 Welcome to this session and to this talk Hans Christof Steiner is going to give you a talk on wind, off-grid services for everyday people and it will be a network-related talk and I'm very happy to welcome him on stage. Give him a warm hand of applause. So I will be talking about our project Wind which you just said about really our work over the last seven-ish years about integrating offline connectivity with kind of nearby networking into the internet and making that something that you can use transparently. I'll give a little overview of some kind of randomly chosen or not so randomly chosen historical precedents that I think are informed this whole discussion and talk about some of the work that well a lot of the work that we've done and other examples that have presented on been presented at Congress and other places and also it hopefully inspire everyone here who works on software of any kind maybe even hardware to also think about nearby and offline networks and how to integrate it into what what you're making. So this work is kind of under the umbrella of the Guardian project. We are a free software project focused on privacy in mobile. We make that means when we do software development we started with the idea that we want to make apps where privacy comes first. We don't want to compromise at all on privacy as in the whole process. So that means you know we haven't become rich and famous because we've opted for grants rather than VC money and things like this. One central idea for us is that the design the usability of software is not in conflict with privacy but really actually an essential part of delivering software that is actually secure and private. If people don't understand what they're doing then they're much more likely to make a mistake and if you design things in a way that it's easy they have to the user has to choose between the dangerous button and the safe button right next to each other then that can cause a lot of problems. So central to our design process is really thinking about user experience. So this is instead of saying you know the user didn't understand it we need to write a manual better we need to teach them better we say no we need to make it so that the software matches the people's expectations we need to present it in a way that the expectations are clear and this means a lot of talking to people a lot of iterations and a lot of trial and error. So Guardian Project specifically focuses the users we focus on our activists and citizen journalists and human rights defenders people anything from like election monitors etc etc we are often called upon to help inform software that's used in businesses or business people are to travel use to use our software and frontline reporters and one but really you do so with the core mission we really want to make privacy and and these kind of things something for everybody and we've kind of found this niche where we can work in partnership with all sorts of organizations who want who will give us money to focus on these people like human rights activists and that we develop free software and we try to push it out there in ways that it can be reused both in terms of free software libraries so that you can incorporate that into your into your apps but also in terms of design research design patterns and things like this so these are just a bunch some of the not all but some of the partnerships these are you know a lot of these organizations represent say the target user and so whenever we're designing software we're always working in conjunction with directly with people who are have strong privacy concerns that we're trying to address another you know accessibility and we also always try to find you know there's already a free for software project out there doing an essential part of what we're doing we would much rather try to support another free software community than invented ourselves so this means we have to do a lot more talking as well but so that's part of coming to an event like this is to say okay you know where where are the parts that we all can work together and make something better yeah so I should also mention that you know I kind of wear many hats in in this is the I pay my bills usually through officially guardian project but a but the way we work is that we we often do a lot of the work just because we think it's important I'm also a Debian developer I'm also a core team of fdroid and other things like this things that don't necessarily pay the bills but because we have some funding here means we can also have time to focus on on things that integrate into the whole thing and are also really important so networks so everyone's familiar with the internet and the internet is now on our phones in our pockets all the time and I think more and more people are forgetting that there used to be lots of lots of all sorts of kinds of networks out there and that I think it's so I wanted to highlight a couple that were influential to me and also just to point out that you know there's there's things we can we can learn from them because it's some of these ideas people think well that's crazy to build a system like this that you know it's too hard when and you can look back and say well actually this was working pretty well not so long ago who here's heard of phytonet some okay phytonet is probably my yes my real my first exposure to anything like a network what it is quite simply was back in the days when you know connection to a network was a modem and dialing into something there was a thing called a bbs it was basically a one stop I mean there was one computer that lots of people could call into and you could exchange you know you could chat you could find files things like this so a bunch of people figured out well you know if we want to exchange data to across the country that's a very expensive phone call but I can call make a local call for