kept. Getting a hold of the people there. And. Asking if I was going to be the oldest. And when I got there, I was introduced. Well, he asked me first, do you mind if I introduced you as being the oldest. I said, no, because I am. And I was proud. Being the oldest. And doing that. Wow. That was my first thoughts. At IML when you saw all the flesh. And all the activity. IML is an experience. That. I wish. Every male could go through. There were every type of people there. Every type of body. There were masculine men or no, some that were not quite as masculine. We'll say. But there was a camaraderie. Yeah. And there were.  That we were waited on hand and foot. But not in between. And our boots were polished so they could see a reflection in it. It was. Just meeting the people. And from all over the world. And getting to know them. And their experiences. That was. Very interesting. And. Just a wonderful. Multicultural experience.  Yes. Fantastic. You placed. Number nine out of 63 contestants. In what was it 2018? Is that right? 1717. What are your thoughts about placing top 10 at IML. I was shocked. There were 63 of us. And then they narrow it down to the top 20. I made it into the top 20. And I was really happy. And unbeknownst to me. There was a whole big group at the stallion. Watching the video of it. And all they knew was I made it in the top 20. And they were happy about that. And then. You, they narrow it down. And the next day you get your. Where you came out. And it says that I came out. Night. Overall. Yes. First in the interview. Really? Yes. I was number one in the interview. Wow. That's quite an achievement. Out of 63. Yes. Yeah. Anyone who's going. Just be yourself. They can tell. Yeah. Yeah. Now. Do you recall your top 20 speech? Yes. What did you talk about? I had another speech about volunteering that I had written. At three o'clock in the morning the night before. I decided no. That wasn't it. So. I quickly wrote. And had to memorize it. And then you get 90 seconds. Yes. There's a clock. Ticking down. The microphone is turned off. So your speech has to be 90 seconds or less. And I wrote. About telling. All the young Ripper snappers out there. That. They don't appreciate. Or realize. What. I said older ones went through. To give them. What. They take for granted. I mean the open bars. The. Disco's the. Pride parades. Now the marriage. And everything that. We still have a ways to go. And my speech was to. Corner. One of the older leather men. Banking them for what they did. And asking them what was it like. Back then. Wow. Because it is so. Different from being. Rated in the bar for no reason. To getting married. Yeah. We have a ways to go. And that we need them to volunteer. After the contest. You received a lot. Of positive feedback. What were some of the things you heard. Feedback from. People, the population, people that heard you speech. Well. I was told. I was a little nervous at that point. At the end of my speech. There was a round of a standing ovation ball. And. When I got home and the people realized. What I had said. And where I came out. There was a lot of. Comments made. Good comments for change. And. More people became interested. In Mr. Classic leather. So the contest is still going. And. Hopefully it'll catch on and go in other cities. Because there are some of us that are older. That. Can represent the city. Yeah. Yeah. Now what advice. Can you offer younger people coming into this. Community. Now. At the leather stallion, which is. Basically the only leather bar. In Cleveland. There are. People who wander in. Nervous. Because they don't know what to expect. Which. I have done. And I try to corner them. And explain some things. That. This is not. Necessarily a bar where you're going to get beat up. We do exchange recipes. And. You know, it's something that if you want to do. Do it. And these people come back and they change. They come in with. The latest fashions on. Pretty soon they're wearing jeans. And they got a leather vest. And they just, they change. And. Become what. I refer to as. Yeah. There's still men when they're twinks. But. They're more massive. Yeah. What's your thoughts on mentorship. I'm all for it. We've lived it. We've been through it. We need to teach it. That's why I try to. Talk to these boys that come into the bars. And explain that. We're normal. And they're normal. And. Just to explain to them what. Again, what life was like. What it is. And what it can be. But we need them to help. And we need them to step up. The people that have been. Running everything. We're getting older. Yeah. And we need. Young blood to start volunteering. In doing whatever they can for. The leather community. But the gay community. Yeah. I volunteered and done it. For the AIDS task force. And this was my 35th year doing it. And now I. Try to raise money to buy turkeys and fixings for Thanksgiving for the AIDS task force. Yeah. And I'm tired. What's the biggest misconception. About you. I don't know because. Like I say, I'm myself. I am who I am. I don't hide anything. I'm proud of what I am. I don't have uncontrolled ego. I control it. Because I am what I am. John Britton. I would like to thank you very much. For an amazing interview for inside leather history. A fireside chat. I hope that you and your people can watch it. And learn from it. So do I.


