Four years ago, a security researcher, or, as most people would call it, a hacker, found a way to literally make ATMs throw bmcmillan@example.com.
His name was Barnaby Jack, and this technique was later called "jackpotting" in his honor.
I'm here today because I think we actually need hackers.
Barnaby Jack could have easily turned into a career criminal or James Bond villain with his knowledge, but he chose to show the world his research instead.
He believed that sometimes you have to demo a threat to spark a solution.
And I feel the same way.
That's why I'm here today.
We are often terrified and fascinated by the power hackers now have.
They scare us.
But the choices they make have dramatic outcomes that influence us all.
So I am here today because I think we need hackers, and in fact, they just might be the immune system for the information age.
Sometimes they make us sick, but they also find those hidden threats in our world, and they make us fix it.
I knew that I might get hacked for giving this talk, so let me save you the effort.
In true TED fashion, here is my most embarrassing picture.
But it would be difficult for you to find me in it, because I'm the one who looks like a boy standing to the side.
I was such a nerd back then that even the boys on the Dungeons and Dragons team wouldn't let me join.
This is who I was, but this is who I wanted to be: Angelina Jolie.
She portrayed Acid Burn in the '95 film "Hackers."
She was pretty and she could rollerblade, but being a hacker, that made her powerful.
And I wanted to be just like her, so I started spending a lot of time on hacker chat rooms and online forums.
I remember one late night I found a bit of PHP code.
I didn't really know what it did, but I copy-pasted it and used it anyway to get into a password-protected site like that.
Open Sesame.
It was a simple trick, and I was just a script kiddie back then, but to me, that trick, it felt like this, like I had discovered limitless potential at my fingertips.
This is the rush of power that hackers feel.
It's geeks just like me discovering they have access to superpower, one that requires the skill and tenacity of their intellect, but thankfully no radioactive spiders.
But with great power comes great responsibility, and you all like to think that if we had such powers, we would only use them for good.
But what if you could read your ex's emails, or add a couple zeros to your bank account.
What would you do then?
Indeed, many hackers do not resist those temptations, and so they are responsible in one way or another to billions of dollars lost each year to fraud, malware or plain old identity theft, which is a serious issue.
But there are other hackers, hackers who just like to break things, and it is precisely those hackers that can find the weaker elements in our world and make us fix it.
This is what happened last year when another security researcher called Kyle Lovett discovered a gaping hole in the design of certain wireless routers like you might have in your home or office.
He learned that anyone could remotely connect to these devices over the Internet and download documents from hard drives attached to those routers, no password needed.
He reported it to the company, of course, but they ignored his report.
Perhaps they thought universal access was a feature, not a bug, until two months ago when a group of hackers used it to get into people's files.
But they didn't steal anything.
They left a note: Your router and your documents can be accessed by anyone in the world.
Here's what you should do to fix it.
We hope we helped.
By getting into people's files like that, yeah, they broke the law, but they also forced that company to fix their product.
Making vulnerabilities known to the public is a practice called full disclosure in the hacker community, and it is controversial, but it does make me think of how hackers have an evolving effect on technologies we use every day.
This is what Khalil did.
Khalil is a Palestinian hacker from the West Bank, and he found a serious privacy flaw on Facebook which he attempted to report through the company's bug bounty program.
These are usually great arrangements for companies to reward hackers disclosing vulnerabilities they find in their code.
Unfortunately, due to some miscommunications, his report was not acknowledged.
Frustrated with the exchange, he took to use his own discovery to post on Mark Zuckerberg's wall.
This got their attention, all right, and they fixed the bug, but because he hadn't reported it properly, he was denied the bounty usually paid out for such discoveries.
Thankfully for Khalil, a group of hackers were watching out for him.
In fact, they raised more than 13,000 dollars to reward him for this discovery, raising a vital discussion in the technology industry about how we come up with incentives for hackers to do the right thing.
But I think there's a greater story here still.
Even companies founded by hackers, like Facebook was, still have a complicated relationship when it comes to hackers.
And so for more conservative organizations, it is going to take time and adapting in order to embrace hacker culture and the creative chaos that it brings with it.
