The land belongs to Google, Facebook, Amazon… They own the data centres.

You can build all you want, but you never know who owns what and for how long… and your corner looks like this:

Imagine your Facebook profile or your twitter account as a hut, a dwelling or one of these blue tents.

The walls don’t belong to you and they can change appearance at any time. The lock on your door? Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes you come home to find some stranger in your bed reading your private messages…. That’s the internet for you.

The only things that belongs to you is your data but to be on that land you have to give up your commercial rights to it. When there is an ad next to your profile page… you get nothing! If you find yourself on top of a search results page, surrounded by ads… you get zero! and worse, if you don’t pay Google a rent, your competitor jumps on top of you with an ad…

You’re either a squatter or a renter. You are nothing more than a slum dweller of the digital world.

Sure, you’d like to leave. And good luck to you. This is where your friends and family live too. Even if you don’t like Facebook, closing your account excommunicates you from their memories, out of sight, out of mind. So you stay, and suffer.

The solution? Land titling.

Land titling is a form of land reform in which private individuals and families are given formal property rights for land which they have previously occupied informally or used on the basis of customary land tenure. Proponents argue that providing formal titles increases security of land tenure, supports development of markets in land, and allows better access to credit (using land titles as collateral).

My friend, Syahfirie Manaf introduced me to the concept. The World Bank, his employer, brought land titling to Indonesia forty years ago.

The same idea worked in Ecuador, Vietnam, Bahia, Kabul, Mauritania, India… What were once economic slums grew to become billion euro economies.

As soon as you get land titles, you are not in a slum anymore! You are now free to sell your land, pass it to your children, or improve your home and local infrastructures.

That’s what Belua is trying to do with the Internet. Instead of land titles, you’ll own shares of the relevance, fame and other realities you helped create.

[pause]

I don’t use guns, just computers and that’s really how I earned a living, legally, for 18 years. Banks, telcos and government would pay me to try to steal money from them.

Everyone tells me this is the coolest job and then ask how I got into hacking and security.

Here is the story…

I’m eight years old. I am watching Matthew Broderick play a computer hacker in the movie WarGames.

I don’t really know what a computer is then… All I know is that I really want one!

A year later, I am in front of a Thomson MO5, teaching myself how to program for the first time.

After that, everything goes super fast, the Minitel, the Amiga, x25, modems, Blue-boxing, bbs’ and finally the internet, linux, and everything that followed.

The police are still using typewriters, punching keys with two fingers and my parents, well, they think i am playing video games.

I am looking for trouble, even my nickname is Frantic.

Fast forward a few years, I am standing in front of Judge Francis Bruty and he’s calling me “a computer genius with a lamentable morality.” I should probably shut up at this point but I have a big mouth so I reply in French: “N’y a-t-il pas de difference entre moralité, légalité et honnêteté”. Isn’t there any difference between morality, legality and honesty?…

Epilogue #

I got away with a slap on the wrist. Some jurisprudence was named after me… and the FBI.

I remember getting a one year ban from touching a computer. That didn’t discourage me. Right in front of the tribunal, I told a TV reporter that the judge’s order was anti-constitutional and thus null and avoid… We went straight to an Internet Café to resume the interview in front of a PC…

The media gave me a reputation and everyone started offering me projects.

“You’re the kid who £$%&ed the Americans? … I got a job for you!” My first clients were Canal Plus, Total, Alcatel, Aerospatiale… In France, projects are called “missions”…

People kept calling me a genius… and looking back, this undeserved title was really my luck as it forced me to study and work so much more just to get to the level of expectation of everyone around me.

Understanding and breaking into systems became second nature. Like Cook Ting, I seem to always find the perfect place to insert the blade and make whole systems fall apart.

Working for dozens of Fortune 500 companies, I got a unique chance to see how all the “big data” we talk about is structured, how beautiful and fragile it is… and I am kidding… There is no beauty, everything is so ugly you want to puke

And to illustrate how I feel about computer security let me tell you another little story from my childhood.

I am five. My mother is working for an air transport company whose main business is to move cargo in and out of Algeria, eggs in, wood out. We live at the Hotel Mazafran in Zeralda near Alger.

Comes new year, my mother asks permission to cook a big turkey for the crew in the restaurant. No problem they say… I am holding my mother’s hand, we are visiting the kitchen… everything is black — the walls, the counter top, literally everything is black. Something is wrong but you can’t really pinpoint what it is… It can’t be just the colour of the walls that makes you feel so dizzy. And then the cook turns around and starts making space for a plate — and now we see it!! Everything is moving, and the black on the walls, the black stuff on the counter tops! Cockroaches — all of it!! The horror — we ate the food from this place nearly every day for over a year…

What does this tale have to do with security? Well, behind all the shiny websites we all use everyday, you’ll find the exact same kitchen… bugs everywhere and cockroaches feeding off the scraps of data you leave behind.