Hi everybody, Frank Pound here from AstroSec. Today I'm going to talk to you a little bit about this topic called space resilience as it relates to the hack-a-sat hacking competition that was started by the Air Force and Space Force nearly two years ago. I've been involved with that project for quite some time and the recurring theme obviously is how to make more secure space architectures and with the hack-a-sat program we used a small satellite model and a ground station as sort of the centerpiece of the competition to try to showcase you know what could be done by an adversary but also showcase what could be done by defenders to make for a more resilient space architecture. So what does it mean to be resilient in space? Well first let's think back to 30 years ago and the organizations that were involved in space operations launching satellites into space. Everybody thinks of a satellite as this you know sort of big square with solar panels sticking out the sides and big antennas sitting up in space and providing some sort of service. Some of those services could be communications you know facilitating the watching of live live sports like the Olympics which are going on right now. There's lots of satellites involved in relaying those communications from Japan to ground stations across the globe and distributing that video for everyone to see. So communication satellites historically have been you know one of the primary things people think about when they think about objects in space that are performing some sort of service. We also have spy satellites up there that take pictures of certain places on earth and we have other sensors that are part of scientific missions that NASA and the European Space Agency and others have launched for deep space exploration. Specifically what I'm going to talk about though is not so much about satellites that are performing those functions of communications or spy satellites or things like that. What I want to focus on though is this new space economy and the new space economy is enabled by the democratization of a lot of technologies that are now within reach of just about anyone with a little bit of a budget and some imagination. It's come time today where if you have an idea that involves collecting data from space it's not so hard to realize that idea. Build your own spacecraft pay a moderate sum of money to get that spacecraft launched alongside dozens of others through economy of scale sort of pioneered by SpaceX and others and get your platform in orbit to collect that data. A lot of people are thinking about monetizing that data you know swipe your credit card and get pictures of your backyard things like that. So how does resilience relate to that? Well the thing is if you think back there's a parallel to this and the parallel is the origin of the internet. The internet was created back in the 60s and 70s for the purpose of resilient communications. However one of the issues with the creation of the internet is folks only thought of it as a capability to recover from a catastrophic nuclear war and people didn't really think about the fact that well the internet itself could be attacked or used for malice. And so for many many years in the 70s and 80s and early 90s the internet sort of grew up in this sort of protected club like atmosphere only used by governments and universities and it was never really exposed to sort of the general malice of the global community. And the same thing potentially could happen in the new space economy as folks are starting to create these great ideas and and great monetization platforms for space. Well what follows is the criminal syndicates and the other you know maybe not so friendly nation states who want to sort of take advantage of those of those new resources that are being you know funded and paid for by their adversaries. And so we must be resilient to that sort of thing so how are we going to be more resilient. Well we can look back again to the to the creation of the internet and we can start to think about how can we design insecurity from day one. How can we think about more resilient designs from day one. Part of that comes with thinking like the adversary.  And so so that means looking at the ground stations looking at the software that goes into the ground stations looking at the communication links that connect the ground stations together looking at the antenna segments that receive the data that goes into the ground station and then looking at the the protocols that are used to communicate to the satellites in space. Looking at the satellites themselves. And so we did all this in the hack-a-sat project. The engineers who built the competition framework group called Cromulance actually built a real world model of a flat set to enable us to act like adversaries and actually run to ground some of these potential vulnerabilities that we saw or that were that were perceiving. And it was so successful they're they're going to do it again with hack-a-sat 2.0. So in summary you know resilience really means understanding you know thinking about the vulnerabilities that exist and thinking about ways to mitigate those vulnerabilities with practical application of good engineering thought and good engineering designs. We need more security researchers in the industry we need the existing security researchers that that are out there to connect with the space an aerospace community and it is enough to have them come in after the fact and to do a security assessment at the end. We need the researchers to be a part of the development team and include them in the entire life cycle of the system. Welcome to Space Security Challenge 2020 hack-a-sat the final event as the democratization of space opens up a new frontier for exploration and innovation we see new cybersecurity vulnerabilities emerging the space security challenge is designed to inspire the world's top cybersecurity talent to develop the skills necessary to secure this last frontier of cybersecurity space. Every federally funded lab is charted with the mission of technology transfer technology transfer is all about taking government-owned intellectual property and transferring it to the public domain the Air Force research lab and our charter to perform tech transfer put us in the best position to lead this effort but first we had to overcome the monumental task of convincing people that hacking a satellite was actually a good thing to do in the name of improving space security but we persevered and our mission fueled the creation of what we called the space security challenge 2020 hack-a-sat. At the heart of it we needed to create a community where one didn't currently exist and we wanted to leverage the challenge model because we've learned a lot from DARPA and they've been very successful at creating communities through challenges and so DARPA created this challenge back in like 2004 bringing together the AI industry the sensor industry or community and also the automotive industry to formulate a challenge to improve the security of the automotive industry leveraging AI now you fast forward 15 years we have a fully functioning industry of autonomous vehicles and that's ultimately where we're going with space security challenge hack-a-sat we want to build trust and security into our space systems so we needed to get the attention of the hacker community and we're not typically as the air force and now space force we're not trying to do outreach to the hacker community so we had a new unique challenge on our hands we also needed to get the attention of policymakers and the general public and industry we needed people to care about this because it affects all of us and then the pandemic hit and all of our plans to run the finals at DEF CON it builds an audience of tens of thousands of DEF CON tracks shattered so we pivoted so we needed to figure out a way to hold finals virtually and still achieve our goal of cultivating a research