This is not my first SkyDogCon.
How many of you remember my first SkyDogCon?
How many of you were here for my first SkyDogCon?
I know you were here.
You don't have to raise your hand.
I think it was SkyDogCon 2, if I'm not mistaken.
But I Skyped in from Uganda, which was very surreal for me.
Because I couldn't see anything.
I couldn't hear anything.
And I'm, like, talking into Skype.
And it was just... it was just terrible.
Like, no crowd feedback at all.
You know, nothing.
I couldn't get anything from the audience.
Couldn't figure anything out.
And apparently, everybody enjoyed it.
Went pretty good on that.
Which was great.
Because five minutes into it, I didn't know if I got cut off and was just talking to myself or whatever.
So this is much better.
So thanks for having me.
I'm really thrilled to be here.
So I don't have any slides.
I'm not using a laptop.
I don't have any pictures.
I don't have any of that stuff.
Is that me?
Hold on.
Check one.
Check one, two.
Is that better?
All right.
Cool.
So yeah.
I thought... one of the things that I thought I would do for SkyDogCon is... I really like the idea that this is really about community.
I like the size of this conference.
I like the fact that you can actually spend some time getting to know people.
And so I thought I'd do something a little bit different.
And I would just sort of tell you a little bit about... I'd have the conversation about how Hackers for Charity started and sort of catch everybody up.
Because honestly, it's not something I've ever done in one shot.
People have gotten bits and pieces of what I've done and what we've been up to and what we're going to do.
And people get it wrong all the time.
Like, I have people come up to me and they're like, oh, you're back from South America.
That's really cool.
You know, that thing you're doing.
And I'm like, that wasn't me.
I don't know who you're talking about, but that totally wasn't me.
So I thought I would just take an opportunity to talk to you about what we're trying to do.
Like, what this thing is all about.
Like, what got me started.
So first of all, for those of you who don't know me, my name is Johnny Long.
I spent an awful lot of time in this industry as a pen tester.
That's sort of how my career got started.
In InfoSec, I was doing pen testing.
And I worked for a big government contractor.
I won't name any names.
But I started basically a red team for this company.
And we spent almost all of our time doing either research or writing reports or doing pen testing.
And this was back in the X-Force days.
I don't know any of you that have been around that long or remember ISS and all of that.
Back in those days there weren't a lot of people doing this work.
So it was all kind of new.
It was all pretty unique.
And one of the things that I sort of aspired to ever since I was a kid, honestly, I grew up as an only child.
My dad brought home my first computer when I was really young.
Before I was 10.
I had access to a computer.
And as an only child and became a computer nerd and just was fascinated about computers, slowly got into the world of hacking.
My big aspiration was to A, have a talk at DEF CON.
B, get published in FRAC.
And C, get a job where I could do this legitimately and get paid and not go to jail.
Not necessarily in any order.
I didn't care.
So having the job actually came first.
I actually landed a job in pen testing, very fortunately.
And was living the dream.
Had this great job.
But I still hadn't done the DEF CON.
Hadn't spoken at DEF CON.
Hadn't been published in FRAC.
The FRAC article came next, which I published under a pseudonym because I didn't want to get fired from the job, thus negating all of the life dream things that I was working on.
And then the last thing was getting a talk at DEF CON.
And one of the things that I was doing with pen testing was I was using Google as a way to get information about our targets.
So for example, if we had a physical gig that we were doing, I would get on Google and I would look for news articles and magazine articles about people that worked at the company and I would try to get their badges, pictures of their badges, and then we'd make a copy of the badge.
And we would use Google to dig up information about the target network.
And it got to the point where this Google thing got to be such a big part of what we did.
We were digging out so much information out of Google about the sites that we were trying to hack into that we realized that this was like a big deal.
And it became this idea of Google hacking.
And so I started this thing called the Google Hacking Database or the GHDB.
Some of you remember that.
We have some of the original peeps from the GHDB, CPs around here somewhere.
He's doing this the whole time with the big bandage.
CP was one of the original guys that sort of found my little forum and was like, holy crap, all this stuff with Google, I'm gonna hack the living crap out of Google.
And this guy was just tearing stuff up and putting up all these crazy Google searches, digging up all sorts of crazy stuff out of people's networks just from doing Google searches.
And so after a while, the GHDB started to grow.
And this was like a community effort, right?
I mean, I didn't invent the idea.
I just came up with this idea to say, well, I'm doing something cool.
If we put a bunch of community around it and get a bunch of people involved in it, it could be even cooler.
And that's what we did.
That's what the GHDB was.
So as that was growing, I submitted a talk to DEF CON about Google hacking, and it was called Google Hacking for Penetration Testers or something.
I don't remember the name.
This was back in 2004.
And remember, this was like the culmination of my dream, right?
Getting to DEF CON and submitting it, having a talk.
Because in my mind, it meant that I had made it, right?
I was a success.
In the world of hacking, that's what it meant to me.
And I had a lot of expectations about what that would bring to my life.
And so I was super excited to get this talk, and I dyed my hair a funny color, and I went to DEF CON, and I gave this talk, and I was kind of really full of myself.
Because this was a big deal.
And I thought that people would think I was a big deal because I had this talk.
And I look back on that talk with...
And I am ashamed.
Like, it's still out there.
You can go and you can find it.
And you might find it mildly amusing.
The talk wasn't horrible.
But in my mind, it was the worst thing that I had ever done.
Like, it didn't come off the way I had planned on it coming off.
It was filled with mistakes.
There weren't groupies after the talk.
You know?
I didn't get any of the fame that was supposed to be associated with me getting to the top of my industry and culminating all my life goals.
