Und ich möchte Rüdiger Weiß, der Professor von Berlin, und er wollte so beinahnt werden. Und Sustainable Blockchains ist das Thema, das er talked about. Und der Subtitel des Talks ist, ganz weit oben auftaucht, ist, nachhaltig Blockchains, digital und dreckig. Sustainable Blockchains, instead of digital and dirty. Also vielen Dank. Thank you. One remark, this headline was not chosen by me, but by the German foreign broadcasting station Deutsche Welle. Someone kind of teased me by saying that if you Google digital and dirty, you'll find this interview in Deutschlandfunk. And that is just one from the bizarre features of the blockchain world. And like other topics where people have a strong emotional attachment, there is a kind of funny situation where all the people that had a scientific approach to the issue and weigh up the pros and cons, they are then invited by the pro and con people to panels, one after the other. And they may then be facing attacks for the opinions they bring forward. But as a scientist, a computer scientist, you should keep calm and understand the technology. And that is surprisingly simple when it comes to blockchain. And that's why I started my first slide by saying simple and old. A blockchain is a chain list of blocks with hash pointers. And that is one of the most simple structures that you can learn in one of the first semesters in computer science as a really introductory example. And that is quite interesting. One thing that can be explained in just a few minutes of a lecture by mixing a few other influences and by mixing it with some other influences, it became very interesting technologies. But as computer scientists, let's approach it and think how you can establish a secure ledger note-taking. And that has been a topic that's been debated in computer science for a number of years. One of the defining papers that's always quoted is from 1990. How to timestamp a digital document. In the Hacker-Szene, there are some interesting experiments. One is by Ross Anderson from 1996. Even more, I had to smile when an old, very old Hacker, he was already old when I came into the scene in 1990, that's Lutz Donnerhacker. He also produced an eternal log file. And that must have had a strong influence because the standard URL that I have quoted here is old assets, that's how it starts. And that's been around for decades and even the people that ran this have always regarded this as an old issue, an old burden. The surprise then was that Bitcoin developed so strongly later. So what happened with Bitcoin? From literally nothing, suddenly there was a currency system that if you look at these usual exchange forums and try to approach, still there is a three digit billions of currency units strength that Bitcoin has. And of course a lot of criticism has been raised about the energy consumption of that technology and one of the decisions that led to the decentralization of the system. And the software quality is a bit grueling, if you look at it as a hacker, of course with your judgment is kind of strong, tends to be. And what I would summarize my comments as would be please do it again properly. And the interesting thing is that some simple, some small decisions at the bit level had strong social and economic implications in this currency system. Now let's try to order the problems to some extent and as the first and most important issue I would raise data protection. Bitcoin is a system where a public transaction letter exists and it's distributed worldwide, so everything is open. And by definition things that are written into that cannot be deleted. So for all eternity in a sense that you will have to define data protection sensibly, of course, but it's all public, open, it cannot be deleted, there's no right to be forgotten. And if you look at, if you would make up a data protection nightmare, then Bitcoin is quite an interesting candidate. Now the people that defend the system say well there are pseudonyms and about that I have to say well that is kind of deceiving as a sense of security. The pseudonyms are the last line of defense really and to some extent in some aspects it is a deceptive kind of descent. I've just noted one item here. It can be attacked with simple graph theory and even perhaps in quotes artificial intelligence to add another buzzword. So, you could look at the whole transaction data and see if, and if I'm a bit eccentric the whole Bitcoin transaction still fit into Ram of my computer, so if you look at the whole thing I'm not looking exactly, but they grow at a somewhat mild rate. You can almost have it all in Ram and then run certain algorithms on it. Another question then is how long will this stay legal? Even the use of pseudonyms is doubted in many areas in the world. Right, now concerning data protection it is problematic and another interesting aspect is to really consider what the philosophy behind it is and that is quite interesting because of course Bitcoin comes from a libertarian mindset and there are people that are called crypto-anarchists or capitalism-anarchists it's quite interesting what mixtures of political ideologies there are these days and the debate whether these people are more happy with or without a state in particular without a strong state that is one of the oldest philosophical debates and that is a very interesting debate as well which to sharpen one's mind one really should get into and try and understand the different positions and make up one's mind about their own position but we are all hackers therefore we tend to say philosophy is all nice and good but we have to produce something to attack some real problems and the interesting thing is in the question whether it is good if a state does not exist anymore what do we do in areas where there is no functioning state where there is no banking a reliable banking where there is no state or social control about who can actually join the game and that is an interesting point that simply got raised by a simple question asking I am rather clear in my mind that an interesting from a computer scientific point of view what's interesting is that there are computers communicating here and the question then is who is allowed to use these computers and is therefore and that is quite strongly linked to the question of access as a whole and that is a debate where I at one point thought well it might be surprising to some people but the spread of mobile phones is about one per person on the planet at the moment but when it comes to bank accounts that is much less accessible so it is an interesting scenario where the possession of a phone however simple doesn't have to be that smart SMS messaging might be enough where that gives you an opportunity of access and that from a hackers point of view was led to the thought well yes discrimination free everybody can use it and this hacker ideal is not just abstract it's not just important in an abstract sense because there are enough