community and it became apparent that this pivot to virtual was actually more of an opportunity it was an opportunity to reach people who wouldn't have normally been able to travel to DEF CON but there were huge challenges associated with this for both the competitors and the spectators so in July we shipped each team leader a flat set which came with an air bearing and what the teams could do is they could put their flats out on top of the air bearings and then they could use the attitude control system in the flat set to be able to rotate the flat set to kind of emulate what it would be like if they were in space but with COVID what we didn't anticipate were the global shipping timelines two of our teams didn't get their flat sets until later in fact the third place team flux repeat rocket didn't even receive their flat set until the morning of the competition on august 7th that was a real nail biter then there were the spectators after all the world is watching now we needed to be able to give people all over the world a way to feel like they were part of the action so we built this fully immersive 3d environment for spectators to explore and watch the competition we did our best to give it a defcon feel so that people really felt like they were still part of that environment that we work so hard to be part of and so as part of this environment we created this extensive library of content and videos and so all of the content that we created on hackasat as well as all the videos that were created are available on our github page and our youtube channel and where you can access that information and continue to learn about hacking cyber and space the scenario was based around a mock stolen satellite so once the teams are on the satellite the remaining challenge is had to do with removing the presence of the malicious actor that was on that satellite orient it so that they could then use the imager to take a photo of the moon that we had set up inside of the facility where the flat sets were all located the other part of the challenge teams were tasked with coming up with a command set that would point an actual satellite at the actual moon teams were given a very limited amount of time to accomplish that goal and one of them was able to successfully take a photo of the moon using that command set we're going to answer the question as to which team had their code sent into space tonight congrats to team poland can into space for submitting not only the best solution overall throughout the whole evaluation period but the solution that is going to space we expect the moonshot to happen in a couple of hours at 6 30 pacific and that picture will be sent down to earth at about 1 a.m pacific there will be people who are hacking satellites and so by having the federal government structure this in a nice organized and safe way we can do it without getting in any trouble and they can get the results and the understanding that they need from an attacker's perspective having the ability to approach something with the mindset of you know how could i break this always helps you understand how a system works better it's something we all as a community have to be thinking about and the security the security community wants to be a part of that they would like to be involved with these systems would like to secure these systems would like to learn more about these systems so so openness and transparency um and and getting access to more of these systems going forward and we need this space community the aerospace community to be open and available and receptive to that um and that's what we were trying to accomplish with hackathat put on a game that that brought those two communities together and raised that awareness and i i think we did a good job of that uh now we hand the ball off uh maybe to to the aerospace community to take that forward last thing thanks for joining us the future of space security depends on the work we're doing together based on experiences with hackathat one most of us expected hackathat two to be pretty challenging qualifiers which took place back in june did not disappoint hello i'm vita and we're going to talk about the challenges fidel and john karson and cotton igeo when you connect to the server for fidel and john karson it gives you a position vector a velocity vector and the current time and then prompts you for some orbit parameters from some quick internet searches i figured out that the challenge is asking you to convert the cartesian position and velocity vectors into keplerian orbital parameters i haven't really done any orbital mechanics in over a decade and that was all you know two dimensional so we're going to have to learn how to do this together cartesian coordinates tell you where you are and how you're moving in a space of right angles the international celestial reference frame or icrf from this challenge differs from latitude and longitude in some very important ways so a problem with latitude and longitude is that the distance in kilometers per degree of travel changes as you move around for example moving south like i am right now you get more meters per degree the closer you get to the equator similarly the farther away i move from sea level like whenever i climb these stairs up here that also means there are more meters per degree of travel down here you know at sea level it's not super significant but it when you're orbiting and moving really really fast really really high it's another matter entirely icrf coordinates are in a three-dimensional grid one coordinate goes roughly north south through the center of the earth and the others are at right angles to that and also each other they're keyed to a bunch of quasars and that kind of thing super far outside our galaxy so that as we move through the solar system and the solar system moves through the universe the coordinates don't change too much however the six numbers three position three velocity don't actually tell us very much about the orbit we'd like to know what altitudes it ranges through where do you have to point a dish or antenna to see it and that kind of thing to do that it's useful to convert them into keplerian orbital parameters which describe the shape of the orbit where it goes and where the satellite is on it right now that's the quick version i found this website to be really useful to understand what all these different parameters mean so how do you actually solve this challenge let's see how the team single event upset did it they started with the orbital pi python module which also produces really nice plots i'm recreating these in a jupyter notebook simply because it makes the plots easy to see and also export their code to solve fiddling john karson is pretty simple they use an orbital pi function to turn an icrf state vector which is the position and velocity into most of the keplerian elements then they calculate the degrees for the true anomaly because orbital pi likes to work in radians and print that out too next let's talk about the sequel to fiddling john karson cotton igeo like any sequel it starts for the previous one ends the spacecraft is still in orbit but now we have to provide a delta v or change in velocity vector and time to execute that change in velocity to put us into a brand new orbit getting from one orbit to another is done by changing your velocity at a specific time increasing your forward velocity at the highest point in your orbit increases your altitude at the lowest point decreasing your velocity at the lowest point in your orbit decreases your altitude at the highest point since we're in an elliptic orbit already which means we vary through a wide range of altitudes and the challenge wants us to get into a low eccentricity or more circular orbit we have to burn at our highest point which is also called the apocenter the single event upset solution begins with their fiddling john karson solution from there they propagate the orbit