That just didn't happen.
And so for me, instead of it being a high point, it ended up being a really low point.
And so all of that to say two things.
One, that I was propelled by this thing called the hacker community in the formation of the Google hacking database, which culminated in a talk at DEF CON, which culminated in the rest of my career.
That's the first thing, is this sense, this idea of community.
And the second thing was that even though I had accomplished a lot of things, I still found myself seeking.
And so for me, I had this crisis in my early 30s of what do I do now?
I did all this stuff.
What do I do now?
What's next?
And so right around this time, I sort of had a falling out with myself.
And for me, it was kind of spiritual.
And for some people, it's not.
Some people, it's bad circumstances or whatever.
For me, it was sort of spiritual.
And I was like, oh, god, I hate my life.
And I don't want to do this anymore.
And if you want to do something with my life, do something with my life.
And one of those desperation things that comes in many forms.
And so an interesting thing happened at that point, when I sort of crashed.
There was a turning point.
And within a few weeks of me having that falling out, I got a call from Singers Publishing, and they're like, hey, do you want to write a book about that Google talk that you gave at DEF CON?
And so suddenly there was this next level thing that happened, where it was like, wait, you want me to write a book on that piece of crap that I just did?
And they're like, yeah.
And so it took me three months to give them an answer.
And then it took me three months to write the book.
And then Google hacking went on to be this crazy phenomenon and became this crazy success.
And so what happened as a result of that was, first of all, fame for me.
That's what launched my fame in the industry.
And CNN's calling me up, and MSNBC, and the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times, and Wired, and all these people are... and suddenly Johnny Long goes like, blows up.
And this Google thing blows up.
And suddenly I was at the forefront of the hacking community for basically work that the community did.
And I never forgot that.
When all this was going on, I was sort of thinking in the back of my mind, well, none of this would have been possible if the hacking community hadn't come alongside me and helped with this GHDB thing.
I wouldn't have had a book.
And so there's kind of a little bit of guilt there, too.
Right?
Like, well, this isn't really all me anyway.
So one book turned into almost a dozen book projects with Syngress.
The Stealing the Network series, which was like the rock stars of the industry at the time were doing that.
No Tech Hacking, which is still one of my personal favorites.
Google Talk.
You know, all these books and all this stuff happened.
And so my career, when I got to the top of that, you know, speaking at DEF CON, I thought that was it for me, blew up again.
And now there's all these books and there's all this fame.
And, you know, suddenly Jeff Moss of Black Hat fame is calling me a rock star.
And he said that in a... I think it was a Wired article.
He's like, if we have any rock stars in this industry, Johnny Long is one of them.
I was like, whoa.
Okay.
That's pretty interesting.
And so right around this time, I'm sort of still struggling with everything.
And I still didn't quite have that sense of fulfillment.
Like I did all of this cool stuff, but I didn't really get anything.
I didn't feel fulfilled out of it.
I still felt like I was wrestling inside a little bit.
And right around this time, my wife went to Uganda on a missions trip.
And she was like, wanted to go to Africa her whole life.
And I was like, that's cool.
You know, you want to go?
And like our church at the time was doing a trip.
I was like, go get this Africa thing out of your system, you know, come back to the real world when you're done and we'll get on with our lives.
And so she went to Uganda for two weeks and I was at Black Hat and I was speaking at Black Hat that year.
And I'm sort of in my suite at Black Hat.
You know, it's like this marble, you know, bathroom with like, you know, two shower heads and you know, an LED screen in the shower and another LED screen over the bathroom sink and like this sprawling, gorgeous suite at Caesar's Palace.
And my wife texts me and she's like, we have water now.
The power is back.
I just got a shower.
I'm walking to work with chickens and goats.
And I was like, wow.
Right.
I was like, we are completely on different planets at this point.
And something hit me.
Like at that moment, I was like, wait, there's another world out there.
That was my first time that it hit me.
I was like, there's another world out there.
And so she came back from her trip.
And I was like, you know, excited to see her and glad she was back.
And we had kids at the time.
So I was like, here's the kids, you know, they're still alive.
You know, high five.
It's your turn.
You know, that kind of thing.
I mean, they're good kids, but it's exhausting being a mom.
Right.
And she's like, she was different.
Like the woman that I sent to Africa, like didn't come back.
Somebody else came back in her place and like she would go to supermarkets and stuff and like start crying, like to the mall and just be like, I can't be here.
And like, the more we talked about it, I realized that she had seen something that I hadn't seen that affected her.
She saw poverty.
She saw people in need.
She saw people that were starving, people that were without.
And she came back to the real world and saw excess.
And there's cell phones everywhere and, you know , there it is.
So she comes back and crap like this is happening.
And she's just like, she's like, what is like, I don't understand.
This place that I used to call my home to me is now different because I've seen the rest of the world.
And one of the things that she brought back that I will never forget, she brought back pictures and she brought back video of kids that were over there in Uganda.
And in the video, you know, you would see these kids in Africa and they'd come up to her and they're dancing and they're singing and they're welcoming her.
And they got these big smiles on their faces.
And she's like, she's like, oh yeah, this one is Gloria.
And, you know, Gloria is like a double orphan and, you know, she's got HIV.
She's HIV positive and she's got malaria and that's her only like shirt.
And she's like dancing and singing and smiling and all this stuff.
And I'm like, what?
What does she have to be happy about?
This other kid, Colin, she only had a picture of Colin, little tiny kid.
He's like drooling and like this huge smile on his face.
And he's looking up into the camera and he's butt naked.
And it's funny because it's like this big head.
You can see like it's shot from above because he's so small.
