More Awesome Than Money (11 page)

The guys all greeted him warmly and strolled a few blocks to a restaurant Ilya liked and settled into a booth.

A PhD student at Stanford who had degrees from Yale and Harvard, Yosem, thirty-five, was not only more than a decade the elder of any of the Diaspora group but he also had been marinated in entrepreneurial culture as an academic and a professional. He had worked in investment banking at Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs, researched intelligent work systems for General Motors, and brand management at Procter & Gamble. He was involved with an online group called Liberation Technology that shared news about ways for political activists to communicate while minimizing harassment. Believing in their cause, he was keen to help make Diaspora a reality.

“How did you even hear about us?” Ilya asked.

It was quite a story. Yosem and friends had been fed up with Facebook and its policies for quite a while, and believed that a distributed network, like the one the Diaspora crew had in mind, was the best answer. For much of the previous year, Yosem had been fighting a brain tumor, and stopped work on his doctoral dissertation for surgery in December 2009. Doctors tinkered with his hormones and prescribed heavy doses of steroids, adding bulk to his large frame. To occupy himself during the lengthy recovery, he had been having deep online discussions about how a peer-to-peer social network would function—precisely what Eben Moglen had been advocating. It was then that he discovered the plans for Diaspora, which he immediately passed along to Randy Komisar, who had taught a class on entrepreneurship at Stanford. Yosem had been his teaching assistant. He had also pulled at the sleeve of Tim Draper, a third-generation Silicon Valley venture capitalist who had backed ventures like Skype and Hotmail. Draper, too, asked to hear more about Diaspora. Yosem was startled by the instant interest both Draper and Komisar had shown.

Every week, Max told him, they were meeting with one of two people at Kleiner Perkins, either Randy or Ellen. There had been no discussions of funding as yet, but it was clear they were interested. “Time with VCs is more important than money,” Yosem said. “There's an old saying about VCs in Silicon Valley: ask for money and get advice. Ask for advice, and you'll get money.”

After a few minutes, Yosem, who taught graduate engineering students at Stanford, realized that the fundamentals of venture capital financing were total mysteries to these kids who had never been outside a college campus. He started with the basics: how the shares of a company were diluted through various rounds, with early investors being rewarded for taking the most risk by getting the biggest stake for the smallest investment.

Ilya started taking notes on a napkin.

Randy Komisar had been pushing them to build a private network for friends and family. Yosem thought the idea had merit. Social network theory, which in sociology predated digital networks, was one of his academic interests.

“The research shows that the average inner circle is about five people,” Yosem said. “Why don't you create the social speed dial? Limit the number of people in your network to nine.”

Rafi grimaced, but said nothing.

The idea, Yosem said, was that anyone could follow your postings, but private conversations would be seen by only nine people. The idea intrigued them. It was a significant way to distinguish themselves from Facebook.

The design of the network absorbed them, almost to the exclusion of any thought of how such a network could plausibly sustain itself. To Yosem, they seemed to have given no thought to a business plan.

Perhaps, he suggested, they might consider operating as a not-for-profit—to find some kind of structure where they could build out Diaspora without the pressure of having to make money. But they did have some vague notions of a way that Diaspora could become a business.

In their initial e-mails, and in conversations with Randy, they had all discussed the idea of Diaspora providing a paid service of hosting “pods,” individual servers that were under the ultimate control of the users but a task that many ordinary web surfers would find beyond their technical means. By the time they met with Yosem, all they thought about was building the thing. It seemed to him that they had bought into a piece of Silicon Valley lore that divorced business realities from digital acumen: they appeared to believe that all they needed was a working product, or something to demonstrate, and they could leave the business plans to the
funders. Since they were taking advice from Kleiner Perkins, Yosem did not argue the point.

Indeed, the Diaspora Four were delighted to have someone who just seemed to want to help them in concrete ways. And Yosem was thrilled to find people eager to build the kind of social network that many people wanted. “I was looking for someone to pick up the mantle so that I could become their evangelist,” he said.