But I think it's worth the effort, because the alternative, to blindly fight all hackers, is to go against the power you cannot control at the cost of stifling innovation and regulating knowledge.
These are things that will come back and bite you.
It is even more true if we go after hackers that are willing to risk their own freedom for ideals like the freedom of the web, especially in times like this, like today even, as governments and corporates fight to control the Internet.
I find it astounding that someone from the shadowy corners of cyberspace can become its voice of opposition, its last line of defense even, perhaps someone like Anonymous, the leading brand of global hacktivism.
This universal hacker movement needs no introduction today, but six years ago they were not much more than an Internet subculture dedicated to sharing silly pictures of funny cats and Internet trolling campaigns.
Their moment of transformation was in early 2008 when the Church of Scientology attempted to remove certain leaked videos from appearing on certain websites.
This is when Anonymous was forged out of the seemingly random collection of Internet dwellers.
It turns out, the Internet doesn't like it when you try to remove things from it, and it will react with cyberattacks and elaborate pranks and with a series of organized protests all around the world, from my hometown of Tel Aviv to Adelaide, Australia.
This proved that Anonymous and this idea can rally the masses from the keyboards to the streets, and it laid the foundations for dozens of future operations against perceived injustices to their online and offline world.
Since then, they've gone after many targets.
They've uncovered corruption, abuse.
They've hacked popes and politicians, and I think their effect is larger than simple denial of service attacks that take down websites or even leak sensitive documents.
I think that, like Robin Hood, they are in the business of redistribution, but what they are after isn't your money.
It's not your documents.
It's your attention.
They grab the spotlight for causes they support, forcing us to take note, acting as a global magnifying glass for issues that we are not as aware of but perhaps we should be.
They have been called many names from criminals to terrorists, and I cannot justify their illegal means, but the ideas they fight for are ones that matter to us all.
The reality is, hackers can do a lot more than break things.
They can bring people together.
And if the Internet doesn't like it when you try to remove things from it, just watch what happens when you try to shut the Internet down.
This took place in Egypt in January 2011, and as President Hosni Mubarak attempted a desperate move to quash the rising revolution on the streets of Cairo, he sent his personal troops down to Egypt's Internet service providers and had them physically kill the switch on the country's connection to the world overnight.
For a government to do a thing like that was unprecedented, and for hackers, it made it personal.
Hackers like the Telecomix group were already active on the ground, helping Egyptians bypass censorship using clever workarounds like Morse code and ham radio.
It was high season for low tech, which the government couldn't block, but when the Net went completely down, Telecomix brought in the big guns.
They found European service providers that still had 20-year-old analog dial-up access infrastructure.
They opened up 300 of those lines for Egyptians to use, serving slow but sweet Internet connection for Egyptians.
This worked.
It worked so well, in fact, one guy even used it to download an episode of "How I Met Your Mother."
But while Egypt's future is still uncertain, when the same thing happened in Syria just one year later, Telecomix were prepared with those Internet lines, and Anonymous, they were perhaps the first international group to officially denounce the actions of the Syrian military by defacing their website.
But with this sort of power, it really depends on where you stand, because one man's hero can be another's villain, and so the Syrian Electronic Army is a pro-Assad group of hackers who support his contentious regime.
They've taken down multiple high-profile targets in the past few years, including the Associated Press's Twitter account, in which they posted a message about an attack on the White House injuring President Obama.
This tweet was fake, of course, but the resulting drop in the Dow Jones index that day was most certainly not, and a lot of people lost a lot of money.
This sort of thing is happening all over the world right now.
In conflicts from the Crimean Peninsula to Latin America, from Europe to the United States, hackers are a force for social, political and military influence.
As individuals or in groups, volunteers or military conflicts, there are hackers everywhere.
They come from all walks of life, ethnicities, ideologies and genders, I might add.
They are now shaping the world's stage.
Hackers represent an exceptional force for change in the 21st century.
This is because access to information is a critical currency of power, one which governments would like to control, a thing they attempt to do by setting up all-you-can-eat surveillance programs, a thing they need hackers for, by the way.
And so the establishment has long had a love-hate relationship when it comes to hackers, because the same people who demonize hacking also utilize bmcmillan@example.com.