You can't tell that he's butt naked, but he's got this huge grin on his face.
He's just looking up at my wife, like with this big grin.
And she's like, yeah, he's lost both his parents too.
He's living with his grandmother.
His grandmother's sick.
And it struck me that these kids had something that I didn't.
It was like they were happy and they had nothing and I was miserable and I sort of had everything.
And that's what drove me to Uganda the first time was just to figure out what that was about.
And so I was like, well, I'm going to next time you go to Uganda, I'll go with you.
Part of it was I wanted to make sure that she came back.
I was like, if you're going to go to Uganda, I want to make sure you come back in one piece.
Not the safest place for a vacation.
So I went, I was like, I'll do whatever.
I'll do construction or I'll dig holes.
And she was doing medical clinics and stuff.
And so when I got there, I was like, yeah, what can I do to help?
You need me to dig something or build something?
Because that's what you do.
I didn't know.
And they were like, yeah, what can you do?
And I'm like, what do you mean do?
Like, I'm not really skilled at anything.
Well, except computers.
They're like, you're a computer guy.
I was like, well, kind of.
I mean, they had no idea, right?
They had no idea what that meant.
But they're like, oh, we got these really old computers.
We need you to fix them.
I'm like, what?
What else you got?
I didn't come all the way to this continent to be your IT support.
Like, I want to help people.
I want to do work.
That's not what I meant.
And they're like, no, really, I don't understand.
Like, we need help with these computers.
There's nobody that can help us with these computers.
I was like, all right, fine.
Show me what you got.
And so my wife goes out on a medical clinic to save the world, and I'm stuck in a dirty closet with old computers.
They're like, well, here you go.
And I'm looking at these computers.
I'm like, you have got to be kidding me, right?
These are ancient computers.
Like, easily 15 years old.
They would hand them to me.
They'd be like, well, we got this one.
It was a really nice computer.
And it was running all our finances.
And now it doesn't work anymore.
So they hand it to me, whatever.
And I'm like, that's really old.
They're like, no.
I'm like, yeah, it's pretty old.
Open it up.
There's plants growing inside of it.
There's so much dirt and so much dust and so much moisture.
It literally had plants growing inside of it.
Yeah.
And so I'm sitting in my dirty closet, and I'm fixing these computers and doing all this stuff.
And she's out doing her thing.
And I got really grumpy about this.
This was not the experience I signed up for.
But at the end of the two weeks, we basically we got together with the organization there in Uganda.
And they had this going away meeting.
And they said, we just want to thank you for the time that you spent here.
And you really have saved lives.
These two weeks that you've been here, you're saving lives.
And I'm like, me?
Her?
What?
And they're like, no, both of you.
Because these computers that you're fixing, they had our financial stuff on them.
And if it wasn't for you fixing these computers, we wouldn't know where the donor's money was and kids aren't getting fed or getting medical care or going to school.
So by fixing a computer, you actually are saving lives.
And I was like, whoa.
And that hit me.
That was another hit that came in.
And that grabbed me.
I came back to my dream job, to an awesome hacker community that's still there, that I still care about, that I realize I've stood on the shoulders of.
Dream job, first world, all that stuff.
Came back and couldn't stop thinking about Uganda.
Couldn't stop thinking about what I had done there and the fact that this little act of service that I did actually made a difference for somebody.
And what I ended up doing was I tried to replicate that back here.
And so I would try to raise money and send it to Uganda to help them from afar.
And that didn't work.
And I'd try to talk about it in my talks.
I'd get involved with advocacy groups like Invisible Children and I'd talk about that after my talk.
Maybe that'll help me fill that hole that I'm feeling inside.
None of that helped until it got to the point where my wife and I were just like... both felt like we needed to go back to Uganda and see what else we could do to physically help them.
And so long story short, we went on that first two-week trip together.
We went on another three-week trip with our kids who ended up loving it.
And then we decided as a family to go over there for a year and spend a year of our lives doing what we could to help over there.
And that first trip was funded by the hacker community.
And I like to tell this story because I'm a Christian.
That's what I believe spiritually.
But that first trip was funded by an atheist, an agnostic, a Wiccan, and a Jew.
Right.
With a priest and a duck.
Right.
And there were Christians that paid for it as well.
But you get my point, right?
This was a really big-time community thing.
And people knew that I was going there because I felt led in some ways.
And my friend that was the atheist and also my friend that was the Wiccan was just like, dude, I don't care why you're doing it.
It's just a cool thing to do and I want to help you do it.
And so that year basically turned into the last seven years of my life.
And so at this point, we've been in Uganda for seven years doing this work.
So all of this has happened because of the hacker community.
So let's outline a little bit what we did.
I went over there and I was like, okay, in the back of my head I thought, if I can do this by myself, this one little thing and help these people, what would it be like if I pulled the hacker community together and we made a concerted effort to help a bunch of people?
It could be really awesome.
Plus, it could do a lot to change our negative image, right?
When people hear the word hacker, what they think, all this negativity around it.
And so that's why I started Hackers for Charity.
Let's put something inside of our community that was actually doing some good that was from us, for us, you know, to reach out and do some good stuff.
I mean, I heard stories about hackers going into hurricane zones and setting up com networks before FEMA got there.
Like, you know, ahead of FEMA.
And internet's working and people are, you know, using Twitter and I've heard about all this stuff.
But it was always going like as an individual or going with Red Cross.
It was never like a big group of us working together.
And that's where Hackers for Charity came from.
So one of the first things I did when I got over there is I realized that the reason their computers were falling apart is because nobody really had the technical knowledge that was over there to learn how to fix computers.
They really didn't know how to do it themselves.