countries where for example women cannot open a bank account without a male relation giving consent or something so is this free of discrimination but there is an interesting dynamic then too because also children gain access and that can lead us to the debate oh great now children have this freedom yes but you can get the situation where people that want to have run businesses then try to capture children and empty their accounts so we have a ringtone subscriptions which happened in Kenya these nice abstract issues does it make sense to give children access to bank accounts that is not an academic debate we have had developments that even the Kenyan government had to take note of still this is a technology that in principle allows access to anyone in my view zwar auch verlangt it needs to be shaped and should be shaped so this discrimination free property that people, creatures of all kinds can have the key to an account that is a small but not unimportant game changer in this area now if you consider that even a non-smartphone gives people access then at a very abstract level you can say that possibly with blockchain and digital trust structures you can build structures that have very few requirements in the analog world and can be used and that means that there are some interesting possibilities that I would like to get into in this talk maybe at the end of the talk a few words on the things that I want to talk about in this talk I talk about how we can take an existing system and some reduce some environmentally damaging aspects and I want also to discuss another system that has different mechanics and I already talked about some things at the last congress about using more intelligent mining algorithms and there were proof of stake or proof of work systems that had no energy consumption for the mining of the coins and both things are being researched and I already talked about this at the last congress and from a hacker's perspective we have considered that we have the technologies but what do we actually create with it and if you look at the bank systems there is not really an academic discussion if you take M-Pesa which started in Kenya which was a cooperation with Vodafone in many areas and I guess it was received very positively so we can see that there have been some positive developments in these projects but we still have to think critically about these projects and even in these cases the government is actually not opposed to these things and even just these three things have selected here a bit drastic so even in the poorest countries of the world there are in Kenya the most poorest actually have to 66% so they still have to pay transfer fees which are considerable old mafia movies you know there was mafia fees for staying protected against the mafia und so this is so you have to pay quite a lot of fees for these things and at the same time you have major wins and I am old enough where where there was no bad connotation of so viel Hausziehen dann ist das grob unanständig and it is simply not acceptable if the poor have to pay fees of that amount of that on that scale and if people that just transfer fees of that amount have to pay the most that is simply not acceptable that is rather indecent even so that is an issue where you can argue yes even small amounts cause effort but if you have 27% profit and if you are in a poor country and you are having sense maybe just out of the goodness of your heart you could waive those fees and that is an appeal that people should not operate this services just to optimize profit and I have also extended my talk at short notice by adding this concerning data protection in May 2019 there was the so what is data protection we have now the issue that these personal data are with private companies and of course we will say what private companies have the secret services have as well but then there is issue number 2 what the secret services have so what happened because in May 11.5 million records of users were offered on the black market the interesting thing now in this was 11.5 million is impressive enough but if you look closely these are just the most valuable data sets these 11.5 million are not just names and all kinds of private and security relevant data this was done professionally these are people that run gambling services and betting services and there are lists saying what kind of transactions these people had made so as I said if you register betting company according to the laws of the German state of Schleswig-Holstein then you have some interesting opportunities there is not a cynical remark it's just an analysis of how things work so if these 11.5 million are just data which is the elite kind of the data then let's just assume that these are not the only data that have gone astray and maybe much cheaper the other 30 million could be bought because they are just peanuts so the old dilemma if data are created the private businesses will sell it secret services will have it but good or bad news, however you want to see it these data can then find their way through some kind of channels and not all hackers in the world just dream about having badly paid academia positions or run nice illumination in camps there are people that want to make money out of these activities and you have to assume that there are people with skills that can get at the data and the usual hacker saying well yeah, data will always be hacked sorry, no, with EMPIESA we've just seen it in May just a few months ago so again, the remark if you do not have data protection friendly constructions, then the data will be gone and it goes astray and I doubt whether society is mature enough to deal with the uncovering of all kinds of data without severe disruptions coming as a result now, since we are at that point of course then that leads us to something that is even more interesting some people in my surroundings got quite enraged about this capitalists are now capturing taking over emancipatory technologies well yes, as it always happens and the situation of course is what has to be told to the capitalists these movements do come from a narco-capitalist area so that kind of weakens the whole point anyway but now let's approach it from a scientific neutral point of view Markets have a tendency to become aware of technologies and try to make a profit out of those not a surprising thing to say and if there are ideas to run this all democratically without banks, without services these service companies will still look and see what they can use und das ist ein Lieber, was sehr interessant ist ist, wenn man sich einen Schritt zurückmacht das ist wirklich ein Angriff auf einer der größten wertvollen Firmen in der Welt von einer der größten wertvollen Firmen in der Welt auf Facebook zu finanziellen Services sie bauen eine neue Klinie in der schönen Lande in Switzerland sie sind von einem Pult von Kurzen und es gibt Spieler in der Klub die Klinie der Klub kostet 10 