101. The Internet Still Delivers Massive Public Good – Tech Field Day Podcast

Hey, you may have heard of the internet. It's an awesome place to find some awesome things. At Cloud Field Day 25, we heard from some of the most awesome people doing great things for the community, for the world, and for the universe, all on the internet.

Join us on this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast to learn more. Welcome to the Tech Field Day podcast where we meet each week. We hear some voices from within the Tech Field Day delegate community.

We discuss some particular, specific topic around some issue that's important within the industry. Uh, Tech Field Day, of course, is a part of the Futurum Group, and you'll find this podcast not only on the Tech Field Day YouTube channel, but also on your favorite ch- podcast application. Uh, do follow us around on social media as well as the, Tech Field Day and you'll find us all of the social medias.

Make sure also to check out the wider Futurum Group, in particular, our friends at Techstrong. You'll find Techstrong TV and the Techstrong overlay application has all of our Tech Field Day content, including this very podcast. This podcast is recorded as we're just finishing out Cloud Field Day 25, and I've managed to capture three of my delegates from the event to join me on the panel as we discuss, well, the fact that the internet actually still has some public good on it.

But before we dr- delve into that conversation, let's meet who's on the panel today. I'm Kenny Sherry. I'm Lino Dallera.

I'm Sharla, also known as GthePhilein. And of course, I'm Alistair Cook, the event lead for Cloud Field Day. And we had quite an unusual feeling event for Cloud Field Day because we got to see a couple of essentially non-commercial organizations bring us some of the absolutely coolest things that are happening on the internet.

Uh, we had Joy J- Joy Chisper from the Internet Archive here. You may know of the WayBack Machine, but if you see Joy's presentation, you'll see that there is a, a whole lot of other really vital information that is being archived by the Internet Archive and that is being stored for the good of not just us, but o- future generations. That it's protecting a whole lot of internet culture and human culture that would otherwise disappear, and that because it's digital, it has always been transitory in a way that records of culture never were previously.

Paper records don't disappear nearly as easily as websites when the funding goes away. Uh, and then for me, a real highlight was going to see SETI. Uh, being of a sufficient age to have run the SETI@home screensaver, it was awesome to go and see the real work, the massive work that's being done at SETI.

And both of these things really would not exist without the internet. I mean, the Internet Archive, by definition - Right ... is an archive of the internet, but SETI itself, because, there's been a huge amount of distributed compute involved, these sort of science projects are still out there and happening on the internet.

Yeah, I mean, just thinking about SETI@home, if for those of you who are not old enough like me and Alistair remember it, I'm sorry, you can... You all piss off now. Um but, the, the s- the whole SETI@home project was basically one of the really big first forays into distributed computing.

Um, if you're not familiar with it, you'd basically get a little chunk of space to analyze, and that would just get downloaded to your SETI@home client. You would analyze it. It had pretty graphics up on the screen to waste CPU power.

Um, and then, like, three or four other people would get the same chunk to make sure that everybody got it and everybody got the results back, and then they'd give you the next chunk. And it was this really cool way of distributing data and to hundreds of thousands of computers all across the world, which was, an amazing feat considering that this was the late '90s that this happened, not the modern era of the internet and massive amounts of bandwidth that we all have. Yeah, this was- It was...

I was just gonna say, and when you say, like, chunks of space, like, you're getting, like, physical, like, matter from space? Uh, sort of. I mean, you're young, or at least you, you look it .

You look way too young. Um, yeah, so you, you'd get the data from the radio telescope. Mm-hmm.

Um, it, it'd actually download a piece of that radio scope data to you, and then you'd process through it and f- look for any, any anomalies, any signals that came from effectively ET. Um, and several people would all do this on that same little chunk of data. Um, and then it would, it would go back, and if everybody sent the same information back, they were done with it, and that was, that was what they needed.

And if anybody had, you know, random data that was coming back or some people just didn't send the data back 'cause they didn't finish- Yeah ... that's why they sent it to multiple people, is so that they weren't waiting for somebody to turn their computer on, then if their computer died, it was no big deal. Yeah.

Yeah, it was, really impressive how... Yeah, I remember the time with SETI@home, and, I was impressed at how, you spend times or you simply use your, your device to contribute to this, ana- analysis. Mm-hmm.