And that stemmed from the fact that they weren't teaching about computers in schools.
So one of the first things we did was we started getting donated equipment, we'd put it into schools and we'd start teaching the teachers and teaching the students basic computer skills.
That on the surface seemed like a really great idea.
It ended up being not a great idea.
Don't give me wrong, there's a lot of people that are doing that and I think they're successful, maybe.
But in my experience, it was a terrible idea because first of all, they didn't know the first thing about the computers that they were getting donated.
They didn't know how to treat them properly.
There was all this, you know, they'd be... I'd come into a computer classroom we'd set up and we'd find like chicken bones, like all over the table, like all over the keyboards and like stuff.
And I'm like, are these chicken bones?
Like, yeah, we had lunch in here and, you know, this is where we eat.
So like we had to eat in here.
And I'm like, but you can't, you can't do that.
And they're like, well, why?
And yes, I'd have to start all, I'd have to like, okay, this is what you can and what you can't do.
And so time and time again, when we'd set up a computer classroom, it would end up getting into extreme disrepair or worst case scenario, the teachers would disappear with the computers and sell them, right?
Because remember this, they're in extreme poverty.
So if, you know, somebody can grab a thing and feed their family, it's not right or wrong, it's survival, they're going to do it.
So the computer classroom thing ended up being a terrible idea.
And it took us a couple of years to figure that out.
So what I ended up doing was I was like, okay, well, let's take the donated equipment and set up a community center where people can come in and learn skills and then they'll, you know, learn from us and we'll maintain our own machines and then we'll bring people in and teach them.
And that model has survived for seven years.
In fact, some of the computers that we have in our training center in Uganda right now are seven years old that we donated that first time.
Because our staff took care of them, you guys donated that stuff.
It's still there.
Our classes are still free because the hacker community for seven years has funded that community center.
Paying for the rent, paying for utilities, paying for salary.
And basically every month donations come in and very rarely do I actually go out and say, hey, our training center needs help.
We use our donations to keep that place open.
And more than 3,000 people have graduated from that training center and gone on to get jobs from having zero computer skills.
That's our computer training center.
That was you guys.
You guys did that.
As an extension to that, I realized that some people were coming in not just to get jobs.
They weren't happy to learn Word and then go get a job as a secretary.
They wanted to learn about technology for the love of technology.
And I was like, oh, wow.
That's awesome.
Okay.
Well, we need to do something with these people.
So the next step was to open an advanced technology center or hacker space over there.
The hacker space, I will admit, is very hit or miss right now.
Because if you think about all the stuff that's in a hacker space, there's a lot of consumables.
You have to have very high tech equipment in an open environment.
Some of it's very expensive.
You have to have very knowledgeable and trustworthy people to be stewards of the equipment.
And not all of that works well where we are in Uganda.
It's a bit dangerous.
And so that's a little bit hit or miss.
But the hacker space is still open.
Through donations, we've started the first Ugandan robot league.
We have an actual robotics team, which is high school students.
And they are on track to compete in the VEX World Robotics Championships in 2018.
So it ain't perfect.
There's a lot of stuff that we can't do.
But when we find an opportunity to do stuff, we do it.
So the hacker space has been running for quite a while as well.
And then the other thing that we did was, as we were living there, we saw a lot of holes and a lot of needs and things that we could do to help people just in various situations.
So one of the first few years that we were there, we watched a village down the street from us burn to the ground.
And a bunch of people were living in this squatter settlement.
They lost everything.
200 plus people lost absolutely everything in this fire.
I put the video on Facebook.
And as soon as I posted, a bunch of people started donating.
And they're like, see what you can do to help.
I'm going to send this money to you.
See what you can do to help.
So the first night, we were able to get everybody into a local church and get them fed with the money.
The second night, we were able to get them fed and we were able to get them some extra clothing.
By the third night, we had so much money that we were able to start rebuilding.
And by the end of the first week, we had enough money to rebuild the entire village.
Rebuilding all of the buildings that were there, larger and with more space and better materials and fully stocking every home that was in there by the end of the first week.
So that project obviously was helping people.
It had nothing to do with technology.
It was just, here's a need.
We as a hacker community can do something about it.
We did.
Well, at the end of that, I went back into that village and just started talking to people.
And I noticed a lot of people were just hanging around.
They weren't working.
They weren't doing anything.
I was like, what do you guys do?
Like, yeah, this is pretty much it.
We just kind of hang out.
I'm like, well, don't you have jobs?
Not really.
And that's when it connected.
Well, that's why it's a squatter community, right?
Okay, well, what skills do you have?
Well, I know how to drive a taxi.
I know how to drive a motorcycle.
Well, do you have a... I don't have a taxi.
You don't have a... you don't have a motorcycle.
Like, there would be mixed bags of skills who were like, okay, well, let's figure out a way to do job training.
And so we looked at all the stuff that Uganda was already doing and they would, you know, a lot of the job programs were sewing or woodworking or auto mechanics or, you know, that kind of stuff and it was saturated.
So, there was a tannery, a leather tannery literally throwing distance from this village.
So, I went down to the tannery and I was like, what do you guys do with all the leather?
They're like, oh, we export it to Kenya, to China, to Italy.
And I'm like, really?
You don't do anything with it in Uganda?
Well, some of the big companies make like shoes for kids.
I was like, well, don't you have anybody that's doing like leather crafting?
Like, I see all this stuff in the tourist shops.
They're like, oh, yeah, we import that.
I'm like, are you... like, at this point, it's like three years in, I've been bringing gifts for people.
Like, here's this great, like, leather thing and it's like made in Kenya, imported into Uganda.