Millionen und dann die haben gesagt die haben gesagt, wenn sie Facebook haben wenn sie ein 2-Billion-Akount auf Facebook haben und nur 1% der User um das zu vergleichen mit der Größe der größten deutschen Banken die internationalen Banken, ihr könnt sehen, wo das geht wieder wieder die Debatte über Dateprotektion ob es State- oder Privat-Aktur Facebook mit ihren Daten ihr könnt sagen, dass das das Wichtigste der ganzen Welt ist Facebook wird die Daten haben sie werden sie aufsetzen, sie haben die Klinien wir haben bei M-Pesa gesehen so, wir haben in dem Fall von M-Pesa gesehen, das Vodafone ist nicht ein kleiner oder medium Enterprise ich habe es nicht bewältigt, aber Entschuldigung wenn es, wenn es 11,5 Millionen premium Datasets gibt, dann ist es ziemlich ungewöhnlich, dass nicht alle der Daten, die die Daten ausgebildet haben ich würde nicht sagen, dass M-Pesa nur die premium Datasets sehen ich will es gar nicht wissen ich will es gar nicht wissen, aber was die Erklärung der Erklärung zu dieser Bedeutung könnte der Population unsetteln zu beantworten, ein former German Interior Minister Thomas de Mezié jetzt noch ein Problem das ich gerne adden würde aber in der Hacker-Camp Hacker-Camp ist ein guter Ort um diese Punkte in die Debatte zu throwen wiederum diese Protokolle verbreiten weil die die Frage der Energiekonsumtion vielleicht solved was ich in meinem letzten Congress Talk in diesem Fall pointe aber was ich sagen würde ich habe zwei Ideen und das ist und ich habe versucht die infrastrukturfreie Mining mit regenerativen Power-Sources und es gibt einiges die Protokolle die sind freundlich gegen Solar- und Windpower und man sollte vielleicht auch ein Dream um die Idee der finanzierten Cloud-Service zu haben um die Block-Chain zu produzieren um die Arbeitskokolle zu verwenden wenn man Länder mit Problemen in den Banking-Systems Problems in der Computerindustrie, Computerinfrastruktur nicht verbinden natürlich das ist nicht das Hackerspirit Hackers just build something in a weekend and build a miner and then just throw it into the desert and suddenly the whole world becomes nice and comfortable but still a few thoughts and maybe even calculations should be made to that end now let's look at regenerative Power-Sources regenerative energies and mining interestingly has a constant power consumption there are far less fluctuation of course they do exist but much less fluctuation even over a longer time scale than the energy consumption of a modern social economy and to that regard the options for regenerative energy sources which always supply a certain base need is there for them to be used the option is there because this really works with a constant power consumption and that is a property that solar and wind power have as well solar and wind power have strongly fluctuating power generation and people that in my early days found nuclear power interesting they thought it's going to be so cheap that you don't even have to have power meters anymore which not wasn't quite realistic but I'm still smiling if you then let the engineers play around a bit then truly we did have the situation that power wasn't just free but even had a negative price because as I said situation is that we may have too much power in the grid sometimes and the idea then is to maybe use the excess power directly for mining the second issue is maybe a bit of a course analysis but in some places there are suitable for power generation mostly in places where you tend not to want to live because there are storms there there is too much sun and therefore it's quite interesting to say well maybe there are places that have a lot of sunlight and we can directly use that power that might be interesting maybe but then how do we transport and store this energy that is very very expensive and if you then as a hacker look at the situation and say hang on how much infrastructure do we need for mining what properties does this infrastructure have and the interesting thing if you analyze the mining system the interesting thing is that some properties are not so apparent one property is that it is friendly for mining pools if you describe bitcoin mining then you keep saying that these are lottery tickets and you have to calculate some random numbers but well the law of large numbers that comes into play if you have a system like bitcoin which is friendly for mining in pools then you do not have to wait and hope for some random lucky event you can use mining results and have them delivered and continue from them alright so let's approach the idea of solar mining mesh networks what requirements to participate in bitcoin mining I'll now use bitcoin as the leading currency use it as a placeholder for all the others since bitcoin allows this the situation is much better than you might think and that gets us back to the hacker idea in principle you can set up a solar power station in the desert throw it into the desert and as an outside connection you need one satellite connection if GSM exists which in many situations let's take GSM so this very abstract situation you just throw one computer into the hottest desert where there is no life form would like to stay for any extended amount of time establish a satellite link the power for the satellite link we can generate as well and these are things where many people might say well let's calculate if it's going to be worth it production of all this but I would say well yes you understood we have to calculate let's do this let's calculate what is possible and what is not I'm not saying that it can solve the world's problems but this basic idea the fact that we have a situation als Idee gesagt wirklich fits the model I've just set up it's quite imaginable that we build solar mining stations and put them into the desert and connect them to satellites and as I said hackers can dream and for long enough I have been thinking this through to be able to say this is not an absurd idea well, I'm a professor I have the right to have strange ideas but apart from that I do really consider this something that you can think of and on a net political evening of the digital economy project I linked up with someone from the solar generation project he introduced systems where they can have trucks with solar panels that really went to African villages in different African countries and supplied services there and so it's still planning or being discussed how they do the token system but there are people working on it that was quite impressive and I got to know some other people when I was invited to a ministry and I'm a mathematician and there were two numbers that really moved me so the transaction fees are really affecting the poorest of the people and 600 million people have no reliable access to energy or to power and I have to say and if you have the most radical idea is that we give access to power to these people and solar power is something very obvious because of the strong solar radiation and