And, yeah, but, the, yeah, the, the, the bad part here is that during the, your working hour- Mm-hmm ... running S- running this- ... this program could because of failure or, let me say, your work, could be really slow.

So this is the reason- Mm-hmm ... why- Yeah ... you should use this, and you, simply, run SETI@home when you are away from your laptop, so it's the best way to- Yeah, it would, it would basically run your CPU 100%.

Yeah. Yeah. Obvi- So...

And it, it, it... And, y- thinking about, several years ago, CPUs were not- They were not fast. Fast.

Right. Like they are today. No.

So... I wonder if that's something or if it's something that they've brought back before, given the new technology now, that would be kindaInteresting So the, the idea of using idle compute power on desktop PCs has been around. The, there was, there was a whole industry of startups wanting to use all of their- Yeah, yeah ...

idle, idle power. Usually it was within your corporate desktops that were unused. And I think we've seen that the yield on that tends to end up being relatively low because things like a staff member who just turns off at the wall at the end of the day, and, and the, the entire compute cluster's unavailable at some capacity.

So i- that dream never quite worked out. But SETI was definitely pathfinding in te- terms of working out how you do this very distributed compute. It was massively distributed compute even at the time.

It was- Yeah ... hundreds of thousands to millions of computers that were running the SETI at home component. Yeah And say, you, you had to have a job scheduler somewhere.

You had to be tracking which bits were complete, w- making sure that you get consistent answers, that you don't get any either erroneous answers or, or in- dishonest answers as well. Mm. Yeah.

Because particularly these days you'd, you'd get a lot of dishonest answers coming back- Yeah ... saying just for people to be, become famous. So some of that, the idea of how you can run those massive distributed systems, this was pretty new and very groundbreaking.

Yeah But we saw, while we were at SETI we saw some of the big changes. I talked about the fact that SETI at home used a tiny amount of, radio telescope bandwidth. 4 gigahertz, s- megahertz- Megahertz ...

4 megahertz signal- Yeah ... because the compute power at the time even with hundreds of thousands of machines could barely keep up with that amount of signal. Yeah, I, I think my CPUs, I worked for a company and, and I had dozens of computers available to me because there were no such thing as VMs at the time.

So literally I had, 30 or 40 desktop computers, and they were all like 400 megahertz Micron computers. Mm. Um, so very limited horsepower compared to what's in, you know, my phone today.

Um, and, you know, so we had to process through it, and it was, yeah, like you said, it was a very small thing. And unfortunately the radio s- telescope that they used f- for that project was destroyed by a hurricane. Mm.

So like that, that, that- Was the Arecibo. Yeah. Yeah.

That killed, that killed the project. Um, there, th- that was one of the things that, that just killed the project. But what they then showed us was that they're now instead of dealing with these tiny narrow band, collections, they're talking about much larger, cl- radio telescope bandwidth collections.

So they're doing broadband connection rather than narrow band collection. Still looking for narrow band signals. Yeah Little blips in these massive bands.

But they're talking about getting terabits per second of data and pouring those into- Yeah ... some pretty high-end, AI processing because y- you can't store terabits per second- Yeah ... of data off multiple sources.

I think the number they gave us was two and a half terabytes per second per radio that they're collecting and having to sort through, thanks to the fine folks at Nvidia who have absolutely massive GPUs, and are, are happy to sell them to SETI. Um, they're able to process some of that at the actual radio telescopes and only feed back to the data center the stuff that actually matters- Mm. Yeah ...

as opposed to all of it 'cause that's just way too much. Let me say, this is a, a real m- you know, the real, so the perfect users of edge AI, which is- Yeah. Mm.

Yeah, very implementing in a, in a project like this. And, so this is, it's amazing, thinking about, a lot of model that are building around these simple bleep. Yeah.

Mm. Yeah. But one of the things I thought was really interesting was they don't, obviously don't have a model.

Yeah. They don't know- Yeah ... what success looks like.

Yeah. Because that would require finding a signal. Um, so they're actually built, they've built a system that trains itself based on the data that's coming in, and it's just kind of, kind of how, I guess continually retraining itself- Mm ...