It was awful.
And so, I got on YouTube and I'm learning about leather crafting and I'm like, okay, well, we're gonna teach these guys leather crafting.
And we used the excess money that we had that people had sent for the village to buy leather and buy tools.
And now we have a leather program running.
We have a basically a master leather craftsman who was one of the guys that was associated with that village burning who now is creating leather products that are world class and employing... we've got about 10 people that are doing this full time.
So, the leather program.
We looked at when we were living there as expats, we're looking at the food that's there and we're like, man, we miss American food.
And we started talking to other people that were working there and they're like, yeah, we do too.
It's like, why don't we start a restaurant?
You know, let's start a restaurant and teach local people how to make, you know, American food and serve good coffee and have fast internet.
So, we started a restaurant which is The Keep, which Hackers for Charity and the hacker community actually started to run and recently bailed out after five years because we were behind in our rent.
But we just looked for opportunities to help people.
And that's sort of what we were doing in Uganda.
Well, now I'm back after seven years and we've relocated back.
And the reason for that is... it's a couple reasons.
For one, it was hard on us as a family to be in Uganda.
Brutally hard in a lot of ways.
Crime is really bad.
Obviously, we didn't have access to things.
Personally, I felt very disconnected from the hacker community.
Every time I would go to a conference, I would feel the disconnect widening.
Like, the reason I was in Uganda was because of the community and trying to do that kind of work.
And basically, we were just burned out.
And our oldest kids were ready to go back to college.
Going to college.
So, it was like, okay, we're gonna come to the U.S.
for a year.
We've said this before, right?
Coming to the U.S.
for a year to basically reconnect as a family.
But the most important reason for me as the founder of Hackers for Charity was this stuff that we're doing in Uganda is super cool and these people desperately need help.
But this was never what Hackers for Charity was supposed to be about.
It was supposed to be about recreating what I felt that first time that I helped somebody with a computer problem and changed their life.
That thing that hit me that changed my life that made me realize I can really help somebody with a minimum amount of effort, placed the right way, and it was about getting other people to experience that.
It was about pulling our community together to do good stuff and help people and change our image.
And what... that phone again, I tell you.
Oh, it's not him.
All right.
What's... couch people.
So one of the things that really grabbed me is what SkyDog just said from the podium.
This idea that you guys get a high when you come to a conference, right?
You know?
There's great stuff happening at conferences and there's like this little depression that sets in.
It's not all alcohol induced.
It's something else.
Right?
That when you leave a con, you're just like... crap.
Like, I got to leave.
You might have a great job, you might have a great life, but for whatever reason, you leave and you're just like... this sucks.
Like, I can't wait to get to SkyDogCon again or I can't wait to get to another conference.
And I think it's for a couple reasons.
I think for one, it's about this idea of community.
Right?
It's about getting together outside of work with people that share your interests.
It's about working on projects together.
Expanding your knowledge.
And for a lot of us, it's about going to a conference and getting something unexpected from somebody.
Some knowledge or some learning that you didn't expect or somebody sits down with you for a few minutes and explains something that you could have taken two weeks reading a book and not figured out.
Working on it in person, side by side, as a community.
It's about that little kick that you get when last year's conference, you talk to somebody about something and then you see them a year later at the conference and now they're doing it full time because they were so excited because you spent five minutes to teach them that thing.
It's about all of that.
And so one of the things that Hackers for Charity was supposed to be about was recreating that between conferences.
Making it really a part of the fabric of our community.
Making that a full time thing.
What does that look like?
Does it mean you have a conference every weekend?
God, I hope not.
You might.
I think we might have the calendar covered.
You obviously can't go to them all.
Maybe you could.
Jason Street I think does.
But we can't all be Jason.
And so what we're trying to do is now we're trying to build HFCUS, which is all about this idea of community.
It's about the idea of working together on projects as a community to help other people and to basically build our community by helping other people out.
And so what I want to do is I want to create projects in local communities in your area.
I want to have somebody say, hey, I'd like to go and I'd like to set up computers for this community center.
Does anybody want to help me?
And I'd like to put the weight of HFC in our social network and everything behind that to go, hey, this guy's trying to do this good thing.
Is anybody else interested?
And we create these smaller groups of community-based people that are interested in getting together between conferences and doing cool stuff.
And it's a win-win.
Because you're getting together as a community.
You're meeting new people.
It's strengthening the bond of our community.
And it's also helping somebody out, you know?
And I don't want to dictate what those projects are.
I don't want to be like, these are the projects that we need help with.
What I'm looking for is I'm looking for people in the community to come to us with ideas and say, I'd like to do this thing, but I can't do it on my own.
Would you be able to help me find other people to do this thing and work on it together?
So that's been the journey of Hackers for Charity.
I mean, it's been eight years now since we started it.
And I feel like we haven't made much traction in our original goal, which was to pull the community together.
And that's what I'm here to do.
That's why we've sort of moved back.
So I want to talk about some of the things that we have going on, maybe to give you guys some ideas.
Because I know sometimes it's a little bit hard to go, well, I don't know exactly what to do.
So one of the things I want to do is just briefly talk about some of the things that we've designed and developed to help you with that.
So the first thing that we realized is that it was really important to get material in the hands of people that want to learn.
At every level.
Whether it's tech stuff, or it's just Khan Academy, for example.
I mean, look at how it's changed education.
You can sit down and watch a video to get you through a tough spot in a subject.
So now it doesn't completely suck.
And you can move on with the rest of your life instead of hating school forever.
So one of the projects that we focused on very early was how do we get materials into the hands of people that need it.
And in Uganda, of course, that was really tough because we didn't have internet.