until the satellite set the apocenter that's the highest point this means simulating the orbit from the current true anomaly or where the spacecraft is until the true anomaly is at 180 degrees this is a relatively cheap simulation it's a few trigonometry and other math operations without any time stepping where errors can creep in once we're at our apocenter we create a maneuver to change the altitude at our lowest point or parry center we can calculate a first guess the challenge wants us to set the semi-major axis to about you know approximately 42,164 kilometers with a basically circular eccentricity we subtract 6371 kilometers for the earth's radius and tell orbital to make a maneuver to set our parry center altitude to 35,793 kilometers that makes a bunch of scary looking warnings and the orbital source code kind of suggests that it's having trouble calculating our eccentricity vectors from that going a kilometer lower avoids the warnings but we're still too high some more trial and error gets us to a parry center altitude of 35,762 kilometers which avoids the warnings and meets our eccentricity goals once we've taken our delta v vector and keyed it into the challenge we get a flag back and that's it thanks for joining me while solving fiddler john karson and cotton igeo of the hacka set technical team we are the developers and organizers of the hacka set quals and finals competition for hacka set 2020 the top eight teams from quals competed in the finals over the DEFCON weekend and a head-to-head race to solve a series of challenges the challenges involved anomaly analysis and resolution satellite operations reverse engineering and of course exploitation on an engineering model satellite or flat set the flat set ran a real flight software framework called cfs that was created by nasa and was commanded with the cosmos command and control software from ball airspace to help us wrestle a little bit teams were also required to complete the honor of a challenge developing a command plan for a live satellite to orient itself to take a picture of the moon while simultaneously continuing to perform in the main hacking competition for 2021 we're going to take it up a notch finalists still had to win their spot by proving their knowledge and skill in the qualifier but instead of finals being a race to the finish it is going to be a classic attack and defend ctf but on a space system platform similar to last year's teams will score points by attacking vulnerabilities in the other team systems teams must protect their own system by patching or otherwise mitigating those same vulnerabilities teams will get sl8 points by keeping their system operating nominally but this is a space system and keeping it in the required state might be just a little more involved in ensuring all of its services are running with their intended functionality the skills the teams need aren't much different or any different at all than last year's teams will need to understand architectures and technologies that are using space systems they will need to understand operating a system that is orbiting the earth they will need to understand communication systems they will need to be able to reverse engineer at both the system level and also binary applications they of course will need to be able to patch binaries and craft exploits what is new for this year is they will need to be able to understand the strategy and tactics for playing an attack and defend ctf the game type is not the only upgrade for 2021 the flat set from last year is being almost completely rebuilt with new hardware and processor architectures to provide a diverse platform for hosting challenges the system will include an upgraded command and data hammer or cdh and all new attitude determination and control system or adcs a power distribution board and a special payload module the payloads hardware for a very unique ctf challenge or two teams are going to get the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the new flight software ahead of the competition with a digital twin the digital twin is a system of systems simulation of the actual flight software it runs in a qmu based simulator called hog hog extends qmu by providing a rich plug-in api that allows for custom hardware and interface simulations without having to add them to the qmu baseline itself for example it's a hog plug-in that emulates the satellite bus used for subsystem communications allowing multiple hog instances running on emulations of various flat-set components to communicate over the plug-in without knowing they aren't using the actual hardware bus using this digital twin technology allows for distributing copies of the game software to teams wherever they are hog also provides a gdb interface allowing teams to use introspection into the running emulation which might prove useful when developing patches and exploits before using them live in the game since the finals competition is virtual again this year teams and spectators both will need access to game information to understand what is going on in addition to a traditional ctf scoreboard flat-set specific telemetry for each team will be visible in real time via instances of nasa's open mission control technologies the open mct dashboard is viewable from our web browser and will display key state of health data so spectators can keep track of their favorite team's efforts to operate their satellites while defending it from the attacks of the other teams satellites will also be progressing through simulated real-time orbits around the earth spectators will be able to see visualizations of these orbits produced by the cesium 3d geospatial tool not only will cesium display where a satellite is in its orbit but it will accurately display a satellite's attitude and orientation a satellite tumbling in its orbit is probably not in healthy condition and has probably been attacked we are excited about the evolution of this year's competition they look forward to seeing the skill creativity and tenacity teams will demonstrate to become the hackasat 2 champion for 2021 i'm erin boland one of the space force leads for hackasat if you follow along into hackasat saga you know that now more than ever it's imperative to get space system security design right you may have also heard about our special project called which is a first of its kind satellite aimed at doing just that think a cyber sandbox in space moonlighter will allow cyber professionals like you to take your skills learn through hackasat events and apply them to a live operational satellite there is a general accepted theory within space vehicle design to bake in cyber with moonlighter we're going to bring you along on the ride and put that to the test by presenting intentionally designed challenges based on all the data and feedback from previous hackasat events moonlighter will represent the best of ideas and operational concepts we believe that moonlighter will be an education accelerator and idea generator for events like defcon in the near future never before has there been an opportunity to develop design and launch a satellite like moonlighter we are so thrilled to be able to bring this technology to play in 2023 please be sure to follow along with everything pertaining to moonlighter at hackasat.com thank you so much for being with us today stay safe and happy hacking space country thanks for tuning in lose and gathered all the pieces of this disk you must be one of the best security researchers in the galaxy and I guess you believe that rumor about the legendary hacker hidden in space working to design the ultimate cyber security key well you're right call me fox you've proved yourself worthy to know my location you're welcome to stop by anytime but once you're here you'll have to help me train the best minds on the planet to become even better I'm looking for the elite fear with the skills and knowledge to hack in space to be the first to experience project moonlighter