Two years ago, I saw General Keith Alexander.
He's the NSA director and U.S. cyber commander, but instead of his four star general uniform, he was wearing jeans and a t-shirt.
This was at DEF CON, the world's largest hacker conference.
Perhaps like me, General Alexander didn't see 12,000 criminals that day in Vegas.
I think he saw untapped potential.
In fact, he was there to give a hiring pitch.
"In this room right here," he said, "is the talent our nation needs."
Well, hackers in the back row replied, "Then stop arresting us."
(Applause) Indeed, for years, hackers have been on the wrong side of the fence, but in light of what we know now, who is more watchful of our online world?
The rules of the game are not that clear anymore, but hackers are perhaps the only ones still capable of challenging overreaching governments and data-hoarding corporates on their own playing field.
To me, that represents hope.
For the past three decades, hackers have done a lot of things, but they have also impacted civil liberties, innovation and Internet freedom, so I think it's time we take a good look at how we choose to portray them, because if we keep expecting them to be the bad guys, how can they be the heroes too?
My years in the hacker world have made me realize both the problem and the beauty about hackers: They just can't see something broken in the world and leave it be.
They are compelled to either exploit it or try and change it, and so they find the vulnerable aspects in our rapidly changing world.
They make us, they force us to fix things or demand something better, and I think we need them to do just that, because after all, it is not information that wants to be free, it's us.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
(Applause) Hack the planet!
There is something about physics that has been really bothering me since I was a little kid.
And it's related to a question that scientists have been asking for almost 100 years, with no answer.
How do the smallest things in nature, the particles of the quantum world, match up with the largest things in nature -- planets and stars and galaxies held together by gravity?
As a kid, I would puzzle over questions just like this.
I would fiddle around with microscopes and electromagnets, and I would read about the forces of the small and about quantum mechanics and I would marvel at how well that description matched up to our observation.
Then I would look at the stars, and I would read about how well we understand gravity, and I would think surely, there must be some elegant way that these two systems match up.
But there's not.
And the books would say, yeah, we understand a lot about these two realms separately, but when we try to link them mathematically, everything breaks.
And for 100 years, none of our ideas as to how to solve this basically physics disaster, has ever been supported by evidence.
And to little old me -- little, curious, skeptical James -- this was a supremely unsatisfying answer.
So, I'm still a skeptical little kid.
Flash-forward now to December of 2015, when I found myself smack in the middle of the physics world being flipped on its head.
It all started when we at CERN saw something intriguing in our data: a hint of a new particle, an inkling of a possibly extraordinary answer to this question.
So I'm still a skeptical little kid, I think, but I'm also now a particle hunter.
I am a physicist at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, the largest science experiment ever mounted.
It's a 27-kilometer tunnel on the border of France and Switzerland buried 100 meters underground.
And in this tunnel, we use superconducting magnets colder than outer space to accelerate protons to almost the speed of light and slam them into each other millions of times per second, collecting the debris of these collisions to search for new, undiscovered fundamental particles.
Its design and construction took decades of work by thousands of physicists from around the globe, and in the summer of 2015, we had been working tirelessly to switch on the LHC at the highest energy that humans have ever used in a collider experiment.
Now, higher energy is important because for particles, there is an equivalence between energy and particle mass, and mass is just a number put there by nature.
To discover new particles, we need to reach these bigger numbers.
And to do that, we have to build a bigger, higher energy collider, and the biggest, highest energy collider in the world is the Large Hadron Collider.
And then, we collide protons quadrillions of times, and we collect this data very slowly, over months and months.
And then new particles might show up in our data as bumps -- slight deviations from what you expect, little clusters of data points that make a smooth line not so smooth.
For example, this bump, after months of data-taking in 2012, led to the discovery of the Higgs particle -- the Higgs boson -- and to a Nobel Prize for the confirmation of its existence.
This jump up in energy in 2015 represented the best chance that we as a species had ever had of discovering new particles -- new answers to these long-standing questions, because it was almost twice as much energy as we used when we discovered the Higgs boson.