free or cheaper and then that will person that bbs can make another local call and that bbs can make another local call and it can and then we can have a global network that's actually affordable and that's this phytonet spanned a large part of the world I mean it went from US to Bulgaria I think a little bit into South America and just you know organized by people who wanted to be able to send little emails and things like this then for me one that's near and dear in my heart anyone ever use beam beaming apps and and palm pilots so this is something I think is quite important this is like it has the idea of offline nearby networks built in from the beginning anything in as far as I remember like the you know if you you had an app you could beam an app to someone else you'd be like hey here's a SAP you want this app and you point the devices made a little noise you could also beam contacts and things like this and it actually worked pretty well and it was just based on like the same little infrared sensors as a TV remote control and and I think that it worked because of the technology was there but this more importantly I think is that they've got it smooth enough and this kind of interaction if you're already talking about like oh give me your card or pull out your thing and pull out your palm pilot and point them at each other was already kind of plugging into an existing human behavior so it wasn't telling people to do some totally new weird thing one thing that's getting a lot of media attention right now is El Paquete Seminal the weekly package in Cuba which is really pretty amazing network of couriers moving hard drives around Cuba what it is is someone either goes to a country that has high-speed internet or they have through some source they get it on Cuba so fighting for people don't know most of Cuba doesn't really have internet access and the internet access that are available is extremely expensive so people have figured out this thing well they just buy a hard drive and they fill it up with ebooks movies all sorts of things apps games and then someone brings it into Cuba they have a whole network of this is a network that's of people who talk to each other meet up and they physically exchange these hard drives so someone says I got the new weekly packet you go you have your weekly packet store you know someone that gets who gets it from someone you go make your copy then people say okay I want to get apps they go to the weekly packet store they pay a little money you get some time on the hard drive copy what you need and this covers Cuba quite well and there is no actual there's no wireless networking there's no there's no wired networking it is people moving hard drives around and and talking to each other and and agreeing and I mean so this was has often been kind of derided as a sneaker net which is something near and dear to us and then something as a last resort but it turns out that sneaker net is still the fastest way transmit data so Amazon has a service where if you have a lot of data and you want to move to Amazon they drive a truck they drive a truck to your to your data center and they plug it in and you load it up and this is an exabyte of data and I mean I don't know all the exact details but something like an internet for one example case it would have taken 26 years to do it over the internet and it took them six months with this thing so it's just really a truck full of wired hard drives and then I feel like so this is more I feel like mesh is fading a little bit so this is something that was there was quite a bit of activity maybe ten years ago of people building DIY networks that can build the figure out how to route data through them but I'm kind of on their own and that's the core idea of a mesh network and so this specific map is the Guifi network in Catalonia you can see like the that is Barcelona where the mouse pointer thing is but so it covers quite a large area I think it's 10,000 nodes and to this it's provided actually relatively high-speed networks in a place where the the local telecom companies haven't really been interested for whatever reason in doing it and there's there's actually a kind of it's kind of a hard thing so the you know this is built by and set up by a whole lot of volunteers and that's takes a lot of people's time and technical ability and what often happens in the in cases like this is that then they've done the hard work of actually proving that people want the internet and maybe we even give some money to it to support it and then the companies often come in and be like oh look that's a market waiting for us and then and these things go away there's another recently I just learned about it yesterday I mean the world the outcome but there's a telecom in Eastern Nicaragua called CESAL very similar idea kind of DIY community-based effort because the the local telecoms were not interested in Eastern Nicaragua at all they set it up got it working and then they telecom saw oh wait people will actually pay for telecom service there and then they of course then set up a giant of lots of towers and put CESAL out of business and of course the internet itself started as an offline network that was you know 1970 that was the internet that was all of it and it this was you know built node by node starting you know when they first turned it on it was two or three computers talking to each other and bit by bit it was built out into what we have now and on top of that you know so that that was a US Defense Department really funded effort but then lots of things started kind of bite it on top of that so Usenet which is still alive and kicking today and is a fascinating idea of how to move so it's basically like forums and all organized by topics and it's back when it was created the the internet was not really available and and people wanted to say well we want to use this this these digital