Populism is very much on the rise. If you just look, Brexit is the latest flavor of the month, but the United States election has been captured by two very different people, Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump, who seem to have nothing in common, except a lot of anger. You can see the popular parties usually on the far right in Europe that are on the rise. There's got a very, very active movement. There's been one in Finland. There's another one in the Netherlands. And so there are all these different pockets of angst and frustration that are present that I would say 15 years ago were well below the surface. So I see all these different movements being fueled essentially by economic discontent. If you look at what's happened to the middle class over, say, the last 15 to 20 years, there's been a growing chasm between what's been going on for the people at the very top of the income distribution and then what's happened to the people in the middle. And it used to be the case that pretty much anywhere in the advanced world, you were confident that your kids were going to wind up having a better future than you had, or a better future than yours was and better lives. And I think that has been lost. Middle class incomes have stagnated pretty much everywhere in the world in the advanced countries. There's been massive progress in poorer countries. If you look at what's happened in China in the last 15 years, it's probably been the greatest anti-poverty program we've ever seen. But that doesn't matter to the people in the middle of the United States or in continental Europe or even the UK. All these places you've seen slow down in wages, drops in productivity, gains only concentrated amongst the most highly educated, and people are very frustrated with that. I think a lot of the factors that are behind us are here to stay. So technology has taken away a lot of jobs. The combination of technology and globalization has meant that a lot of activities have migrated away from people that used to say finish high school. They'd go on and they'd work in some sort of manufacturing job. They could raise a family. Their kids could go on to more education if they wanted. You could have all the comforts of society and you could live a pretty good life. Those jobs have been lost. They're not present in the United States and Europe to a large extent anymore. And they're not coming back. And I think part of the driver for the economic frustration is we haven't replaced those jobs with new things, so we haven't found a way to put the people that would have gone into those positions to work elsewhere. And so they're left looking around saying, you know, what's going to come for me? I think New Zealand and a lot of the commodity producing countries may have benefited from a one time change in China. So China's gone about as far as it can with its existing growth model, in my view. They've built all the highways and roads and infrastructure and transformed their economy in a pretty serious way. And that required massive imports of all kinds of commodities. And that happened to be, you know, going on for the last seven or eight years. It's definitely the case China's slowing. I don't think China's going to return to eight to 10 percent growth for an extended period ever again. I think they're going to be more in the five, four, six range.  And so some of the places that were insulated temporarily from these forces, I think, are going to be feeling them. If you look at what's happening in Brazil, Brazil was a country where when they were awarded the Olympic Games and the World Cup, it looked like Brazil was on the rise. It was a country that had turned the corner. In fact, we see that they hadn't. In fact, they were just riding a commodity bubble and that covered up a lot of problems. And now it's front and center on the world stage. I think the challenge for policies to deal with the scenario I've described is there's two directions to go. The first is to stop looking backwards and pretend that we can return to the 1950s. A lot of the presidential campaign that's anti-trade pretends that we can just go back and everything's going to be okay. And that if we could just reverse some things that we could return to the world we were once in, I think that's a farce. There's no chance of that. And it's destructive because it focuses attention and energy in the wrong places. I think what we need to do is work on educational outcomes, improving what we economists call human capital, people's readiness to be able to embrace technology and work with it. We've just got too many people that enter the workforce without the skills they need to be able to get good high-paying jobs. This is a problem everywhere. The U.S., maybe New Zealand has an additional problem which is the more diverse you are. I think the harder it is to get everybody to pull together behind these kinds of outcomes. The countries where there's been less of this tend to be countries that are more homogeneous where you can do things that involve sacrifices in the short run for the long-term gain because everybody kind of feels like they're in it together. If there's political gains to be had from ostracizing people and pointing, you know, this guy's the problem, that guy's the problem, it distracts you from getting on with it, it makes it harder to take the steps we need. If the way that this is put is we're going to do some difficult stuff now to make our kids better off, I think that's an achievable plan. Germany offers one case study. A government fell in Germany in 2004 and five because they enacted a bunch of very difficult reforms to try to stop defending the old types of jobs that were moving away and create a better partnership between the workers and the firms to try to move into a more 21st century style economy and the gains have been very tangible. Germany's doing better than any other country in Europe in large part because they had a really rough time in the middle of the last decade and, you know, the government fell. So there's no doubt that there will be some short-term pain for enacting the kinds of changes that we need, but I think the alternative is far worse. Stagnation for 15 years is going to just generate more and more discontent.  If you don't, you know, take the steps now. This doesn't all have to be grim. If you can convince people that the future is going to be bright again, that there is hope that technology isn't just evil, globalization isn't bad, that we can bring gains to everyone, but we need to focus on trying to get them ready for it. That can be a somewhat optimistic message. So I think if we've concentrated on that and made that the priority, instead of getting distracted with all these other things, this is achievable.