Casually, he offered to prepare a case study of Facebook, as well as a list of potential competitors, a remark that meant nothing in particular to the guys until a few days later, when a fourteen-thousand-word e-mail arrived from him. It was an account of the rise of Facebook, tracing its roots to initial efforts, among others, at Williams College in 1989, when Mark Zuckerberg was not yet five years old, and a decade later by a former Tiananmen Square protestor who had moved to Cambridge. The first big commercial social network site in the United States, Friendster, preceded MySpace by a year and Facebook by two years, but was hobbled by its popularity; the demand outpaced the ability of the technology available in 2002 to keep up with the capacity of the servers. (The company was underwritten, in part, by Kleiner Perkins.) By the time Mark Zuckerberg offered Facebook to a broad audience in 2004, the technical infrastructure had improved. Not only was Zuckerberg talented, farsighted, and fast moving, but his timing turned out to be perfect.

As the dinner wound down, Ilya took out his Maker's Notebook, which he carried everywhere to track ideas. He slipped the napkin of notes into it.

“Someday, when we are rich and famous,” Ilya said, “we will pull out this napkin and say, ‘This is how it all started.'”

—

In early August, the team realized Diaspora 1.0 was hopelessly nerdish.

They demolished it. As Brooks had prophesied in
The Mythical Man-Month,
they had to be ready to throw away one version, or more.

As they rebuilt, they were quicker. Roadblocks became manageable. Getting photos into the stream had seemed, initially, to be beyond their competency.

“Next year, maybe we will have photos,” Dan said. “Then one week, we were, like, whatever. And we had them.”

Ilya cackled. “We thought that was never going to happen,” he said. “Maybe everything seems hard until you try it.”

That was another lesson from the programming gurus: find a problem that interests you, and you will solve interesting problems. The Diaspora team was wrestling with a challenge that they cared about, in an area of life that was fundamental to their generation. And as daunting as the notion of designing a network had been, they had found that many building blocks were widely available. Eben Moglen had been right: Facebook was a bunch of doodads written with the PHP code that made web pages come to life, with things like pictures and status updates. By their more cherished measuring stick, innovation, Facebook was pretty minor.

“Facebook is not that genius,” Dan said. “It's like a stupid website. It's a lot different than the stuff Steve Jobs is doing.”

The basics seemed simple, Ilya said: “Social networking—I can post photos, I can post messages. And oh, I can post location. In itself, it's just two fields in a database somewhere.”

He paused for a moment, reflecting on the hubris, or possible ignorance, of his remark. “Maybe it's that nothing seems hard when it's already there,” Ilya said.

—

A few people at Pivotal who had taken them on as mini guidance projects spent two days going over their first version of the site, and pushed them to identify three classes of users.

They came up with, at one extreme, people they called “beards”—free-software users—a class of übergeek, and, at the other end, “girls.” The girls and the beards were polar opposites in this rendering of humanity. (The third class, lodged in the middle, were people who used free browsers like Firefox rather than Internet Explorer, and were glad to employ tools that they did not have to devise themselves.)

“We have to have girls if we are going to succeed,” Max said.

Two of their cherished details, though, were arduous for all but the most devoted geeks: encryption of data and running an individual server. The original concept of Diaspora was that each user would have his or her own server, of the kind envisioned by Moglen for the freedom box. These individual servers would be called “seeds” (and thus the aptness of the name Diaspora, with its Greek root evoking “scattering” and “spores”).
While the hardware for the seed servers existed, the day when it would be a simple plug-in and setup was some time off, awaiting the development of a stack of software that would include a social network like Diaspora.

Moreover, Max did not want Diaspora to be just another piece of software to end up in the freedom box. “We don't want to be part of Moglen's army,” he said. Max had been put out by Moglen's statement in the
Wired
article that he was not going to pick a favorite among projects working to create an open-source alternative to Facebook. “We thought it was heresy,” he said.