" There's actual noise out there- Yeah ... that shows life. I also like that, they showed us how they're using the lasers- Mm-hmm ...

to launch. Personally, I didn't know we were doing that. I thought it was still just, you know, the radio.

Just radio. Yeah. Just radio.

But they're also doing lasers just in case. Let's see what turns out. Yeah, in case something comes, comes that direction.

Yeah. But they also have to make sure whatever type of lasers they're using, that they don't incinerate the thing they're shooting the lasers at. That's impressive.

Yeah. It's like how do you even calculate that? That's looking at the, laser sails- Yeah ...

interstellar transport mechanism. Yeah. Yeah.

Woody decides of how that might work for a more advanced society than our own. So one of the things I thought was really cool was they, they had a system that apparently they're just deploying. I, I think you said it was a proof of concept that they'd just produced a few of, which was, looking for, f- radio flashes- Mm ...

that were in the night sky and stuff like that. Mm. And that was all crowdsourced and open source hardware.

Yeah. Mm. And it seemed to be basically basic cameras that were just fisheye lenses pointed up with three...

And you said they were just 3D- 3D printers ... printed shells- Mm ... around it.

I'm like, okay, that's cool considering you have 3D printers at home. And it's a, it's a ... Yeah, and it's a- And it's a, the size- Right ...

of a suitcase. So that's something that's fun with the internet too is because literally I am someone now where just about anything that I'm thinking about buying, my first thought goes to can I 3D print it? Can I print th- can I s- And I go to the printer- ...

print this at home and- ... and then print it Yeah, print it at home ... and it'll conveniently cost me three bucks in filament.

'Cause I already have all the filament, you know? Right. Oh, you've seen my garage.

I've got racks of filament up on the wall at this point. There's so much filament. Yeah, so just like I, before I hit Amazon these days- Mm ...

can I print it? Yeah. Yeah.

I wanted to return to the, the cameras because, I've been looking at a, a project called All Sky Camera. Mm. Uh, and so it's an, it's an open source software application that does exactly what we're talking about.

You know, you get a good quality camera with a fisheye lens that's in a weatherproof container. Uh, you attach usually a Raspberry Pi to it or some other computer- Mm ... Yeah, and when, it's often used for, tracking meteors, finding- Yeah ...

the orbits of meteors. And then by the time a community of people are running these things, multiple sites see the same meteor and can track where it was, what velocity it was actually moving at, where it came down- Yeah ... those kinds of things.

Yeah, so- some leave that triangulation- Yeah ... and all that good stuff. Yeah Yeah, all that citizen science stuff.

And again, it's enabled by open source access to software, open access to some pretty advanced technology. If you go back 20 years, the idea of being able to run real time high def video cameras and capture the entire sky and share it across the internet, uh- Oh, yeah ... the internet is enabling great stuff.

That was an un- unex- un- you know, th- that was not a thing that could happen 20 years ago, much less further back. Yeah. I wanted to r- circle back to the Internet Archive as well, because, just partly the Internet Archive is a pretty inspiring, organization whose ob- objective is to protect- Yeah ...

a huge amount of w- Mm-hmm ... what is otherwise volatile data. Having, they, just celebrated having a trillion web pages stored, and they have a variety of other different types of content.

I think one of the things to, to recognize is that this is a largely privately funded, entirely privately funded entity in order to protect community for... I mean, it's funded by community and to protect the- Yeah ... data for the community.

Yeah. I think that's a, a absolutely spectacular project. Yeah.

And the, the... One of the things she showed in the dem- in the, her, not her demo, in her presentation, was the fact that they had give a relatively small amount of money- Mm-hmm ... is their average donation size.

Mm. 5 or something was, was their average dona- donation size. Um, so they're not getting their funding from the billionaire classes.

They're not getting their funding from government orgs, at least not very much. And that's good, 'cause that means they're not beholden to- Yeah ... what those- Mm-hmm ...

what those organizations or what those governments want. Um, so they have the ability to kind of tell the governments, "Hey, we're just not gonna do what you want. If, if you've got legal paperwork, all right, that's a separate thing.

" And one of the things she said was they've, they've got server farms in the US, in Canada, in Europe. Um- Mm ... I'm assuming they've got some in Asia, and, and Africa as well somewhere.

