Ethical hacking and subverting the internet | Thomas Webb (Tom London) | TEDxBerlinSalon

who's Tom London if you google Tom London you'll find a Wikipedia page that I created just gonna get this rule like real early my real name is Thomas Webb I chose Tom London because back in 2014 you could rank highly on Google by having a keyword in your domain name and I wanted to be the most successful magician in London so I decided to put London in my domain name I was Tom London magician so if you typed in London magician man I was number one and then I was like oh why don't just call myself Tom London and before yeah I was killing it so that was pretty good it's funny actually I loved that introduction which is you talking about America's Got Talent and being a magician I'm probably gonna get kicked out of the Magic Circle for this because I've decided that I'm going to break the biggest rule of them all which is the magician never reveals his secrets you see secrets to magic tricks are usually really really bad because tricks are usually like not that interesting but I'm not a magician I'm a hacker and I think that hackers should always reveal his secrets because they're really cool so my talk today is gonna be about anything is possible when you can code I'm a big advocate of programming I think if you can program in today's world you can quite literally do anything so to break the status quo can everyone take out their mobile phones I want everyone to take their phone out and I'd like you to open up your camera if you've got an iPhone you know just tap the camera' camera thing if you want Android you can just sit this one out this was take-home so we're gonna do is oh so you're doing already scat scan this QR code and it what happened is a push notification will pop up at the top and you can click on that push notification it says a website my last name's web website yeah that was expensive you should see a webpage that will say what device using I could actually just determine what device you're using in the browser but I thought you know it's kind of early let's wake everyone up with their thumb so just click what device you're using and the next question is going to ask you if you want to come on stage or not I know some of us got social anxiety I do so if you don't want to come on stage just click no and then once you're done there'll be a little holding page which they keep this page open can I get a big yes 17 people followed along so hey when I won America's Holland I had this dream I was like I really wanna be able to hack everyone the problem is hacking people was really difficult especially when you don't have a Wi-Fi network so the Wi-Fi in here I don't believe is working so there's design challenges like how do i hack people without being able to you know collect them inside a Wi-Fi network I have to be able to do it through the device over 3G or 4G so to create that effect of hacking someone it was really quite difficult but I realized I could use a little magic just to kind of hack the hack and that's what I've done so what you you're on right now is I've if I click this button here it with screens going black and then I can make them go blue red we can do a little party cool right yeah it's free see and then what I can also do is if I click this they're all gonna flash them colors this is my little hacking thing colors hacking and then some of you maybe five of you are gonna get the pokeball if you get the pokeball that means I choose you who's got a pokeball there's a pokeball okay can we get a round of applause please as he comes onstage can you come join me that's great in the meantime you should look at your devices I think I may have opened Instagram is that worked yeah you can now follow me on Instagram isn't that cool all in the browser how did you get 40,000 followers Tom now you know Hayden come on up so what we're gonna do is I'd like everyone to open the calculator app on their on their mobile device mobile device who says that I say that and once you've done that here's get heating what's her name Rohit's tom hold on to that he's we're gonna I'd like can we just everyone has to follow this like really precisely we're gonna simulate a blockchain chain 2019 we're gonna say that about our house is perfectly okay so can we just start off with a hi there hey what's nice feet do you have what size feet do you have your shoes 37 what's that in the UK sizes okay can everyone just type 37 37 and then on your calculator app and then hit the multiply button and just wait let's go is hey hey ding so here right what's your credit card PIN number and I'm deadly serious no let's just go with can I have a number between one and ten hey that's a really good choice hit eight and then hit multiply it again so you should all have 296 can I get a yes finally let's go is this guy here hey sir how many girlfriends have you had I'm really killing you today I'm sorry no no no no what number do you live at like your house or your apartment 32 everyone high only 32 and then hit the plus symbol so we should now have nine thousand four hundred seventy two this is great okay it's all on you now buddy I want you to put your thumbs over the numbers close your eyes and I want to in input a random element to this just so you don't think I've planted people in the audience because that's what magicians do I always close your eyes and hit hit six numbers at random don't look at them I get nervous at this bit okay what did you type you've typed okay so everyone you've hit plus now you need to type eight zero zero eight two one so we're gonna add eight hundred thousand eight hundred and twenty one if you hit equals the sum of those numbers is eight hundred ten thousand two hundred ninety three can I get a yes we have a massive round of applause please take a seat thanks so much thank you I think we've got someone who's put this on the thing have they oh they have cool okay so there is eight hundred ten thousand two hundred ninety three everyone's got that on the device so that's a random number we made and the reason we simulated blockchain is that all of you've authenticated what's just happened because you've all taken part in the transaction use your own calculators there's no trickery going on here it's that fair to say well inside my pocket here I actually have a pen and a paper I found this outside is a