And so we worked with this little group called Rachel at World Possible.
And what they did is they took Wikipedia, Khan Academy, Project Gutenberg, all these groups that were doing great things online with content, and they made offline versions of it.
In fact, the work that Rachel did sort of created this movement with Wikimedia, which was Wikipedia for schools, which was a self-contained copy of Wikipedia that didn't have external links.
And so we worked with them over the years to sort of infuse more content into that and put it on USB sticks that we could put, you know, take from laptop to laptop and copy Wikipedia and Khan Academy and all this stuff to people that needed it.
That little project did great in Uganda because of the internet problems.
And now it's on a write-protected USB, which is brilliant.
Can't tell you how many 32-gig hard drives I smoked.
And I mean, like, at the hardware level.
I'm seeing viruses that will kill hardware in Uganda.
I don't get it.
I still can't get my brain around it.
So this thing really helped with that.
So we would move around with these things, and we'd install them in schools all over Uganda so that people could have a library in their school when they didn't have a single book with one USB stick.
An extension of that was working with the Raspberry Pi and making just a Pi version of that same thing so that you plug it in, you get a Wi-Fi access point, you connect to it, all the material's here.
Now you don't have to install it on every machine.
As you know, the Pi's not incredibly powerful.
You can't get a lot of clients.
It doesn't have a battery in it.
So that was a little tricky for us.
We had to figure out, well, they're not going to have great power.
We need a battery backup to the thing.
We need to ruggedize it a little bit.
And so we started building this thing called the Rugged Pi.
And some of you saw it.
It was a gutted Raspberry Pi in a Pelican case with a Lexan cover and a battery and a power switch.
You can't just yank the power out of a Pi all the time.
And this Frankenstein project that we worked on, and Sam Kinch helped us with and did an awful lot of work on it, over the years developed into this very sexy Frisbee you guys might have seen me walking around with.
And this guy is manufactured by Intel.
And this is the rugged version of the Raspberry Pi.
It has all the same content on it with an SSD, 500 gig SSD inside of it instead of a 32 gig drive.
Water resistant.
Instead of the 10 users that the Raspberry Pi can support, this supports up to 50.
And now we've expanded the content beyond straight educational resources by working with other content providers.
So not only do we have Wikipedia and Khan Academy and thousands of books from Project Gutenberg and all sorts of things like that, we've also got technical content on here.
How to use a computer, how to use Word, how to use Excel, how to use PowerPoint, video lessons about how to use a computer to get better with a computer.
We're working with Pluralsight, which is one of the large providers of video training for IT.
We're working with Cybrary.
They've both given us access to their entire library.
It ends up on here.
The security awareness company run by Wynn Schwartal, his group, all of his content is gonna be on here.
So you can go into a place and you can basically, okay, what do you need to know?
And you don't just give them web links, you give them the content in the context of where they are.
So let me give you a perfect example of where this is useful.
Transitional homes.
We used to call them halfway houses, that's not the right term anymore.
Transitional home.
You go into a transitional home because you're recovering from a drug problem or you're having issues with your life, you've had run-ins with the law, you might have people that are trying to get at you.
So you go into this place to try to get back into life.
The first thing that they're gonna do is that they're not gonna tell you, hey, let's get you online, let's get you on social media.
They're gonna encourage you to get your life together and stay off of internet, right?
Because people are out there that wanna get at you and tempt you and all this stuff.
But they're like, but you need to get an education and get your life together.
You can't do those.
Those two things are incompatible most of the time.
So we've rolled this into transitional homes and just installed it so they can get a leg up on training.
Network plus, A plus, and security plus on here.
You don't have to go onto the internet.
The entire course, Cybrary, Pluralsight, both offered their courses.
So you can sit down, take all the training, then get online to take the cert.
And you can go get a job with this thing.
Prison systems, go into prison systems.
A lot of times, internet is completely locked down.
They can't get access to it.
So anyway, this, I have cards I can give you that give you more information about this thing.
But this is one of the projects that we developed as well to get education out there.
Now, one of the other things that I wanna do sort of in closing, and I'm just kicking around ideas, things that we saw, needs that we saw that people needed help with.
Very, on a very technical side, all of us love tech, right?
I mean, that's the core of, I mean, this education stuff is great, and education arguably is the core of technology, and it's great to have the foundational education, but yeah, you just, gadgets, right?
I mean, just playing with stuff, and yeah, it's awesome.
Well, I feel like that's sort of what got me started, was actually having my hands on something that was ahead of its time when I was young.
And when I was young, they had computers, I'm not that old, but you know, I had a fairly, I had access to a fairly advanced computer because my dad worked for Texas Instruments when I was a kid.
So I had something wickedly cool for the time in front of me that I could play with, and that's what got me interested in technology.
I don't feel like there's a replacement for that.
You can't get on a webpage and go, that's a cool thing, in that little video player window on YouTube, and be like, ah, that's great.
You're just gonna go to the next video, and the next video, and that just becomes your life, is watching videos.
So one of the things that I'm trying to do is I'm trying to get advanced technology in the hands of kids that need it the most but can't get access to it.
There's a lot of reasons for this.
There's a difference between going into Best Buy, you know, or Fry's, and seeing a 3D printer at a distance.
It's very different than sitting down and designing something and creating it yourself and printing it out on that printer.
It's a very different experience.
So what we want to do is put this stuff in the hands of kids that need it.
So from second grade, we work with, even first graders can use this.
This is an Edison robot.
It's basically a Legos Mindstorms knockoff.
Okay?
30 bucks for this little thing.
It reads barcodes.
