Presented at
DEF CON 30 (2022),
Aug. 13, 2022, 2 p.m.
(45 minutes)
The internet, as it stands today, is not a very trustworthy environment, as evidenced by the numerous headlines of companies abusing personal data and activity. This is not really surprising since companies are responsible for optimizing revenue, which is often at odds with user benefit. The result of these incentives has produced or exacerbated significant problems: tech silos, misinformation, privacy abuse, concentration of wealth, the attention economy, etc. We built OpenCola, free and open source, as an alternative to existing big-tech applications. It puts users in control of their personal activity and the algorithms that shape the flow of data to them. We believe that this solution, although simple, can significantly mitigate the challenges facing the Internet.
Presenters:
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John Midgley
- Cult of the Dead Cow
John Midgley was born and raised in Toronto, Canada. He studied computer science at the University of Toronto where he earned a B.Sc. and a Masters in Computer Vision. His first job out of school was building the search algorithms for openCola, an early peer to peer collaboration tool that was arguably 20 years ahead of its time. Not being able to afford a time machine, he busied himself by working at a string of startups and then a couple larger companies (Microsoft and Netflix). From 2011 to 2021 he worked at Netflix on Facebook integration, search, video ranking, content promotion and ended up managing the personalization organization, responsible for the systems and algorithms that construct the Netflix experience. Now that it’s 20 years later, the world may finally be ready for a new and improved version of OpenCola.
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