little like postcard and there's no other like things inside my pocket it's just you know just one thing and I wrote on this is very cool it actually has on here where the magic happens and it's got your comfort zone and so I drew my whole circle I said magic and I wrote eight hundred ten thousand two hundred ninety three isn't that cool I know you're thinking he must have like 810 thousand postcards all over his body that's logical so I did this on America's Got Talent that was the best moment of my life and did it with their phones it was really really cool so how did I do that well let me break it down I've never told the story I'm very excited to share with you I put it life hack so what my goal was to do was to be able to get everyone's phones to be controlled by me the whole phone so the design changes that is like okay well how can I control the phone I can use an app the problem is I have to get ones download app that's impossible so I can't use that Wi-Fi network if I've Wi-Fi network I can send our beaker and get a little message to pop up you know like when you connect to a hotel Wi-Fi and I could control that page and their Wi-Fi in the auditorium scratch that one so then I was like oh my god I can use a QR code because in 2017 iOS they added the QR code thing you just used most people don't know about that and you can have a webpage that's like okay that's cool unfortunately the ADT thing happened before that so what I did is I actually have my assistant come on stage wearing a jacket looking like a techie and he was like everyone needs to go on this web page we're doing a thing and everyone's like okay I'll follow along and they all did it so now everyone's primed and ready they've got no idea what's going on so how did I make this little application it's actually quite complicated what's happening is that QR code falls you onto my my server which is running life hack doc tech they're expensive domain name well you lay on the webpage I use something called Pabna PubNub is a real-time data messaging platform what it does it basically is like whatsapp for the internet so if you've got like a like an app or something and you want to communicate between people and servers you can use pop-up to do that really really quickly so what does it send like a little text message and it's so small it takes milliseconds to get from A to B so when you hit that webpage what's gonna happen is your your phone's gonna go my name is Tom and then it sends a message to my server and my server goes this is Tom and then when my server wants to make your phone change color it sends a group what's that message to all of you and goes red and then on your device it goes I got a message saying red better change to red and it just does it it's that quick apparently no one's done this before so I was like that's pretty cool okay so then I realized I could also do links so I can do window.location in JavaScript which will change when you're in the web page it will forward you want to a link so I could do like a prefilled tweet like sixteens Twitter with a prefilled tweet that's like pretty fun and then they introduced this whole thing or you can do native opening apps natively which is what I just did so I can actually open the Instagram app for you and this scales up to well theoretically millions of people all unified together and this one big whatsapp group over the Internet so yeah that was my moonshot right there it was really funny how I got in touch with the guy so actually the guy who come aside his company was huge huge company and Steven Blum the CTO I found on LinkedIn I dropped a little email was like hey I'm a magician or do some magic stuff yo can can you help me out and he came back to me he was like PubNub is magic okay so I'm saying that like we're excited like this San Francisco bigshot just sent me an email two seconds later are you real person oh so the phone thing how did that work anyone any ideas perhaps KITT okay so what I did does these are really old tricks cool toxic so what I did is when you type in a number to a mobile phone on a calculator you can hear plus zero times left bracket and then the cancel button and what that will do is it will store that number you typed in at the start into the memory bank and then you can do any math you want and then when you're equals it will just show the number so I've done twelve thirteen fourteen so it appears like you've done this equation but when you get equals it just goes no thank you and just puts the memory bank number up in front of it you all just came like a massive rap applause it's just like it's that easy thank you you say yeah any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic is what arthur c clarke said i think any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology and i think that some youtube technologies that we forget sometimes the technology is magic i hear more often not than not people say that's just an app and i'm like yeah but do you know how that works no but it's an app i people just assume the technology does all the work but really there's so many components in everything that are so magical so does anyone I have ever had coffee with a hacker no my girlfriend how she could explain it to you yeah it's basically like should we get a oh is that a lie could i hack that let me just play around with have you got my soldering iron in the back and I get carried away so so the morning of this AGT audition I'm in Apple that is like addiction to Apple and I walk in and I see this this is a Bluetooth printer it's this big it's tiny and I see it I'm like ah I could put that on my pocket and then if someone said like a picture I could print it out and be like haha just like I did right except you know use the pen that time but you get the idea so I bought it was like a hundred bucks and this is the morning of my audition I should be practicing something else but no no no I'm playing around with this it's better than that see when you take a photo of it it pairs the photo to a video and then it has an app which plays the video in augmented reality is there Matt so my brains like the possibilities they're endless if I have a photo I compare that photo to a video okay well there's this thing in magical multiple outs multiple outs is where you have more than one options so let's say I say to you pick one of the 52 playing