media we don't have access to the internet how can we do this so similar to something like phytonet this is computers calling each other syncing up data and and what you get basically is this so someone you like a university will have a complete copy of you Usenet and then you can connect to them whichever is the closest to you and say well I'm only interested in this much of it and sync with them and then and then it syncing includes you're putting your responses back in that university takes your response and then forwards it to every other connection and and it spans the world in these asynchronous kind of bit-by-bit connections going in every direction and a very a more recent one which to me it's such a clever hack both politically and technically it's called touche in its target it's basically about getting around internet blocking in Iran has anyone heard of touche no it's not so it turns out that so that Iran often blocks aspect aspects of the internet satellite TV is very popular in Iran but the satellites are all operated by I believe UAE the United Arab Emirates and they don't those countries don't get along so that is it they wreck the people put to touche together recognize oh this is an opportunity for us because ultimately a satellite is video is just bits and it turns out it's a standard format it's mpeg format bits so there's no one checking that your bits actually are a nice pretty playable video so touche is a system where they have a cable channel on a satellite run by the UAE that's targeted in it's available in Iran on one of the on the main satellites that Iranians use to get television and if you subscribe to it and you basically a lot of these little satellite boxes you can download to a USB thumb drive so you can just download stream data to it and then they have a little app that extracts just like you know unzipping a file but it's taking data out of mp4 so this to me the whole thing is just I don't such a crazy hack but that works that I found it very inspirational so so then why do we now really want to think about incorporating offline and nearby networks like you know there's all these things before that was the only way or there was there was a direct need and now it feels like well it's so easy for much so much the world to just get stuff on the internet companies like like Google have really pushed this idea that look they can provide always connected services and you know when they when you're always connected then they can run these huge servers and have these insane search indexes and all this stuff that you can't do in it where no one's been able to do in a decentralized way so you know they're so invested in this model of always connected and in that everywhere they're flying balloons Facebook as well you know that they have their idea of putting drones up to beam internet always connected internet around the world to me this I've always been very fascinated in the history of computers and the internet and it reminds me of a one I think often overlooked but very important story in the in the in the roots of the internet and and computing and that is a lot of this stuff like the internet was that was being built around when the Vietnam War was being fought and while we usually think of like a lot you know oh the internet was a bunch of hippies making internet access or information available for free that that there is that what that was happening at the same time the people who actually were funding this the people in charge of the Defense Department US Defense Department funding had a very different idea their idea was about well if we have a nuclear war proof network that spans all everything then we can have the most efficient centralized command control possible we can build a network where every all we have people taking care of everything and then when it'll be so efficient that the president can actually decide who which person to shoot will that is able to flip on a monitor and the airplane will be flying in the air and the president gets to pull the trigger this is this is this is really this is not a made-up story this is really part of what they were thinking about one of the things that they did it so in the in that time so around 1970 the largest computer in the world was in Thailand because they had built a network all up through Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia where the Ho Chi Minh Trail was this is where the Vietnamese brought weapons from the north down to the south to fight so they they would they had this idea we'll just build a network over the whole thing will wire up sensors and video cameras and audio sensors and then we'll know where everything that's happening on this on this trail and then when we wanted you know blow up some truck or something there you there you go the general can sit there and be like that one and it will have perfect knowledge and that and so huge amounts of money largest computer in the world they built the system and it was reporting all these statistics about all the things that they have killed and blown up here they have a nice map of all the places that it that were targeted via this system and then after a while someone tallied all the numbers that they had of all the trucks and airplanes and everything that they and people they had killed with this and they realized that it was much larger than any of the estimates from the departments who just were trying to estimate the size of the military and then in after the war you can now see this in the in museums in Vietnam the Vietnamese figured out oh here's a microphone and when it hears a truck someone shoots at it so they just played recordings of trucks so this this was really they had centralized command and control they built this amazing infrastructure internet up on the whole you know in this rural thing in a war and they were victims of their own information