something that I also consider und of course there is no infrastructure in these places right now and if we do it in places where there is few population then you don't really have much reliability and of course you have people who just collect scrap metals and who might scavenge whatever we drop there and and if we and what we want to do is use CO3 free power to do the mining and and and I have to say that and if we only have like a reasonable mining project that gives us more solar power then this is also a win and these are things where I say let's just consider this don't be too pessimistic about the reality yes I know if we do the calculations then it turns out it's not so easy on an economic level but still if there are so many possibilities and opportunities that are unused that will also heat up the planet then if we could divert some of that energy or heat then this is not a bad idea and yes let's have some more ideas if you think about the calculations for the if the builds for the mobile connections you could pay these with the power that you produced and during the day you could produce solar power and during the night you could then take advantage of the money that you've earned and if we make the systems more intelligent then that's something worth thinking about and the other fundamental approach is is that bitcoin involves a lot of efforts to do a lot of calculations based on random numbers and what I found interesting is an alternative which is proof of space and I think in the next couple of weeks and months we will have some more interesting results so for instance there's perma coin which combines distributed storage with payment systems and if you have and for the people who evaluate economic success they they are these people are willing to pay for this so the ICO managed so the ICO for FileCon managed to acquire a three digit millions fundraising and therefore I think that young people can look into it and maybe come up with some good ideas and I want to give you an overview again so you get the consensus by by making the storage space available and if you want to combine consensus with useful social actions then everyone wins and if you combine these things then you become part of this reward system instead of just randomly calculating hashes actually do something worthwhile with the energy and you have more influence on the system just by doing it I don't want to call this a win-win scheme but it would be quite annoyed if people actually called it like this because then the big countries would use more energy than smaller countries and one of the promising things that I've seen is that we use regenerative energies and let's combine these properties and 2. und wie gesagt für die Akademie für die Akademie die sogenannten we should mining schemes also wo wirklich die demokratische Ansatz dass jeder rechner ein we should try and find democratic approaches where each computer has a say and then find approaches that do not have the energy problems and that will create a new currency dynamic now that is the kind of research that I conduct but today I wanted to place the focus onto really hackable ideas and really invite you to maybe take part now to summarize oh I forgot this even stronger requirements of stronger challenges are the privacy challenges I had a talk yesterday about a certain form of economy that could be a building block in certain knowledge protocols now that surely there is an interesting approach for research to conduct some mathematically challenging and useful research so again protecting privacy requires very well thought through mathematical ideas so all mathematicians are invited to take a deeper look and then I said proper cryptography as I said we should consider do we want people with a lot of money enter the system and generate a lot of CO2 which on the other hand would stabilize the currency that may sound horrific but if you approach it cynically you could say that the CO2 generation is quite strongly correlated with the value of the currency so cynically said if you're ready to burn this and that amount of power for Bitcoin then it is worth something to you you shouldn't forget that either the large power consumption does mean that Bitcoin even against state attacks has a certain amount of resistance and resilience and the people that they for hardware for mining bitcoins auf Technologie stand they use a technology in processor building but I'm going to be mean now but technologically they're quite in the middle between Intel and AMD I think they have finer structures than Intel these days so in that regard it's quite interesting and of course also an offense to the mathematics community because mathematicians always searched for prime numbers with interesting properties and a wholly failed brain coin system which had as proof of work searched for prime numbers the fact that this failed so badly even though it found chains of prime numbers with interesting properties and then the scientific community had the fact that this failed is kind of denigrating to the mathematics community because you have people playing with this and producing nicer results than the scientific community had and then it failed but that's not a very rare thing in the cryptographic community now last slide to point out the positive sides die regenerative energies have a number of properties digital currencies have a number of properties that go very well with regenerative power generation that can go very well with grassroot economies and let me say it like this if we build this in countries we should try to get privacy inserted as quickly as possible but in this ear if friends they believe so we have the best darkness that follows they don't except if you you don't want to get it you don't want to get under Jetzt haben wir die Probe auf dem Black Market.  Entschuldigung, das war sehr müde. Ich musste einen artistischen Interlekt hier hinsetzen.   Das ist nicht der Kopf des Rocker-Klubs, dass er eine Barbi-Puppe hat.   Ein sehr einfaches Experiment, das ich auf diese Daten fahre. Wenn du nur für ein paar Stunden denkst, kannst du ein paar Python-Skrips, die ein enormes Amt von Unrest geben können.  Wenn ich einen kleinen Strip schreibe, kann ich alle diese Leute, die in Gamling sind, wenn du 11,5-Millionen Menschen denken, und du dann nur 1,001 per Millen, dann respondest du zu Blackmail, das würde viel Geld auch generieren. Die Forschung für nachhaltige Gruptografien.   Da gibt es hier ein paar interessante Ideen. Ich habe gesagt, dass die Datenprotektion auf der sehr basen Basis sein sollte. Das ist Arbeit für alle.  Vielen Dank. Also eine Punktlandung. Ja, eine perfekte Landung. Rudi, danke dir. Jetzt eine sustained Blockchain, statt digital und dörter. Für Q&A haben wir leider keine Zeit, weil Rudi schon alle seine Zeit hat, aber du weißt, wie er es jetzt aussieht. Er wird einen der Exzits benutzen, weil das der einzige Weg, den er hat, den Tenzen zu verlassen.