So day one of your first robotics lesson, you're actually controlling a robot.
You're giving it commands, you're driving it around the room, you're chasing it with a flashlight, and by your third lesson, you're having robot battles.
We're not talking years and years of theory and all this stuff to get to that point.
You're doing it like your first, second, and third day.
Instant access, super cheap, indestructible.
They rolled an F-150 over this thing.
It didn't break.
It's Lego compatible.
All the sensors built in.
30 bucks.
We want to start putting together resources so that we can go into schools that don't have the budget to afford it and bring these small kits of technology, an Arduino starter kit, a Raspberry Pi with the videos on how to run it and the books and all that stuff into the schools of the kids that need it the most.
And so these are some of the things that we're working on that we feel like can really make a difference.
We get to play around with cool technology.
We're already starting to bring kids into our conference.
Okay?
And we've seen that that has a powerful effect.
You bring a kid into a conference, their eyes are like, wow, this is great.
And what I'm suggesting is that we also do a little bit of work reaching out into our communities to try to make it happen outside in our communities.
And I think we can make a difference.
So anyway, I am still alive.
I did survive my experience in Uganda.
And I'm so grateful to you guys for everything that you've done supporting us.
I mean, you paid for our existence while we were in Uganda and made all of that amazing stuff happen.
And I'm thrilled with everything that we did in Uganda.
But I'm even more excited to see what we're going to do next.
I'm open to your ideas.
HFC is not about telling you what to do.
We're about enabling you in some cool ideas that you have.
So I'm totally open for conversation.
If you guys have any questions, feel free to ask.
And now...
You're going to open it.
Is it twisty?
That's great.
Oh, that looks good.
All right.
That's great.
Thanks, man.
There we go.
Goes down so smooth, doesn't it?
This is the worst grape soda I've ever had.
Go for it.
Yep.
Cards are here.
So...
They want us to remain anonymous.
Okay.
All right.
So that's a great question.
So to repeat the question, how do we get people engaged who sort of don't want to be on the front lines, don't want to be involved directly, or want to stay behind the scenes for whatever reason?
That's a great question.
Very, very little of what I did came about as a result of me being that face-to-face person.
That stuff's awful.
So, I mean, you think there was me and my family on the ground in Uganda, and there were thousands of people supporting that effort.
So for every person that's face-to-face doing something in a community that's talking to a kid, or going to a school, or a transitional home, or prison, or cleaning up, or whatever, there are people behind them that are support.
Okay?
So it could be financial support.
It could be as simple as donating to a community event in your area.
It could be donating equipment, an equipment need that they have to make something happen.
But the other thing is sort of intellectual donation.
So, for example, I'm starting to just rely on the community for ideas about how to make things work.
So if we do a community event, like Joey was involved in one of our very first ones at DerbyCon.
These guys were involved when we did that very first thing.
And we went to basically a women's shelter, and they just wanted to ask questions for a bunch of hackers, like, you know, and they were concerned about privacy, like, how can I keep my privacy online, you know, and all that stuff.
And so we just sort of did a roundtable and talked to them.
Well, to make something like that happen, you have to be able to reach back into the community to get ideas about, you know, what's the best software for protecting against this?
What do you use for personal protection for like this kind of stuff?
And we had to reach back into the community to make that happen.
And that's going to continue to be a thing.
So for a community event like that, it would be really nice to track volunteers to get feedback to figure out how to grow it for the next time they do it to pass the information on to someone else.
We're going to need developers and coders to maybe sling some web code to help us organize that.
Or bolt on to an API for an existing suite of tools that helps with that.
So there's always going to be possibilities for that thing.
And so, yeah, it's a great question, but there's lots of opportunities to get involved behind the scenes.
Yep.
Well, it varies based on where they are.
But one of the things that I find is that it's easiest to go the other way and actually start working with people who are seeking us out.
You know, so it starts with a conversation.
You know, you might run into a guy in a coffee shop or at a church or at a, you know, I don't know, wherever.
And a small talk comes around and they're just like, oh, you're in computer security.
What's like the first thing that's going to happen?
Like almost all the time they're going to ask you about something.
Oh, I got this thing that happened with my phone.
You know what I mean?
Right.
How can I surf my port?
Right.
Okay.
You want to step away from that guy.
But the point is, you lead the other direction.
You actually start engaging the people that engage you when you're open about what it is that you do.
That you're involved in security and that kind of stuff.
And focus on that person who's reached out and figure out a way that you can, you know, help them.
You know, it's all about relationships.
When you're on the front lines like that, it's all about creating a relationship with a person or an organization so that you raise a level of trust, you know, so that you can engage them without them, you know, worrying about you hacking them.
And that's step one.
You know, let's get to the point where we can actually have conversations.
And I think that'll go a long way to helping our image, too.
Yes?
Yep.
Okay.
So the question is, long-term, once you actually make a donation, for example, into a school, how do you make sure that that can continue to grow?
Because of lack of education on the part of the teacher, overprotection of the amount of investment, that kind of thing.
Again, it's different for each situation.
In my personal experience, I find that it often makes sense to start small and work your way up.
So in Uganda, as an extreme example, I wouldn't go in and ever again drop $20,000 on a computer classroom.
We made that mistake with an organization we trusted and thought, you know, they were going to really be good stewards and they weren't.
And fortunately, we were able to pull those computers out and put them in our community center and find a better use.
It was better to start small and maybe don't always come in with handouts.
The first time, come in and engage awareness and see if there's interest there.
And the first time you go in, you're going to donate a raspberry pie.
And you spread it out a little bit and you find the ones that are actually very interested in maintaining that and come back to you.
You can't force that.