bubble so more directly what why do we need offline and network well what we have is is centralized very and getting seems to me even more so it in some places in many places the world it's very fragile and pretty much any place in the world it can be fragile and when it's surprising times I worked in lower Manhattan at during September 11th there was no internet no phones no cellular phones for weeks there was no power there were power lines this big in the street so this this can happen you know in the middle of New York City in a lot of the world is expensive it's getting you know easier and easier to censor it it is everyone knows it's being surveilled in so many ways and and of course it's lots of people are trying to push it to not be not be neutral like have to prefer certain services over others so it's also not evenly distributed so this is a map of the world very based on percentages of people using the internet very unevenly distributed and so part of why that is well it turns out that it's quite expensive in certain parts of the world and often in those parts of the world where people don't make a lot of money so really I mean affordability is a huge block to getting on the internet in a lot of places I mean this is something that Facebook has figured out with their internet.org program they basically figured out that you know it's worth it to them to pay for the internet bills for people around the world to access Facebook but then of course they don't pay for the internet internet bills as a whole just accessing Facebook there's even I mean another example of a project that we worked on so in the US that there are large parts of the US where people are that do not have coverage for example farms a lot of large farming areas and so we worked with a group representing farm workers in Georgia the we were helping them track the work that they did so they could get paid fairly and for the most part they did not have access to the two mobile connections or the internet this is in Georgia not hardly the most remote remote parts of the US there's also lots lots of places in the world so here's an example of Syria where there's actually the internet out you know the connection to that world outside of Syria is pretty tenuous there's Tartus basically has three connections and then there's one in Aleppo and that's it and in some countries they've designed them deliberately like this so Libya after the fall of Gaddafi they were able to kind of go in and look at how the telecom was built it was built for to have one central building that could control every aspect of telephones and internet and another nice example with these in Hong Kong these protests that broke out and they were the occupied this causeway so it's kind of a very unexpected thing to be have tens of thousands of people you know in a highway and there was a lot of they were trying it was political demonstrations they were trying to get themselves heard and they had put a lot of effort into trying to communicate and also keep abreast with what the police were doing and there was quite a bit of attention but about I forgot the name there is a there's a service of chat app that had a remote what no this one was specifically about having a local connections fire chat yes thank you fire chat and it got a lot of publicity here but it and that one was quite interesting because it actually it worked as a regular chat app but if if you couldn't connect on the internet it would you could also try via Bluetooth just to send messages through the network so it's a nice model of saying okay well internet if you have it and ad hoc mesh if you don't so now I mean these are a lot of nice ideas and hard technical issues how can we do this that's part of the question that we've been working with and our most recent work has been related to a Mozilla competition around offline networks and we started we chose to focus on Latin America and to kind of broaden our horizons and we started out we had we had done some work of the time we started out with some surveys to get some ideas of what what were the issues like what were the concerns about people so these are the respondents from these countries of that we talked to then we're just trying to get some general ideas about you know when you're using a phone you know what are what are the problems that you have and to the the cost of data was number two and batteries number number one so we had come in it with a perspective very much thinking that what we had heard I we probably we had just learned a lot about our kind of how expensive it is to use phones in a lot of parts of the world and that was our focus so then we were surprised to see oh actually yes that's a concern but battery time is is the number one so from from this also we say you know how much data do people use so two gigabytes or less is about half the people that responded so not not so much and then how much they pay so most of the people were paying more than $20 a month which you know in the EU is not so much money in a lot of places that's that's a lot of money that's substantial portion of their income so about 10% of a lot of people's income so and from this week so we did a lot of interviews and things like this and we we also so we wanted to we find that having real stories is very informative to the process but there's a lot of privacy concerns that actually saying oh can we interview and spread your your story about your concerns around the world so what we did actually was based on our surveys and interviews we put together fictional people and these are three of them and try to keep them close you know close to what we were hearing and so these are these I think there's eight or ten or so all available on on the okay thanks website it's linked on the the talk page and it just kind of tells a little bit of their story their their phone their income and things like