Many of my colleagues had been working their entire careers for this moment, and frankly, to little curious me, this was the moment I'd been waiting for my entire life.
So 2015 was go time.
So June 2015, the LHC is switched back on.
My colleagues and I held our breath and bit our fingernails, and then finally we saw the first proton collisions at this highest energy ever.
Applause, champagne, celebration.
This was a milestone for science, and we had no idea what we would find in this brand-new data.
And then a few weeks later, we found a bump.
It wasn't a very big bump, but it was big enough to make you raise your eyebrow.
But on a scale of one to 10 for eyebrow raises, if 10 indicates that you've discovered a new particle, this eyebrow raise is about a four.
(Laughter) I spent hours, days, weeks in secret meetings, arguing with my colleagues over this little bump, poking and prodding it with our most ruthless experimental sticks to see if it would withstand scrutiny.
But even after months of working feverishly -- sleeping in our offices and not going home, candy bars for dinner, coffee by the bucketful -- physicists are machines for turning coffee into diagrams -- (Laughter) This little bump would not go away.
So after a few months, we presented our little bump to the world with a very clear message: this little bump is interesting but it's not definitive, so let's keep an eye on it as we take more data.
So we were trying to be extremely cool about it.
And the world ran with it anyway.
The news loved it.
People said it reminded them of the little bump that was shown on the way toward the Higgs boson discovery.
Better than that, my theorist colleagues -- I love my theorist colleagues -- my theorist colleagues wrote 500 papers about this little bump.
(Laughter) The world of particle physics had been flipped on its head.
But what was it about this particular bump that caused thousands of physicists to collectively lose their cool?
This little bump was unique.
This little bump indicated that we were seeing an unexpectedly large number of collisions whose debris consisted of only two photons, two particles of light.
And that's rare.
Particle collisions are not like automobile collisions.
They have different rules.
When two particles collide at almost the speed of light, the quantum world takes over.
And in the quantum world, these two particles can briefly create a new particle that lives for a tiny fraction of a second before splitting into other particles that hit our detector.
Imagine a car collision where the two cars vanish upon impact, a bicycle appears in their place -- (Laughter) And then that bicycle explodes into two skateboards, which hit our detector.
(Laughter) Hopefully, not literally.
They're very expensive.
Events where only two photons hit out detector are very rare.
And because of the special quantum properties of photons, there's a very small number of possible new particles -- these mythical bicycles -- that can give birth to only two photons.
But one of these options is huge, and it has to do with that long-standing question that bothered me as a tiny little kid, about gravity.
Gravity may seem super strong to you, but it's actually crazily weak compared to the other forces of nature.
I can briefly beat gravity when I jump, but I can't pick a proton out of my hand.
The strength of gravity compared to the other forces of nature?
It's 10 to the minus 39.
That's a decimal with 39 zeros after it.
Worse than that, all of the other known forces of nature are perfectly described by this thing we call the Standard Model, which is our current best description of nature at its smallest scales, and quite frankly, one of the most successful achievements of humankind -- except for gravity, which is absent from the Standard Model.
It's crazy.
It's almost as though most of gravity has gone missing.
We feel a little bit of it, but where's the rest of it?
No one knows.
But one theoretical explanation proposes a wild solution.
You and I -- even you in the back -- we live in three dimensions of space.
I hope that's a non-controversial statement.
(Laughter) All of the known particles also live in three dimensions of space.
In fact, a particle is just another name for an excitation in a three-dimensional field; a localized wobbling in space.
More importantly, all the math that we use to describe all this stuff assumes that there are only three dimensions of space.
But math is math, and we can play around with our math however we want.
And people have been playing around with extra dimensions of space for a very long time, but it's always been an abstract mathematical concept.
I mean, just look around you -- you at the back, look around -- there's clearly only three dimensions of space.
But what if that's not true?
What if the missing gravity is leaking into an extra-spatial dimension that's invisible to you and I?
What if gravity is just as strong as the other forces if you were to view it in this extra-spatial dimension, and what you and I experience is a tiny slice of gravity make it seem very weak?
If this were true, we would have to expand our Standard Model of particles to include an extra particle, a hyperdimensional particle of gravity, a special graviton that lives in extra-spatial dimensions.