This is the animation minute As always let's start with jobs a jaw drop games is looking for technical animators animation programmer and AI Programmers to join their studio. Micro's animation is looking for animation leads Eric here is tweeting that they're still looking for a cartoony Maya animator Sucker Punch is looking for animators for gameplay cinematic and technical Mike is tweeting here They're looking for a senior animator and Star Trek prodigies looking for a previous artist And then at a job posting looking for a senior animator So as you go into news the art of book for the Mitchells versus the machines is now free available online, which is awesome I'm still gonna review the book look for it on my channel soon speaking of free books This simplified forms is online in full ass while go check it out if you're interested in story Here's the story course part one to four. I've been following this for a while. It looks super cool Now there is going to be an art of book very cool I'm very excited for this look at that school presentation. That's cool. That's super neat I can't wait. Speaking of art. Look at this. I like it. Oh, yes, I do Really like it. Oh, that's the best. Come on. That's cool. Here's another one Can runs over you wing, but maybe that's why I love it. So cool Here's another one. I love it Love it Design the colors everything so cool when I meet that character in there coming book news here arcade club I love those designs. That's super cute. And I love this as an actual arcade Cue pages on French. It's very cool. I don't check this out So as you go to 2d animation because pencil tests are always awesome. So cute. I love it speaking of 2d This is insane. Check it out. This is 42 seconds long. Absolutely awesome. It's even saying this is an insane shot Super complicated and the awesome part is that there's a whole thread about how you went about it research Into final animations very cool. Check it out. It's crazy shot. It's crazy shot. This is cool to see too Blocking out the animation with cubes. I like that the end for mother-in-law and then getting into the animations very cool The reference is awesome. Look at those wings. Speaking of reference. That's very cool Crazy creature. All right, so you're going with two Star Trek Because if you watch my channel, you know, I love Star Trek. It's blinking lights and interiors are super cool Here's one and then here's another one Shuttle Bay so cool And of course pixel arts. I love this tentacles of grape Switch that's great that then there's this crazy town animation of hands and arms. I didn't understand what's going on here It's insane. I love it more pixel art. Look at that. It's so cool. So crisp, too And look at that. That's cool lighting in pixel art. This is a resident evil mock-up here Love to play this and last but not least again, so crisp so cool And that is that animation minute you can find it every month on my channel at 10 a.m


some people will find that it will polarise to some extent. I suspect that some people will find it too controversial or provocative. Some people will say that it will not go far enough, but again it is trying to set a direction, a different narrative on this issue than we have had in Scotland before. Anna and I are keen that we move away from the idea of how we fix women so that they are more entrepreneurial. We have only been more confident. Last time I was in this Parliament physically doing a session similar to this one, I was speaking to someone at the end and she said that the company is sending women managers on a course to be more aggressive and more this and more that, such as men. Why is the company not sending the men on a course to be more like women? We have to stop trying to fix women to address entrepreneurial under participation. We have really got to fix society and we have to mitigate the consequences of its current unfixed state. Those mitigations have got to be more profound than they have been. I believe that we can do that. I am not naive about that, but there is no point to just another review saying, let us set up a confidence course for women and then let us move on. There is no longer time for tick boxing. My comments at the start about the crisis that we are in, this country is going to experience this species, this planet is going to experience exponential change, and it is going to be bewildering. If we cannot put our best minds at scale on to those problems for this country and for the wider humanity that we are in, then we are in big, big trouble and those post-apocalyptic or post-industrial apocalyptic wastelands, I mentioned earlier, will look tame in comparison to what is coming. That absolutely requires us to involve our best people involved in this. A big part of that is having those women who want to fall onto their career paths, having the same access to those paths as men do, I think. Thank you very much. I am very, very much looking forward to reading the review. Just one more question, which kind of takes us back to where we started. The first thing that you mentioned was around culture. Thus far, you have not really reflected much on attitude to risk and our perception of failure culturally. I would like some reflections on that. I know that you said that at the beginning culture can be changed very easily, but it seems to me that something about a risk appetite and our attitude is deeply ingrained and how we perceive failure, which of course is simply learning in business terms, but I would like some just to finishing reflections on that, thank you. Yes, certainly. There is a statistic that I do not know how valid it is, but it is probably in the right ballpark that on average successful founders had five failures before their sixth company, so you can see that if we do not tolerate failure, we are not going to tolerate success either. Something that comes out quite often in the data when people look at high entrepreneurial as Scotland is a fear of failure, it is a cultural thing. How to address that? I apologise that this is anecdotal, but it is anecdotal at scale. We have a generation of founders coming through now, and when I say what I am going to say, I do not mean to disregard older founders. I am older than I was once, and I want to still be a part of this debate, but there is a generation of founders coming through who have grown up in a different age. They do not remember all the shipyards closing down in Clydebank and everywhere else. They do not believe that they should grow up in a managed decline policy as it was when I was growing up. They live in an