To get wide acceptance of Diaspora in the short term, the group recognized that servers would probably have to be hosted by schools or companies. The notion of seed servers was supplanted by the idea of pods.

Then there was the question of making encryption manageable. Both Rafi and Ilya had been deeply invested in it as an intellectual and political challenge.

“We're in charge of the tinfoil hats,” Rafi said.

Encryption at one level or another had been practiced by armies and lovers for centuries. The point was to keep confidential communications from being hijacked by encasing messages in codes that, in theory, are known to only the sender and the recipient. Until the early 1990s, most strong encryption was under the control of government agencies. An antinuclear activist named Phil Zimmerman devised what he half-jokingly called Pretty Good Privacy in 1991, so that politically engaged people could communicate on Internet bulletin boards without being watched. The code quickly made its way around the world. Two years later, Zimmerman became the subject of a criminal investigation into the exporting of munitions without a license: encryption that used keys larger than 40 bits was classified as a munition under U.S. regulations, and PGP keys were at least 128 bits in size.

With help from an aroused community of academics—how could algorithms be controlled?—and lawyers, including Moglen, Zimmerman came up with a plan to circumvent the ban. The law might see a 128-bit encryption key as a munition. As pages of 1s and 0s on paper, though, the code was a physical thing called a book. The entire PGP code would be published by MIT Press. Anyone could buy it, tear off the covers, scan it
into a computer, and encrypt away. There were no export controls on books, or tearing out the pages, or scanning them. The investigation of Zimmerman was dropped, and PGP continued its global migration. In the United States, federal law enforcement officials took the position that for public safety, encryption should be regulated by the government. To create impermeable hiding places was, in the view of the FBI director, Louis Freeh, a development that would help terrorists, criminals, and others seeking to damage society. Starting in 1993, the Clinton administration encouraged the makers of secure communication devices, like certain phones and fax machines, to voluntarily incorporate the “Clipper chip,” an encryption tool developed by the National Security Agency. The decryption key for the Clipper would be held in a kind of legal escrow by the government, and was to be used only when it had permission to unlock encrypted conversations on the devices. The industry resisted. Without voluntary compliance, the Clipper program failed.

Nevertheless, generations of government authorities continued, with little public knowledge of what was going on, to intercept communications on the Internet. In 2002, John Poindexter, a presidential adviser, proposed a “Total Information Awareness” plan to scan phone calls, e-mails, and travel and financial records from across the world. That seemed too drastic a step even in the months after the attacks of September 11, and it was abandoned in 2003. Or so it seemed. New programs, called Prism and Bullrun, did essentially the same thing, with much greater effectiveness and despite varying levels of cooperation from the Internet companies. In 2013, Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency had gotten access to traffic on Google and Yahoo! without the knowledge of either company. Even though those companies have complex security walls at their data centers, both virtual and physical, the information is not encrypted when it moves across the cables that are the backbone of the Internet from one center to another. “
People knowledgeable about Google and Yahoo's infrastructure say they believe that government spies bypassed the big Internet companies and hit them at a weak spot—the fiber-optic cables that connect data centers around the world and are owned by companies like Verizon Communications, the BT Group, the Vodafone Group and Level 3 Communications,” Nicole Perlroth and John Markoff reported in the
New York Times
. “In particular,
fingers have been pointed at Level 3, the world's largest so-called Internet backbone provider, whose cables are used by Google and Yahoo.”

As the digital ecosystem grew—“
modern cars are computers we put our bodies in and Boeing 747s are flying Solaris boxes, whereas hearing aids and pacemakers are computers we put in our body,” the writer Cory Doctorow observed—vast resources were expended by businesses, criminals, governments, scientists, and hackers to seize control of at least part of the space. Measure was met by countermeasure. A computer user might lock a machine with a password, but could still face catastrophe by opening an innocuous-looking piece of e-mail and clicking on an attachment. The poisonous software secreted within those attachments would install a keylogger—a spy tool that tracks, records, and transmits every stroke entered on the keyboard, thus stealing passwords, account names, and so on.