I see the looks on your faces.
You should be asking me the question, "How in the world are we going to test this crazy, science fiction idea, stuck as we are in three dimensions?"
The way we always do, by slamming together two protons -- (Laughter) Hard enough that the collision reverberates into any extra-spatial dimensions that might be there, momentarily creating this hyperdimensional graviton that then snaps back into the three dimensions of the LHC and spits off two photons, two particles of light.
And this hypothetical, extra-dimensional graviton is one of the only possible, hypothetical new particles that has the special quantum properties that could give birth to our little, two-photon bump.
So, the possibility of explaining the mysteries of gravity and of discovering extra dimensions of space -- perhaps now you get a sense as to why thousands of physics geeks collectively lost their cool over our little, two-photon bump.
A discovery of this type would rewrite the textbooks.
But remember, the message from us experimentalists that actually were doing this work at the time, was very clear: we need more data.
With more data, the little bump will either turn into a nice, crisp Nobel Prize -- (Laughter) Or the extra data will fill in the space around the bump and turn it into a nice, smooth line.
So we took more data, and with five times the data, several months later, our little bump turned into a smooth line.
The news reported on a "huge disappointment," on "faded hopes," and on particle physicists "being sad."
Given the tone of the coverage, you'd think that we had decided to shut down the LHC and go home.
(Laughter) But that's not what we did.
But why not?
I mean, if I didn't discover a particle -- and I didn't -- if I didn't discover a particle, why am I here talking to you?
Why didn't I just hang my head in shame and go home?
Particle physicists are explorers.
And very much of what we do is cartography.
Let me put it this way: forget about the LHC for a second.
Imagine you are a space explorer arriving at a distant planet, searching for aliens.
What is your first task?
To immediately orbit the planet, land, take a quick look around for any big, obvious signs of life, and report back to home base.
That's the stage bmcmillan@example.com.
We took a first look at the LHC for any new, big, obvious-to-spot particles, and we can report that there are none.
We saw a weird-looking alien bump on a distant mountain, but once we got closer, we saw it was a rock.
But then what do we do?
Do we just give up and fly away?
Absolutely not; we would be terrible scientists if we did.
No, we spend the next couple of decades exploring, mapping out the territory, sifting through the sand with a fine instrument, peeking under every stone, drilling under the surface.
New particles can either show up immediately as big, obvious-to-spot bumps, or they can only reveal themselves after years of data taking.
Humanity has just begun its exploration at the LHC at this big high energy, and we have much searching to do.
But what if, even after 10 or 20 years, we still find no new particles?
We build a bigger machine.
(Laughter) We search at higher energies.
We search at higher energies.
Planning is already underway for a 100-kilometer tunnel that will collide particles at 10 times the energy of the LHC.
We don't decide where nature places new particles.
We only decide to keep exploring.
But what if, even after a 100-kilometer tunnel or a 500-kilometer tunnel or a 10,000-kilometer collider floating in space between the Earth and the Moon, we still find no new particles?
Then perhaps we're doing particle physics wrong.
(Laughter) Perhaps we need to rethink things.
Maybe we need more resources, technology, expertise than what we currently have.
We already use artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques in parts of the LHC, but imagine designing a particle physics experiment using such sophisticated algorithms that it could teach itself to discover a hyperdimensional graviton.
But what if?
What if the ultimate question: What if even artificial intelligence can't help us answer our questions?
What if these open questions, for centuries, are destined to be unanswered for the foreseeable future?
What if the stuff that's bothered me since I was a little kid is destined to be unanswered in my lifetime?
Then that ...
will be even more fascinating.
We will be forced to think in completely new ways.
We'll have to go back to our assumptions, and determine if there was a flaw somewhere.
And we'll need to encourage more people to join us in studying science since we need fresh eyes on these century-old problems.
I don't have the answers, and I'm still searching for them.
But someone -- maybe she's in school right now, maybe she's not even born yet -- could eventually guide us to see physics in a completely new way, and to point out that perhaps we're just asking the wrong questions.
Which would not be the end of physics, but a novel beginning.
Thank you.
(Applause)