Um, so they've got stuff everywhere. And so even if they delete something, if say, the current administration says, "Hey, go delete X," 'cause, you know, of whatever crazy reason we want, then, all right, fine. Give us the, give us the, the legal paperwork to do it, and we'll delete it off our servers here in the US, but we've still got copies of that everywhere else.

You have no impact on those servers. Those aren't stored in America. You've got no jurisdiction over them.

Ooh. Then, you know, the same applies to obviously every other jurisdiction and, and administration as well. And I'm, I am still concerned about legal impact when you publish a content here.

Because, my point of view, this, organization, yeah, could spend a lot of, effort to building, the platform to, you know, store everything, but, probably they ma- must pay a... They must spend a lot of effort also to cover, for legals, for- Mm-hmm ... everything.

Oh. Mm. I'm, I'm sure their legal bills are- Yeah ...

very large. Yeah. Yeah, that's true.

Because yeah, it depends on, regulation where you put the datas and so and so. Mm-hmm. Mm.

Yeah, and then I'm trying to... My mind's going blank. But, I know they said, like, one if not more of their data centers are green, so- Mm ...

they also put a lot of money into that. Mm. Yeah.

Which- Yeah, 'cause I think she said the, the data centers they're just, they just opened in Canada are 100% neutral or, or almost- Right ... 100% neutral, yeah. Right.

So that's what I was saying. That's pretty impressive. Yeah.

Like, it would be impressive to have them maybe, like, come to Tech Full Day and we take a peek behind the curtain. That would be cool. Well, yeah, Joy, would love us to see more inside, and, maybe at an event where we're actually up in San Francisco rather than down here in the South Bay, we'll get an opportunity to see inside, see all of the things that are inside.

The other aspect that I really liked was the focus on accessibility. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

That it's very easy for us that are fully able to assume that everybody else is able to consume content in the same ways that we are. But focus on, being able to have, written word read and, um- Mm-hmm ... text that can be set at a size that is, is easier to consume, and, also natural language as well, native language, becomes vital.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh, some content in Italian too.

Anyway. I was checking also last day. Uh, anyway.

Uh, yeah, it's, it's impressive how they, probably they spend a lot of effort to make this platform accessible for, yeah, for people, for every- e- everyone else can, uh... For example, for, reading, people that can't reading a book- Mm-hmm ... there is also an audio version.

So it's something that, sometimes m- m... Yeah, private companies or, you know, the industry take more time to re, readapt their platform for, you know, the regulations- Mm-hmm ... that are, binding on, the accessibility of the website and stuff like that.

They are built natively this, because it's probably the primary mission. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think, I think it is something that's important, 'cause what's going through my head right now is, you know, one thing she also called out that I actually kind of forgot about too, is the fact that they're taking physical books and digitizing those- Yeah ... and storing those. Yeah.

Because we're definitely in a place where we have, like, whole civilizations where-They're lost. Yeah. Languages are lost.

And so we do need to start storing those things like that, 'cause things are definitely getting lost. Yeah, 'cause I remember she said that, one of the, the really popular streams was- Yeah ... literally the person scanning the book.

Yeah. Yeah. And Internet Archive, if you're watching this, the next time you do that, I have written seven books.

Feel free to pick one of mine. And one, one of the, the other aspects that, came up in the presentation was the recognition that the Internet Archive is a library. Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. That it's, it's not just some private individual who's decided to make copies of everything.

Yeah. Right. It's about preservation of knowledge, and it's about making that preserved knowledge accessible to as many people for as many purposes as possible, in the same way that a, a Library of Alexandria for, for the internet, let's make sure the Visigoths don't come and destroy it.

Yep. Uh- Yeah ... and I think, yeah, there's some other interesting thoughts around beyond just the US, but other countries where- Mm-hmm ...

access to information, access to, maybe alternative teaching from whatever is acceptable within their country. Uh- Yeah ... that kind of accessibility is a, a very much an enabler for the individual citizens.

And I think that's something that sh- as, as we look at, some regimes that are t- very much trying to control their populations to usually the detriment of those populations. I was recently reading about the rise and fall of the Third Reich as a, as an interesting- Mm ... historical piece of work.