this what apps they use and what they do with the phone and these were very for us very helpful in thinking about how to prioritize things you know battery we had to we put more effort into battery conserving then based on that we went back we've the longest running piece of this work is in asteroid where we started in about 2012 with this what we then called swap app swapping and from there we've tried to think about so after it is an app store it's all about getting a blob of data from somewhere to your device so you can use it you know whether it's an app a video a ebook whatever so in asteroid we really have this opportunity to think about like well what are all the useful ways that we can move blobs of data from here to there and how can we get them all into one user experience where you don't really have to be aware you don't have to say why I have to set up I have to you know oh the internet's not working I have to set up the Bluetooth connection in a special way so that I will be able to use it we wanted or mirroring or blah blah blah so it's and this is really taking shape more and more I mean on on the left there you have some of the many ways that that data gets transmitted in the in the asteroid ecosystem so of course you have me up top is asteroid org it is there by default you open up the phone with internet device is search for an app install it if all is the internet's working fine it will just download it from there in each in in the after I don't work and declare well I'm also available here in this mirror you know if you cannot reach after I don't org you can try the repo on this server so that's available in there but the client knows to say okay I can't connect to this one it's been so what's the next in the list and we'll try that and it will keep on trying and then users if you want to set if you have your own server you want to set up your own mirror the closer to you you can set up your own mirror and add it anyone and share it to anyone and that same logic applies you don't the user doesn't have to know that the main one failed or even there's no notification or anything it just keeps going until it can't find anything if it can't connect at all then you're notified so that still is a centralized server that is after I don't org is a central community of people any the everything after I'd makes is free software and we try to make it easy for the people to use it so for example there is a guardian project app repository or repo anyway you can just kind of subscribe to it you can send the link the email click it and after it says do you want to add this and then that also can have its own mirrors and you can have as many of these as you want each with their own mirrors each with their own setups and then we have the nearby functionality so every phone has radios that can talk to each other there's Wi-Fi radios there's Bluetooth radios and these are set up to exchange data so that in after it has the nearby tab to help you walk you through the process of making a connection so you can exchange apps for any app this or video or things like this that is installed on your phone you can make it available and connect to someone else's device they see it in the regular app store experience click install and also then there's the problem of you know you need to do this procedure you need after I talking to after aid so if you want to send so yeah I have an app I want to send you I don't have after I okay well I can just send you after I straight so that's a relatively straightforward thing let's see on the left of just saying okay well I'll send you after right first and then the rest will be much easier to sync up and then of course it needs to also play nicely with other app stores so most the world of Android people are used to only having Google Play but large parts of the world many app stores is normal China for example India other places and for this to be a whole ecosystem they all have to play nice so if you know if you're getting apps from play and then you also install after aid then after I will do what it can to work nicely it will you can of course then if you install an app from Google Play you can of course share it on using any of these things and then we recently saw a nice kind of a surprising example that would someone came to our chat room and just said oh by the way I've set up a store in Cuba and he so because we we put the effort into the whole tools to make sure that it just if it can talk on a network it'll work regardless of its whether it's the internet or not this man in Cuba decided he was gonna open a mobile phone store his and he's taught a good way to promote his mobile phone store would be to have a local Wi-Fi access point that you could connect and get free apps and so that he was on the edge of town he said well if you come here you can connect for free to my network you'll get free apps and then oh if you need a cable or or el paquete I think he does that and then my store is right here and so this is it kind of interesting me this is an interesting model to me because it's for the most part it's offline it is one Wi-Fi access point with hard drive plugged into it more or less and it works and then every so often he gets he syncs with the internet so it's a kind of like once a week internet connection and along those lines there's these little things like all sorts of little boxes that have Wi-Fi and storage in them now and this one's called library box of software for it that it makes that idea of this kind of occasionally syncing to the internet and having a local store very very simple and very cheap yeah so I also want to point out like we're not the only people doing this work and and really what we hope to see is a lot more like a lot more people focusing on this kind of thing and doing it in a way where we can inter interoperate so briars messaging app there's talk from