cards there's only 52 outcomes right so if I have a picture of every single playing card that picture could then turn into a video of me holding a playing card saying you're gonna pick the seven of Spades this is like two hours before osment's do the most important audition of my life but then I realized that it's technology which means it's not just eight videos it's an infinite number of videos so anyway I get through the first round and they're like what do you want to do they already know because I said them a text message before the auditions saying guys this is what I'm doing for next what Tom your auditions in ten minutes what are you doing need to focus on this like like Nats core I'll get through it so good so the the printer was great but I couldn't hack it I don't have an API or anything was really limited so I was like well probably can make my own one so I did turns out unity has this there's a comical of euphoria a few lines of code and you can actually build your own augmented reality app this took me like 10 minutes I couldn't believe it a few lines of code so that's a cube it's just tracking onto the boarding pass that I had so I was like okay this was crazy I was like okay it's like Saturday night this is possible I think but I've not made it yet let's run with the idea so I hop on a train and I go all the way to Paris and this is what I did there's four judges if I take a video in front of a famous landmark I could say in in front of the you know Simon you're gonna pick the Eiffel Tower I could enter the same thing and say how are you gonna pick the Eiffel Tower no you're gonna pick the Eiffel Tower I've got one video for this location for each judge meaning if I ask the judge to say name one of the world wonders and they said the Eiffel Tower I just have to play the corresponding video right can I get from saying okay soso so for judges they always sit in the same location so what I had to do is make sure that the order of the video when I'm doing it I always have the same judge in the third position so third position was Mel for example so Saturday night hop on the train to Paris and I decided over the next two weeks before the audition to travel to every single lap mark around the world and it's funny cuz in the comments everyone was like yo it's Photoshop definitely definitely not Photoshop I actually went there it was pretty much emotional I remember crying the top Acropolis after being all over around around the world I remember getting drunk on when those trains were you sleeping them like in a cabin and there's like a chicken next to you you know that kind of like whole experience it's a real real cool and then my friends like yo you should go to the Great Wall China I like that's about I did know I went there that was that was crazy that was probably the most incredible thing ever to see that the only one there other girl were China so in the meantime my app that I was building started going really well the tracking works I managed to get its Lee would play the videos one after each other so you can see now it's doing Paris and then it's gonna start playing the video in Pisa straight after so I could have the camera playing and it would just play each of the judges videos in succession here we go magic wipe and then BAM I'm in Pisa and so I build that well in unity of basically hacking it together with stuff that I found online from other people so the next bit was like how do I get the actual picture itself doing the little printer and the whole pocket idea you know I can pull it hard but like hey this is we picked so what I did is I I wanted to have it my back in an envelope so there's no question of like you know I put it at the start that couldn't be anything else in there so I made this jacket that held the printer but what's crazy is that it always went wrong so I remember being in there like practicing and this is so I get one practice I'm standing there just like oh jeez and my assistants on the side stage trying to print it and it's not working and the producers look at me like you're gonna you're gonna die out there you could have died and I'm like please work um so yeah the range was really bad but but it did work and it was incredible so this is what happened this is it happening in the flesh guess how I did it though Pub nerve what was happening is is my assistant had another iPhone app hooked up to the iPhone app that was on stage and it was sending a public message you'd like I've just done with you saying this job just picked this one this judge picked this one and on the app I had something see like a hundred videos it was like a three gigabyte out hundred videos and the app was just in real time just go play this one this one this one this one just like that super fast I'm really kinda really happy to tell you all this because no one knows how this works and I'm like this is so cool so yes I did it it was it was really really awesome sadly they didn't pick the Great Wall of China that really tore me up inside cuz obviously that was a very long way to go for no reason but they did pick the pyramids which I thought was great because I went there and then I didn't get through the guy who did a card trick did so yeah great success no I'm not salty about it it was it was awesome it was so cool maybe I should have told them all this stuff I did and they may have been different but obviously I've just revealed like all of my magic to you right [Music] the way the way it's the thing about hacking is that like you always got a hack better right so you memorize said about the calculator thing you know the programming thing one little problem with that you guys will did it on your phones I didn't program your phones right three rounded numbers then you hit an around the go ahead around a number you will copied the number as well here equals bam you get this digit I knew what it was right yeah so I made a little bit better also just for fun anyone recognize the number what if I take out their commas no what if I reverse it today's date the third of the ninth 2018 now guys think very much [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 255,757

Rating: 4.9317932 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Entertainment, Hack, Magic, Technology

Id: Tp25LmdYlds

Length: 19min 9sec (1149 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 18 2018