Coming up on DTNS, the U.S. Supreme Court frees Google to use Oracle's API code, while Justice Thomas suggests maybe somebody should pass a law calling Facebook a common carrier. I mean, why not? And LG quits the mobile phone business. Kinsha Nilgaya, LG. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, April 5th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lean. Rich, that's you. Oh, I'm sorry. From Lovely Clueless, I'm Rich Strafilino. And I'm Roger Chang, the shoes producer. We were just talking about Easter traditions and French toast pro. Get that and more by becoming a patron and getting good day internet at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. The New York Times sources say that Pinterest is in talks to acquire the photo platform VSCO. Proposed terms of the deal were not disclosed, and VSCO's last funding round in 2015 valued the company at $550 million. Question, is Yahoo answer shutting down? Favorite answer. Why are you even using it? Here's the site I like better. Next answer. I saw another site shutting down recently. It's really sad to see site shutting down. Next answer. Beautiful day, isn't it? The real answer is that Yahoo answers in operations since 2005 will be shut down on May 4th with posting disabled on April 20th. You have until June 30th to request your data with Yahoo advising, quote, you won't be able to download other users' content questions or answers. Just your own. Microsoft confirmed it will hold its build developer conference virtually from May 15th through the 27th. Microsoft has not yet updated its build event page with any scheduled events for the conference or opened registration as of yet. Google now allows third party developers to submit Android Auto apps in the navigation, parking and charging categories to the Play Store. The company initially announced plans to expand the apps available in Android Auto back in August. Previously, they only let third parties submit messaging media apps. The analyst at eMarketer report that in 2020, in store mobile payments usage grew 29% in the US to 92.3 million consumers using it at least once over a six month period. The firm also estimates that this will grow 10% rather in 2021 and also predicts half of all smartphone users will use mobile payments by 2025. All right, let's talk a little more about the Facebook breach you might have seen kicking around. In June 2020, a data set with personal information on more than 533 million Facebook accounts began to be offered for sale on a hacking forum or, I don't like calling them hackers because hackers are sometimes good folks, but on a forum for $30,000. After purchase, a private telegram bot was set up to sell search access to the data. The data set included publicly available information scraped from profiles. So things like a Facebook ID, name, gender, location, relationship status, occupation, date of birth, private mobile numbers associated with the accounts were included as well. Facebook subsequently confirmed the data was obtained in 2019 through a now patched vulnerability in Facebook's ad friend feature that let you gain access to members phone numbers. So that's how the phone number part got in there. Everything else was pretty easily available otherwise. Over the weekend, the data set started to be offered for free on the same site that was initially charging for it. Egypt, Tunisia, Italy and the US had the most users listed, each with more than 30 million with 107 countries included overall. The data breach notification service have I been pwned has been updated to check if your account was impacted. And it's worth repeating this is not a new data set, or except for the phone number, even particularly private information. The significance is that it is collected in an easy to access way. And the significance today over last year is that it's now made available for free. So anybody can get at it. This will make it easy to conduct targeted phishing attacks where you know a person's name and country and just need their phone number. And Troy Hunt points out it is gold for spam based on phone number. Oh man, the phone number spam.  But if somebody has my phone number and they're going to be calling me in any given day at any given time, that is annoying at best. It's, it's, it's worse. It could be worse than that.   I mean, that's like quite honestly, like it's become very easy to become numb to these kind of even new data breaches at this point, because we see them so regularly, you just have to go to have, I've been pwned and look at the volume of, of data sets that they just have on there. It definitely is, I mean, like the ultimate impact of this is that, I guess, potentially lower quality actors that wish to do harm with this information now have access to it, you know, it sold for $30,000. Now it's, you know, then it's sold to a telegram up for considerably less as effective, you know, it's free now. Not again, not the end of the world. Again, though, social engineering can be pernicious and horrible. And I, you know, people find horrible ways to use this information. So not great that it's out there.  Yes, the scale is bad, not new information, not that bad. It's important to separate the fud from the facts. I think the facts here are you should be aware, if you're in this data breach, so that when someone contacts you out of the blue and has all this information, you have it in your head like, oh, but they could have got it from Facebook, right? Because my information was in that breach. It's all about being able to protect yourself. There's nothing in here particularly that allows them to do something without your knowledge and cooperation. It's really more about harassment, spam, phishing, etc. LG Electronics Board of Directors approved a plan to shut down the company's mobile communications business, which makes it smartphones. LG plans to fully close down the division by the end of July. LG was in the cell phone game long before the rise of smartphones, you may recall, making high-end feature phones like the LG chocolate and LG Prada in the mid-2000s. The company was fairly early to adopt Android, releasing its first device with the OS in November of 2009, and becoming a partner with Google on well-regarded Nexus devices like the Nexus 5, the Nexus 6, and the Nexus 5X. But the company's mobile division was unable to generate a profit in recent years with operating losses of over $5 trillion. That's about $4.4 billion US dollars since 2015. Counterpoint research estimates that in Q3 of 2020, LG had 1.91% of global market share, not a big market share. Some analysts blame a lack of leverage over chip supplies as one of the contributing factors to the LG mobile handsets demise. Also, LG will continue to develop mobile technology in other areas like 6G. It will provide service support and software updates for existing products over a period of time, and we wouldn't be too surprised if the name is licensed to another manufacturer, as has been done by Nokia and Blackberry. I mean valid efforts, right? LG with a scrollable screen, even of late, trying to bring innovation to the market, that will be missed. Perhaps because some of that stuff comes from LG Display, a separate company, but in the same umbrella group. Perhaps that will continue to happen. They'll just be innovating for other companies instead of making their own models. But it is the end of an era, and like you mentioned, Sarah, we've seen the dominance of Nokia and Blackberry. Man, back in 2004, it was Nokia and Blackberry, where the top sellers of phones, and it looked like that would never end. LG was up there then, and they survived quite a bit longer than I think maybe some other people expected. They certainly outlasted Nokia and Blackberry. I sometimes look at Samsung and Apple up there at the top of the charts and think, oh my gosh, it looks like they're unassailable, that they'll never end. But all things do come to an end. So it's a matter of when, not if. Listen, LG makes them beautiful refrigerators. I have an LG washing machine. It's very nice. There you go. Yeah, I mean, so do I. Where I did at my last apartment, however, I never had an LG mobile phone. But I remember, not that long ago, it being a, oh, this is a premium brand. I mean, they made nice phones. And I think it's really sort of a, I don't know, a matter of the market getting saturated enough and the company being undercut to the point that they just couldn't compete in this particular arena. Yeah, it seems to me that initially, it seemed as Samsung, LG, Motorola, HTC, in the early days of Android were kind of the big players in those markets. And Samsung very clearly kind of staked out, I think, the high end successfully, obviously, with their Samsung line of phones. And then the rise of, and we've seen Motorola have these same struggles, HTC have these same struggles, right? LG is not the first one to kind of struggle to figure out this market. We've seen the rise of Chinese manufacturers. I think in 2015, we might have still been like, oh, this Xiaomi, they're up and comers and they're really making waves back