Hiding any truth that wasn't the party's truth became absolutely vital. Having some way- Yeah ... you can preserve- Yeah ...

the actual truth from the book burnings becomes really vital. And I think one of the things here is that distributed nature of the Internet Archive storage is a, a vital part of protecting against maybe one of those locations being overrun, overtaken by, somebody who's, who's got their own agenda. Yeah.

And, and I mean, y- with the internet, nothing is effectively safe from politics. I mean, think about the, the AWS region in the Middle East that- Mm ... got blown up last week, by Iran 'cause when, as, you know, they're dealing with that whole mess over there.

Um, and so if, if the Internet Archive was only based in that one region, well, suddenly, you know, the Alexandria library's been caught on fire again. Mm. Um, so they've been able to build around that whole problem and put things in so many other places.

I think you said they have data on every continent except Antarctica. I... Yeah.

Yeah. I think that's what she said. Um, so they, they've, they've done the best they can as far as keeping stuff safe with the only o- further option of, all right, build the data center on the moon and start- Right ...

putting data there. Well, at least in Antarctica you don't have any problems with either fresh water or cooling. Yeah.

I, I would say- The whole world ... just pop, pop the, windows open and have a humidifier. Power generation's problematic and getting staff down there.

Especially for six months out of the year, solar is not gonna work. No. Uh, but I did notice that Citi had had people down in An- Antarctica- Yes ...

doing- Yes ... research in the recent past, and so there we go. We've...

This, this, event, we have covered all of the continents- Yeah ... for, for, footprint and, and space as well. Yeah.

Yes. This, this is very true, yeah. We've, we've covered most of the universe at this field day.

Of course, we're normally talking about the infrastructure that sits behind doing all of these things, making sure that you can deliver whatever it is you need to put on the internet, whether it's for commercial good or public good. Um, but I think this, this has been quite a sort of mind-opening, experience of a cloud field day. Yeah.

Yep. Uh, what else should we have at Cloud Field Day? What else sh- in terms of...

You know, what are the other things that aren't a vendor that are... What's awesome on the internet? What is the i- the internet awesome for that people are doing?

Bring back Sevia to talk more about the infrastructure that ran things like Sevia at home. Mm-hmm. That would be really cool.

Mm-hmm. Or more things from w- from the Internet Archive. Like the- Yeah ...

those are the two things that come to my mind right away. Yeah. But as far as, like, good coming from the internet, I mean, quite frankly, these days, a lot of my, you know, most cherished friendships have been made online, has been virtual.

Um, it helps open up a space where you get to meet people that you may never have been able to come across. So- Mm-hmm ... I like that very much.

Yeah. I mean, from my perspective, the Tech Field Day community and, and, for me also the vBrownBag community, this is a, a group of people that I know in person, but we are... The relationships continue online between the now very infrequent occasions- Yeah ...

that I get to, to meet these people in p- in person. So I absolutely am with you there. And e- even domestically within New Zealand, there are...

Discord has been very good for- Mm ... connecting groups of people intreted- interested in specific things to have a conversation that is not going to be dominated by advertising inserts and, and just repeating of some popular content that we've seen as the, social media platforms we've all g- grown up with have, you know, Corey Doctorow would say they've be- all become enshittified. Uh, that doesn't seem to be wrong.

Uh, but we are seeing more sort of communication still. It's, it's still the internet is joining people together in, in places even if there are places that maybe we joined before that it's now separating us a little. Yeah.

So before we decide to just talk about random things and, enjoy ourselves, in fact, we'll, we'll do that over lunch after this. Uh, feel free to go and have lunch yourself once you've listened to this podcast. Uh, if people would like to talk some more with you, where can they find you?

com. It's my company's website. net.

You can find me across the internet as Gifted Lane. Um, right now the two I'm on heaviest is I'm back to live streaming on Twitch. Find me on Tuesdays, and I'm also heavy on LinkedIn these days.

Of course, you can find me, Alistair Cook, on, all of the, social media, but most active on LinkedIn and here on all of the Tech Field Day content on all of the Tech Field Day channels. Uh, so thank you very much, Danny Cherry, Lionel Talera- Thank you ... and, Shanna Warner for joining me on this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast.

Thank you for joining us. com/podcast or find us in your favorite, podcast application. Find us online as well on YouTube.

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