There's no magic formula that's going to make that work.
You have to organically grow it out with people that come to you and say, hey, that thing you gave us, look what we did.
What else can you tell us?
And you go from there.
It's harder when it's your kid's school.
And you want that school to work.
Even though it might not.
The answer there might be flipping the model and getting the local hacker spaces involved.
And taking some of the students at like the computer club out for a field trip to the hacker space.
You know what I mean ?
And seeing how you can bridge the gap that way to draw them out into a larger community and try it that way.
It's a good question.
Anybody else?
Are we out of time?
I don't want to run asleep.
You have all you want.
Anybody else?
Yes?
Obviously
, there's no replacement for people buying in.
You know, having a personal investment into it.
Although a lot of times that can be hard to accomplish.
It can be hard to translate.
I find that that works well in developing countries.
It doesn't always work as well here.
What I find that works the best here is connecting high interest level.
You know, finding the really high levels of interest in small pockets and feeding that.
As opposed to trying to get a bunch of people grown up and become excited about it.
Like I said before, you latch on to the ones that are actually excited about it to begin with and then the fire's already fueled there and you'll get more bang for your buck and more return out of your time investment by investing into them.
Not everybody's going to get into technology.
You know, it's as simple as that.
And for some people, technology will always just remain a tool.
You want to find the ones that are deeply interested in tech.
And it's a lot easier to push them.
Yep.
Yeah.
Is it fair to say that it's in the United States, one thing that you've seen
, it's and find those key few individuals and then grow out laterally?
Absolutely.
Oh yeah, because that'll spread very quickly.
For example, one thing that works very well is like a scholarship system where you can take a student and pull them out and give them a scholarship to a hacker space, for example.
That kind of thing.
Along with their parents.
So it's basically this idea, like I said, of finding the people that are really interested at first and pulling it out that way.
And then he's going to, you know, if that one has a friend who also becomes interested in it, the best friend gets interested in it, you just start growing.
You can grow it that way.
But scholarships are a good way to go too.
Yeah.
Different direction.
Okay.
Now that you've gotten the family back to the States.
Yep.
What's the first thing that stood out to you upon your return that is something you want to address either for yourself or your community around you?
So the question is, what stood out as something that I really feel like I want to address now that I'm back?
I think it's really this, the thing that hits me the hardest is being separated from the community and the effect that it had on me.
I feel like I personally atrophied in my time away, you know, because I was focused on a certain type of skills that I was teaching and I became disconnected from the community.
As a result, I got very depressed and, you know, like SkyDog said, you know, once it's over, you know, it sucks that it's over.
And I think that's the thing that's heaviest on my heart right now is the fact that we have an amazing community.
When we get together at conferences, there's very little drama per capita.
When you think about all the crap that happens online, there's silliness, you know, for sure, but there's very little drama in most modern conferences.
Like we get along in real life.
And our sense of community is already very strong and we get a rush out of it, you know, and we all get lifted up and we might come in not feeling that great or just being down or crappy work environment or whatever.
And for most of us, the conference brings us up out of that.
And that's the biggest thing that I want to address is I want to try to find ways that we can strengthen that relational aspect of our community instead of everybody retreating to their own corners.
I'd love to see us work, you know, together on more community projects in real life, you know, because I've seen the power that that has.
And I think that's where the magic of the conference comes from, is that you get together for a common goal in person, you know, and build, you know, relationships.
So that's one thing that I'm really, really trying to do.
Yep.
Anybody else?
Yes.
Welcome.
Yep.
So the
first question is where do we exist online and how can you get plugged in?
So our website is hackersforcharity.org.
It's safe to type hackers and charity in Google.
Pretty much going to do it.
Your other question is not so simple to answer.
How can you get plugged in?
We tried for a long time to have a volunteer website.
Yes, here's the website.
We tried for a long time to have this idea, this hackers for charity volunteer network where we would bring people in and we would task them with things because they were volunteers interested in helping out.
And the model was flawed, frankly.
I don't want to be the one to dictate projects.
So now the way it works, it's a lot simpler until we have some app around it, which isn't necessary yet.
The process is very simple.
Find something that you'd like to do and do it.
If you need a social media 800-pound gorilla to drum up some support or maybe donate some equipment or some manpower, give us, drop us a line.
Hit the contact button and say, hey, I'm in this area.
I'd like to do this thing.
Here's what I need.
And we'll tweet it.
We'll put it out on Facebook.
I'd like to say that we'll get directly involved.
I don't know how often that's going to be possible.
It's certainly more possible now that I'm back.
But that's it.
The model is just very simple.
We want to enable you to do things that are helping other people out and improve the image of our community.
Because, you know, look, 90% of this community, more than that, 99% of this community are people with jobs or people that are in school and have family and high ethical standards and want to keep their job and all that stuff.
And it's the fraction of a percent that's out there committing crime that gives us a bad rap.
The media gets all that.
It's the one percenters, as always.
It's like we're a big emcee.
And I want to change that.
I want to provide every opportunity for the media to get a glimpse of the other 99% that's out there setting up stuff before FEMA gets on the ground in a hurricane and doing that stuff.
And I don't want hackers for charity to necessarily get credit for something we're not involved in.
But if we can be a clearinghouse of people that are doing good things inside of our community so that the media has a chance to see it, I'm all about that.
And if we can help you do that, I'm all about that, too.
It may be like I have this idea for a product that could help a lot of people and I don't know how to make that happen.
I would need a coder and I would need a this and I would need a that.
Let us know.
And we'll use our very heavy following in the community to try to make that happen.
Yep.
Good questions.
Anybody else?
Cool.
Thank you, guys.