then. I would have to go back and check the copy on that. But you can look at the huge impact they've had, not just in China, but in India, the EU and stuff like that as kind of staking out that kind of premium mid to low range, really, where you're getting a lot of features for not a lot of money in those markets. LG of late just kind of seemed to just want to be a weird lab to see what would catch on. They were doing DACs in phones. They were doing that dual display phone. They were doing that wing phone, which I don't even know if that ever came out. But it looked like it was an interesting idea. I don't know if they ever, if as of late, they really considered that like, hey, this is going to catch on and we're going to do this. We're going to light some fire there. Yeah. And, Sarah, I think you pointed it out. One of the big things is that LG didn't have chip leverage like Samsung and even Apple does by designing their own chips. And they didn't have a feature phone plan after a while. They really bet on the high end of the market almost too much. And BBK Electronics, those are the folks. BBK Electronics includes Oppo, Vivo, OnePlus, Realme, and iTunes. And those are like, when you look at the top five, three of those are in the top five of cell phones. So BBK Electronics had the right idea. They had the regional advantage with being near chip manufacturing in China or assembly plants in China. So yeah, I think LG is going to be fine. They're going to be fine. Just handsets was not going to be their thing. All right, let's talk about the Google Oracle case. An API, if you don't know, is a description of how to work with a program. ZDNet quotes Mulesoft, CTO, Uri Sirid, describing it, describing protecting an API like copywriting the instructions for using an ATM.  It doesn't make any sense. Maybe patent that, but that's not something that you can copyright. So APIs for a long time have been considered to be uncopyrightable. That has recently been put to the test. And when I say recently, I mean for 10 years, Google and Oracle have been fighting in court about whether 11,500 lines of code in the Oracle API or 11,500 lines of code representing 37 APIs in Android violate Oracle's copyright. Google developed these APIs themselves in order to make Java work, but Oracle claimed, and they were right, that the structure, sequence, and organization mimicked Oracle's API. And then Oracle also claimed that it violated copyright. Now the copying is in fact not at issue. Everybody knows they copied it, whether Google developed it themselves or not. The courts have determined this is a copy. The case here at the Supreme Court was conducted to determine if Google's infringement, their copying, was a fair use. In the United States, fair use provides a defense. If your infringement is for a certain purpose, like educational reasons or meets other criteria, like you just took a very small amount, or you're not undermining the marketplace, or it's transformative in some way, you can say, even though it technically infringed, I'm not guilty of a copyright infringement because I have a fair use defense. And the US Supreme Court ruled Monday that Google had a fair use defense. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote for the 62 majority, quote, as part of an interface, the copied lines are inherently bound together with uncopyrightable ideas and the creation of new creative expression. So the court ruled that Google only used the API in so much as to let Java programmers build Android apps, which is found to be a transformative use. The 11,500 lines of code in question represent 0.4% of the 2.86 million lines of code in the entire Java API. So it's a very small amount. Breyer compared that to the gas pedal in a car telling the car to move faster, something you might be able to patent, but the idea of which would not be copyrightable. Copyright is meant to promote new ideas by giving protection to them so that creators are incentivized to create. And fair use is meant as a balance to make sure that copyright protection does not suppress more new ideas than it encourages. Justice Breyer identified the Google's use of the API code enabled new creative expression, Android apps, that would not have existed otherwise. The Justice wrote, quote, the upshot in our view is that fair use can play an important role in determining the lawful scope of a computer program copyright. Now writing for the dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas joined by Justice Alito criticized the majority for not ruling on whether declaring code in an API is protected by copyright. They just jumped past that like, let's assume we're not going to rule on that. Let's assume it's copyrightable. We think there's a fair use defense here. Justice Thomas thinks addressing that copyright issue would show that Google's actions were not fair use, hence the dissent. But the majority opinion here, 62, is that the limited amount of use that Google made of the API is not a copyright violation. Well, shoot. This has been going on for some time, as you mentioned, a decade. And yeah, I think really, I mean, Oracle and Google both have, they both have good arguments here. And the idea that Google's saying, well, sure, yes, we copied this code. This is something that we did. But you can't call this a copyright violation. Well, the Supreme Court agreed with them. And I also, I have to say, not that the Supreme Court isn't well-versed on these issues, but this is, I mean, it's a very nuanced thing. I would love to know what was going on in the chambers, you know, where they were like, what do we think? What do we think here? Oracle or Google in this situation, you know, knowing what we know, because it is a, it's a kind of a, it's a messy deal. The one thing that stood out to me though, is that this over, did overturn, right, Tom, a lower court ruling that ruled in favor of Oracle. Right, the lower court ruled it was not a fair use, and Supreme Court overturned that. Yeah, yeah. So, so I mean, I think that's why there was a lot, you know, you know, there was a lot riding on how this case would come out. And so I'm glad we have some, we, you know, we have a final to the Supreme Court. There's no appeal. It is interesting that there wasn't, I guess, a wider present. This was relatively narrow in the scope, at least, you know, compared to what Justice Thomas wanted to see. So, but interesting that, you know, this was not a foregone conclusion, right? I mean, I think sometimes, you know, we think, well, you know, it makes sense to me that it's only 0.2% of the code. So of course, how could that fall under copyright? But other courts did not see it the same way. And the decision was based on it being transformative, not on the amount of code. So even though it was a small amount of code, that was not the basis for the fair use defense. The fair use defense was, hey, an API is just a description of how you use your thing. They're still using Java, and the people using Java are still dealing with Oracle. It's just, you're saying, hey, Java can, you can declare that, hey, Java, if you want to work, here's where, where you'll work. That should not be copyrighted because it reduces innovation. Hey, folks, would you like a DTNS hat, a hoodie, a mask, or a mousepad? We have all that and more at the Daily Tech News Show store. You find it by going to DailyTechNewsShow.com slash store. Oh, you thought we were done talking about the US Supreme Court, did you? Well, we're not. The US Supreme Court has vacated a lower court ruling which had said that the president acted unconstitutionally when blocking followers on Twitter. The reason it was vacated is because the president in question is no longer in office. So the question is literally moot. This is what moot means. This case doesn't matter anymore. It's a fairly mundane and uncontroversial ruling. But in a concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas, again, this is in a concurrence. He's agreeing. It's like, oh, yeah, this is moot. In a concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas took the opportunity to argue that social media platforms might qualify as common carriers. Thomas wrote, a traditional telephone company laid physical wires to create a network connecting people. Digital platforms lay information infrastructure that can be controlled in much the same way. Now, keep in mind, if something is deemed a common carrier, it does not have the right to exclude, right?  