last year here at Congress from Torsten Krote which has a it's a very similar idea it uses the internet when it's available but it also can do local connections for sending messages there are this we work a lot with Tibetan activists in Dharmasala in northern India where a lot of Tibetans are based they are quite remote didn't have networks they've set up their own whole systems of both a network and computer systems that cover their area then I mean what we're seeing now you know even the Silicon Valley doesn't have perfect connectivity so you can get offline maps on things like on Google Maps and we're seeing you know Apple and and Google now are also pushing this nearby idea it's I guess hitting the mainstream and specifically so you know they have huge engineering resources which is a wonderful thing to see on that but they always come there's for in the case of Apple but they often you know make it work really nicely but then they stick in arbitrary restrictions like you know iTunes is not allowed to do nearby because they don't want you sharing music or and and Google of course track adds an extra tracking that's their business model and from from Apple there's a very important lesson to always when you're designing systems think about spam and abuse this is a this is apparently become a thing in New York where people are doing airdrop Apple airdrop is their nearby service dick pics to anyone who's on the subway who happens to have left their their airdrop in I guess there's a like kind of listen all mood so yeah you open your phone and it shows you the picture right there right less than ideal and there's also two apps called share it and Zafia which I've many millions of users which do need this nearby sharing quite well but that's what they look like to me that doesn't look like they're really focused on the nearby so much I mean when they started out it was very simple and it was all and it worked nicely and then it's the same you know their startups it's the same business model now they're trying to track and monetize you with like endless it's fight be things so you know we need to do it another way this the if we really want to have something like oh that's neutral and nearby and working offline it is not gonna it's not gonna come from Apple and Google and it's not gonna come from the VC startup fund VC funded startup and to highlight really the way we're thinking about it like what we want to put up first and foremost is is that ultimately we want people connecting to people and thinking about how people act rather than encouraging them to act in a way that's that works with your business model and also putting this into the design of how the protocols work so this is some early thinking about from Paul Baran who's involved researcher involved in the design of the internet so it's interesting 1962 he's thinking about you know centralized networks decentralized networks distributed networks but these all assumed that those points don't move but people move and now that you know we all have phones we have to consider that that movement is always going to be part of this so that means at some points you will have a great connection to the internet so you can use it and it may be it's that centralized hub and spoke other parts that might be some more decentralized and other points you know it may be just connected connectivity to one library box that has specific services that you may or may not need there's a whole whole range of things that need to be considered if to make this whole kind of fluid experience actually work to break it down I mean you what we have these kind of concepts as our kind of core first is what we call chime and that's the idea you have to it has to be discoverable if someone sticks a little Wi-Fi box there if your device doesn't know how to find it then it becomes you know it's quite a bit of work to actually use that thing and you need something to store data in order to have an effective you model where I say you have the once a week internet you also need a way for people to send their stuff out to gather and share it out and and and so one thing I think is that the most from this most recent work that is the most generic and re-sharable is to actually say okay what is the format of data for announcing yourself and a service that you're offering this is our first draft of such a thing the wind chime announced protocol and so this needs to announce you know I am available on this Wi-Fi node so the SSID BSS ID I am available at this address I am available at you know whether it's Bluetooth or not and this is the kind of service I am providing and it has to be in a standardized way so that it can happen automatically you don't want to present a whole list of texts we know many many many things to the user that's not going to ever be useful then we also have this available in a library for Android called Iyanda which just tries to make these core pieces really easy to do in an app so that's the discovery piece the sending files and the receiving files part so then the question is you know how can you get started doing this in software that you're working on and some of it is just a matter of trying as we've learned where you know most of the time you think well you know if I have a network connection even if it's just a local network with you know small nodes it should just work right if I'm on a mesh network it should just work because it's all the internet well it turns out it's pretty normal to check for specific things that only exist on the internet and then that ends up being the only thing preventing your software from working in a nearby or offline way so that's the first thing just like well set up a network of your get a library box one node see if you can talk to it with your app you doesn't work without a domain name so we're used to you know CCC dot DE as but if you just have an IP address