internet age where every customer on earth is adjacent to them in a way that was not the case when we were struggling to maintain our steel industry and all those kinds of things. Every competitor too, so they have to be very good founders, but every customer is available. The internet has widely propagated exemplar stories, narratives about how companies succeeded and failed. Those younger founders are much more comfortable with the idea that they might not succeed first time, because that is what they are seeing in their peer group. Where do they see their peer group? It is not in Scotland, it is international. The founders that they admire did not succeed the first time or made big mistakes and recovered from them. They do not have the same fear of failure. The more we see successful Scottish companies and the more we hear those founders talk about failure, the more that becomes okay. For example, there is an organisation that is running events in Scotland—I would not say its name because it is a word word, but it is called F-star CK Upnights—where people just stand up and say, here is how I screwed up. This is what I learned from it. People are talking about those stories and they are less and less scared to do that. I think that it is happening. We are making that progress. I am seeing founders fail—very good young founders—who are getting back in the saddle and trying again. I always believe that networks trump hierarchies. There is what we think we can do in Government or people in my position, what we can say to encourage people, but people get the reference points from the people who like them from experiencing what they are experiencing. As they see the network experience failure at more scale and recover from it, they will be better equipped to deal with that. I think that that is starting to happen. In Scotland, we need to switch the narrative from why we can't do stuff to how we can do stuff. That is important because what we say affects people. Rather than talking about barriers, I want to talk about things that we can do. We are starting to do them and that is creating that network effect. It is creating a common voice, a common belief and more exemplars. Those will feed the engine. I think that we are on the right road. Jamie Halcro Johnston I have a number of questions. Some of them have been covered by colleagues, which is always the way. There are questions around the economy and about some of the regional stuff. I want to follow up on some of the questions that you answered earlier to my colleague Graham Simpson. You have a number of hats. Obviously, you are doing the review, but you are now the chief entrepreneur. Is the nature of your role in the employment with the Scottish Government your contractor? You are paid directly or through a company, you are a civil servant or a special adviser, subject to code of conduct, you are directly employed. What is the nature of that relationship? The nature is that I am employed through a company, which is my consulting vehicle, and I am paid via that vehicle, essentially by contract. I suppose that, again, on the questions that were asked earlier, you talked about the process of your appointment. You also talked about 30 years of experience decades within business.  Sometimes, yes. Absolutely.  That is very common in the scale-up startup world. The important thing is talent in that world. I cannot and will not speak to how the process works. That is for others to do that. I can tell you what my involvement in it was. In some ways, I can view my interview process as being the prior experience that I had, the stair review, and then the very intense fall-up to the stair review that I worked on, discussions about the role. As I say, I am aware that there were other candidates, so it certainly was not all me. I do not know what the nature of those discussions were, but I will tell you what I have seen. Some will take a view that that was a good decision, some will take a view that it was a bad decision or a wrong process, but I would have to direct you elsewhere for that. I suppose that we will find that at the end of the period. You were confident that the Government knew you well enough over your experience of you. I wanted to ask two areas. You said in an interview in August 2020 that it is still not enough focus on the economy for the Scottish Government. That was only a few months ago. Has anything changed or is it still your concern? I would like to see an increasing focus on the issue. You might expect me to say that, and I am very conscious in my position that I do not have the responsibilities of Government. I do not have to address fair pay in a very difficult current climate and a whole bunch of issues that I do not even have exposure to. From my perspective, I would always like to see more. If you have found me saying that you know what, Jamie, I think that we have enough focus on this, you should be concerned. To be more specific, I think that we have a really exciting direction of entrepreneurship under way. I am frankly grateful to the folks in the Government that I am working with that they are giving that time and attention. I am grateful to cabinet secretary Forbes that she commissioned a stair review. I think that everyone in the tech sector is grateful that that happened and that she supported the things that we are doing so closely, as an example. I am not saying that there is a catastrophic lack of focus. There are some very good things happening, but what I want to see is those things implemented as quickly as possible. I realise that that goes into a wider process and that is a difficult process. You are always going to hear me saying that because I think that we can always go faster in that area. If we do that, we then create more tax revenues, better wellbeing, more jobs for people, which I think helps with those other nearer-term problems, so that is why I think that it is important. I am always restless and I should be restless on this issue. We have talked about things like particularly the Scottish National Investment back and some of the work that they have done, but the enterprise bodies and the regional enterprise bodies, such as Highlands Arts Enterprise and Scottish Enterprise South of Scotland. How important are they in terms of the business support in terms of encouraging entrepreneurs? There are lots of different areas that support can be given about how important are they and what do you see their role going forward? I think that there are great assets in summary. I think that there is a lot of work that is done by our agencies