Justice Thomas suggests, quote, if the analogy between common carriers and digital platforms is correct, he's not asserting is it, it is. But he's saying, if it is, then an answer may arise for dissatisfied platform users who would appreciate not being blocked, laws that restrict the platform's right to exclude. He's saying, hey folks who are upset about Twitter blocking people, here's what you can do. Justice Thomas also argues that Facebook and Google hold outside market power over speech, even if there are alternatives, writing, quote, a person always could choose to avoid the toll bridge or train and instead swim the Charles River or hike the Oregon Trail. But in assessing whether a company exercises substantial market power, what matters is whether the alternatives are comparable. For many of today's digital platforms, nothing is. Points for the Oregon Trail reference, Justice Thomas. And what he's saying is, sure, you can talk elsewhere outside of Facebook, but it's kind of hard to have the same impact if you do. In the end, Justice Thomas says it's up to the legislative branch to enact laws about what is and is not a common carrier and that it doesn't apply to the case he's writing about.  This is a weird concurrence because it's just as Thomas just saying, you know what, I just want to talk about this while I have a chance. Oh, boy. Where to start? Where to start?  But on the other hand, I'm like, it makes a lot of sense, depending on who you are and how you communicate with people and how you consider that to be your lifeline, really. Yeah.  It is very bizarre. I mean, kind of going back to the last case, it would be like if in that decision, they talked about why like Microsoft's Windows license couldn't be copied. Like, you know, like it's so far afield. And I know he establishes that this doesn't apply. But like, if Common Carrier Status doesn't apply to one, like I guess, of the major online platform, it's like the scope of Twitter is like an order of magnitude less than when we're talking about the reach of Facebook and Google, specifically kind of what he's kind of laying out here, which makes it, you know, at the one hand, it's a very interesting idea. And we've kind of become familiar with this with the whole net neutrality, you know, reclassification that we've kind of gone back and forth on now over the last 10 years as well. So like, we're a little bit more familiar with that than I think we might have been. Interesting idea just seems to be coming out of the blue, obviously setting the precedent for if this comes before me, you'll know how I'll look at this, you know. Keep in mind, he's not saying, I should decide if it's a Common Carrier, because that's not how it works. I think a lot of people misinterpret this is like, oh, he's saying bring a court case to me about this with Facebook and I'll rule in a, no, he's not. In fact, he may very well rule that Facebook is not a Common Carrier given the current laws. What he's saying is the legislature gets to determine what is and is not a Common Carrier. And the legal test for whether the law is constitutional or not would decide whether it should count. And what, so what he's saying here might be a little subtle is, hey, legislature, pass a law that defines a Common Carrier as someone with a big market dominance over communication online, call it a Common Carrier, and the courts will be able to support you. And I think he's right. He's not saying that it is a Common Carrier right now. He's saying it could be if the legislature passed a law and that law would pass constitutional muster. I know that's kind of nebulous there, but it's, it's a weird place for him to make that argument. But you know, Supreme Court justices don't have blogs. So this is what they do. It does very much pivot kind of the traditional dynamic that we've seen over the past couple years where most of this conversation that we've been having is around section 230 platforms versus publishers. And this kind of changes how you can, you can orient yourself to look at possibly to look at these platforms if there is future legislation to, you know, to, to, I guess, to actually make that a thing. Well, I don't know the last time y'all went to space jam.com, but it's been around since 1996. Oh, yes, it is, it is an old school URL. 25 years later, the sequel film called Space Jam A New Legacy starring Ron James has replaced the URL space jam.com to showcase the new movie's first trailer. But if you say, well, hold on a second, I really liked that old website. It's been around since 1996. The original website has a new URL at space jam.com slash 1996. Yeah, back several years ago, the fact that space jam had not been updated since 1996 became an internet meme. And it kind of percolates back up every so often with people talking about how amazing it is that that's still there. It's still online. The server's still there. It's up there with a few other long lasting websites. And so yeah, the idea that there's now a new space jam movie and they need space jam.com to make way, you know, for LeBron and the modern space jam almost lost us a piece of internet history right there with LG phones and Yahoo answers today. Thank you, Space Jam 1996 people. It does. It does warm my heart that I can still go online and get an extremely low resolution AIFF audio file of Michael Jordan saying a line from that movie. As someone who customized all of the notification sounds on my Windows 95 machine with clips that I would pull from stuff like that, it warms my heart. It's pure nostalgia, just like much like people still being interested in the original space jam is probably mostly pure nostalgia. I mean, it's an iconic movie. People love this movie. It certainly is to some people, Sarah. It certainly is. And it joins, you know. I say this never having seen it. I'm sorry. I've never seen it. But yes, I know the space jam memes. I get it. I get that people care about this and the fact that the URL was around for so long before it got messed with.  Just go slash 1996. If you still want some original vintage website thrills, the Dole Kemp 1996 presidential campaign website is still available for you to go and check out text versions of all of their TV ads. If that's, if that's what somebody's a space jam, it's your jollies. All right, folks, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. This one comes from Stuart, the watch lives Cooper from Melbourne, Australia, who says your conversation last week about rugged phones, the caterpillar rugged phone seems to be firmly aimed at firefighters, water resistant, spray resistant, and a flur. This gives firies. I think that's what Stuart is calling firefighters. Maybe it's a slang term in Australia. A quick way to hot spotting fires when they don't have ready access to dedicated equipment. Yours from the emergency side. Yeah, thank you, Stuart. This is definitely being marketed towards construction sites. But if it's not also being marketed to firies, it should be. You're absolutely right. And it's marketed in multiple industrial situations. So I can't imagine it. It isn't also being marketed there. But well spotted, fire spotter Stuart. Thanks, Stuart. If you have anything that you spot in any of our shows or feedback or questions or anything in between, please send that email to feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. 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