Our Internet lives have become centralized into the hands of a few major corporations who's fiscal obligations are clear: to sell your attention and information to the highest bidder. You are not (eg) FaceBook's customer, you are the product that FaceBook sells to its customers. Today, that's advertisers. Tomorrow, it could be your employer, your (or another) government, or your nosy neighbor who can no longer peer into your bedroom since you put up those blinds.
Furthermore, the US government (read: lobbyists) have a strangle-hold on central infrastructure (read: DNS) and can take down almost any site with little to no due process. Legislation is being introduced all the time that attempts to give them more power than they already have. (What First Amendment?)
If and when The Public(tm) decides that Something Must Be Done(tm), I want us to have a solution ready. In this talk, we take the above premises for granted and discuss solutions to these and other problems. I have lots of ideas but few answers and no code. My goal is to get people thinking and talking about solutions, and hopefully some implementations will emerge.
Mark Smith, aka Smitty, has been a System and Network Engineer professionally for 19 years at a few ISPs you have probably never heard of and a few institutions and enterprises you probably have. Currently, he has taken on the challenge of software development. The only DefCon he _attended_ was DefCon 5; since then he's been a vendor (Halibut Stuff, Ninja Networks), a volunteer (Hardware Hacking Village), participated in contests (Mystery Challenge, Badge Hacking), and ran a contest (Crash And Compile). He's a Maker, a ham (KR6ZY), a husband and father, and otherwise a paranoid goofball.