that they cannot brag about on social media because they would be criticised for that, but it is very much appreciated by the companies that they work with. Again, I am sure that they could move faster and all those things, but there is a lot of good work done there. I have been working recently closely with Scottish Enterprise, for example, which is obviously the biggest of these agencies. I have been very happy with the level of collaboration that I am seeing led by Adrian Gillespie and his team on how we can embrace and amplify the work that we are doing in Stair, for example. I think that they have a very important part to play. There are a lot of expertise inside these agencies, which sometimes goes unnoticed, but is appreciated on the ground. I do not have any great criticisms of what I am seeing. I am delighted that there is a good engagement. We can always do more together. I like the fact that our agencies and our other bodies are starting to coalesce around the same view, the same model that I referred to earlier, the same system model, so we can start to reinforce each other's implementations. I am pretty happy that we are starting to go in the right direction. You talked about confidence. Scotland has a great entrepreneurial past. I am from the northern Isles, so I think that we consider ourselves still of that way in there of companies like Kylo Partners that are based in Kirkwall. On the point that you were talking to Maggie about, it is vital, as you say, that we do not just focus on the central belt or the northeast or areas that perhaps have traditional basis. What do you see as the barriers to you delivering a entrepreneurship agenda across the whole of Scotland, particularly perhaps the remote areas? It is important to remember that, if you look at a rural population, proportionally more people are entrepreneurial in that environment, partly from necessity. Again, it shows us that entrepreneurialism is innate. The reason that we are all still here as a species is because our ancestors were entrepreneurial and solved survival problems. We have that latent potential. It is very important that we do not see rural entrepreneurship as a problem to be fixed, but rather as an opportunity to be leveraged. It is easy to fall into a model that says that we have an alpha city here in Edinburgh, relatively speaking, and the rest of the country is a problem to be fixed. We have to see rural entrepreneurship as a network that we can strengthen. That requires us to do when we are designing policy. I have talked about things such as incubation, founder education, building a network of like-minded individuals, the right type of funding and so on. We natively design those to work for rural entrepreneurs. I believe that, if we do that, we will also work for city dwellers as well. If we do it the other way around, often it does not work for the rural entrepreneur. For example, if we take the scaler network—I do not want to overindex on that, but just as an example, because it is one that we have all heard of—and add a mobile component to that so that it can be in rural areas and bring expertise, bring digital marketing skills, business skills, bring appropriate micro grants, bring people physically together in a network and so on. It moves around in those areas. That is one example of how you can design a resource that is previously considered to be static and city-centre-based and brings it to rural communities. I am doing a lot of work with, for example, Jackie Brearton and Grobiz to understand how she thinks about that issue. The interesting thing is that, if we do that, the same solution will work for primary carers, for example, because they cannot always be in those same places. It is another example of how the same solutions can work for multiple entrepreneurial categories if we think about it in a properly systematic way. I suppose that it was that question around infrastructure. It could be broadband, it could be transport, it could be homes, it could be all of these things that can often be a big barrier. I know that we have issues in city centres as well, particularly on the housing issue, but it is those infrastructure issues that can often be a real barrier to somebody choosing to build their business on an island. The requirement for very high-speed broadband across the country has been well reviewed and discussed, probably by this committee, but it is extremely important. We also have to think about rural entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship in disadvantaged city areas often have the same problems, often lack of access to basic infrastructure such as good internet connectivity, incubation and so on. There is a lot of lost entrepreneurial talent in those areas, too, and we have to make sure that we are solving that in a layered way. I have looked at the provision of internet. It is not really a capital spend issue. You can always find capital spend, but who is going to pay the internet bill every month? That is not capital spend. If answers will no department of government or elsewhere wants to do it, the capital spend amounts to nothing. We can solve those problems and we have to start solving them. I think that we owe it to our citizens to find ways through those logistical challenges. I think that if you solve for rural entrepreneurship, you probably also solve for inner city entrepreneurship and you probably also solve for people in more fortunate positions. I have a request from Graham Simpson for a very short supplementary. It is very short. I want to thank you for what you have said today. You have come across really well. Are you going to be producing progress reports for the Government and for this committee? Yes. I am not currently producing those against my work, but rather through the work that I am doing. To give you an example of that, we have published the Stair 2-year progress review. I think that it will come out in November or early December, which is a programme that I am very, very actively involved in. Likewise, I expect that we will do the same with the Stuart review, which I will stay very close to. If members would prefer, or, additionally, to take all my individual activity across those things, I am very happy to consider doing that and producing such a report regularly, so I am happy to consider that. That is helpful. The clerks and I will discuss how we develop the future relationship. I would like to thank you very much for the evidence that you have brought to us this morning and for being so generous with your time. I will now move into a private session.


Cyber Conflict Module 9 North Korean Cyber Strategy Once you have completed the readings, lecture, activity, and assessment, you will be able to articulate why North Korea relies on such asymmetric military capabilities as cyber technology. Welcome to Cyber Conflict Module 9. So far in the course, we have focused on Russia as a major adversary in the area of cyber conflict. Clearly, Russia poses a great threat, but other countries are cause for concern in the world of cyber as well. In this module, we will look at North Korea and its cyber strategy. In October 2014, an extraordinary event in the history of cyber conflict occurred when a nation state mounted a cyber attack against a private corporation. Kim Young-un, leader of North Korea, ordered an attack on Sony Pictures as revenge for Sony's release of the motion picture The Interview. The action comedy film about two journalists who arrange an interview with North Korea's leader and are then recruited by the CIA to assassinate him depicts the North Korean leader as shy and unsure of himself, enamored with Western culture, and desperate for his father's approval. The North Korean Central News Agency stated that North Korea would retaliate sternly as Sony Pictures released the film, describing the movie as a quote, blatant act of terrorism in war. Sony delayed the release for about two months, but eventually released the film on December 25th. About a month before the release, a group self-named The Guardians of Peace hacked into Sony Pictures Corporation and leaked numerous internal emails, employee records, and other correspondence to embarrass the company. A few weeks later, the hackers threatened to attack any theaters showing the film. In mid-December, the FBI formally accused North Korea of executing the attack based on direct evidence that the agency had collected. What would motivate a sovereign state like North Korea to mount a cyber attack against a private corporation over an unflattering depiction of its leader? To answer that question, we must look at Kim Young-Un's role as supreme leader of the country. North Korea's supreme leader is basically considered by his loyalist as an earth-bound deity. As such, he demands complete allegiance in exchange for protection from the outside world. Allowing the country's citizens to see him in a negative light could threaten his legitimacy and rule. In fact, a New York Times article covering the Sony hack stated that one of North Korea's chief cyber program objectives is to protect the images of the country and its leader. The article noted that, similar to how North Korea attacked Sony, the country had attacked a British broadcasting company station after executives had announced plans for a documentary about North Korean's kidnapping of a British nuclear scientist. The readings for this module point out that beyond protecting the image of the country and its leader, North Korea's cyber capabilities also provide an asymmetric supplement to its military operations in times of peace and war. The most likely location of a conflict involving North Korea is the Korean Peninsula. It's to combine U.S. and South Korean force. The United States has about 35,000 military personnel in South Korea, but we would need to quickly send reinforcements if hostilities broke out. North Korea realizes this and the country also believes that the United States has become over-reliant on satellite communications and other information technologies. As a result, North Korea likely has plans to target both logistic and command and control systems to prevent the United States from quickly providing the needed reinforcements. Such a delay would provide North Korean forces enough time to overwhelm the existing enemy forces and dig in for a lengthy war, something that the United States does not want to involve itself in. North Korea appears to be accelerating its programs for training cyberwarriors, which is quite economical compared to developing conventional weaponry. The CIA's World Factbook estimates that North Korea's gross domestic product is roughly $40 billion, one-tenth the size of our F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program, and a drop in the bucket of our own GDP. North Korea views cyber-programmed development as a way to level the playing field and ultimately neutralize the United States' technological advantage. As an example of this effort, North Korea scours its country for its most promising students and then sends them to schools with specially designed cyber operations curricula. In 2003, after witnessing the United States' shock and awe campaign against Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq, Kim Young-un's father, Kim Young-il, is said to have warned his generals that, quote, if warfare was about bullets and oil until now, in the 21st century it is about information, end quote. With suffocating economic sanctions and a stagnated economy, North Korea is unlikely to ever pose a conventional military threat to the United States. However, given the low cost of developing and maintaining cyber capability, we likely will continue to see North Korea's cyber attacks against our interests and allies. Quiz Question 1 – True or False North Korea is believed to have attacked Sony Pictures Corporation as retribution for Sony Pictures investments in South Korea. The answer is False. Quiz Question 2 – Which of the following are reasons that North Korea tends to rely on asymmetric attacks against adversaries? Note – Two of the following answers are correct. A – North Korea finds traditional attack methods too predictable and ineffective. B – North Korean leaders believe that asymmetric attacks are less likely to lead to war. C – Asymmetric attacks allow North Korean leaders to punch above their weight. D – North Korea's leadership is actively attempting to privatize its economy and seeks to avoid negative publicity. Answer – B and C are correct. North Korean leaders believe that asymmetric attacks are less likely to lead to war. Asymmetric attacks allow North Korean leaders to punch above their weight. The activity for this module asks that using software like PowerPoint or Keynote build a presentation about North Korea, providing the following information. Note the country's annual gross domestic product GNP from the CIA's World Factbook. Provide interesting facts about the country, including the size of its population, military, industrial production, and agriculture output. Note how many people have access to the Internet. Compare the information to that of South Korea. Consider the difference and similarities of the two countries.