is the sequence of numbers will your app work because that actually the domain name makes it a lot harder to set up individual lightweight nodes and then you know in the flow of using your app is there data that can that can be sent and cached and in a way that's not say leaking private information things like that and just starting to think about that is that is the first step of saying and with a lot of little tweaks you a lot of software can work then on on nearby and offline networks without big fancy changes of syncing with Bluetooth and things like this so to wrap it up I just want to say that really what we wanted we know that this is possible so we want to build this network in a way that reflects our values instead of always turning us into a product and that and you know I that means building a network that there there's will do something useful if the big provider is not available making it easy that means building systems that you don't have to ask in advance to set them up just you know buy the 30 euro TP link turn it on and it should work in some form you know there's lots of things like official things like domain names which help but it shouldn't be essential and then thinking a lot about you know well how can we keep this affordable I mean affordable affordable accessible and without any kind of arbitrary things like well you can think anything you want just not itunes songs so affordability then you know it might feel like well you know it's less important here but the system is made up of affordable little bits that gives you a lot more flexibility in how you actually you build it so it really applies kind of everywhere and in closing just to leave a little something that inspires us is these are these starlings in in England that every night gather and just fly around in these swarms of these self-organizing swarms which are you know many different individuals some leading some following the leaders change and it's very highly recommend watching the videos are amazing of these of these birds and it's if we can make networks with that kind of fluidity of organization then that would be quite an amazing thing thank you thank you for your talk and we have still some time for questions if you have to leave then do so quietly and we have two microphones one over there and one in the middle and of course the signal angel just line up and I will call you to ask your questions don't forget to be quiet while walking out maybe a little show of hands if somebody wants to ask a question but cannot reach it because there are people standing in front of the mic yeah yeah okay just walk up to number two that's sitting right over there and go ahead yeah so you talked about the Barcelona case where they have some kind of a meshed network already as far as I understood and you told and you told us that probably the telco providers will come there and take take like the piece of cake there and build their own business model there but what are the limitations so why is it possible because I think if the infrastructure is already there it should be cheaper to maintain it then then to pay extra for the telco providers so this you're talking about the Nicaragua case no for example the Barcelona case oh the Barcelona case so well the problem is you know if you have a company if you have good competition and they can build the networks cheaper and maintain them and you know do them in a way that's with net neutrality and things like this that's great but I think part of the motivation in Catalonia is that they don't have much network competition and Nicaragua very much so there's two companies there's a Spanish company and a Mexican company and that's it they're huge and so that these companies don't are not responsive to what people want to do and often put arbitrary restrictions and things like that does that answer your question or but I was kind of wondering why it's not competitive why I like the independently built infrastructure is not competitive I think in the case like of Nicaragua the telecoms really they have lots of money they really don't want anyone to have a set of precedent of being effective competition and so they were like oh they're actually getting subscribers let's crush them I mean they're monopolies a huge huge monopoly it's you know that's that's part of it so I think it doesn't matter the cost really they don't want people getting the idea that they can start competition and yeah okay microphone number one so you currently focus on mobile technology do you consider the desktop or the laptop out of scope because it's irrelevant or just because you want to make it a feasible project so for the general idea as a whole absolutely it's fully in scope and yeah we want to see that me personally and Guardian project as a kind of organization we our development work is on mobile and that's why this was have such a mobile bit but we'd love to see desktop and things like this number two please I thank you for a talk I have actually two questions one is as far as I understood right now the Bluetooth is the way to go for this decentralized networks at least what people are doing right now and what is the biggest thing that we have accomplished that people have accomplished until now like what is the biggest decentralized network Bluetooth based maybe in this chat client or something and the second question is you mentioned a lot of technical problems that happen and so how does their routing actually work with this Bluetooth stuff do you have like geo based routing or do people everyone knows everyone or yeah thank you yeah so yeah there's a let me see start with a simpler question so we it's not just Bluetooth so it'd be Bluetooth so you can do Wi-Fi just if you have an access point without the internet that works there's also the things like Wi-Fi direct which seems to be you can work nicely but not always so really you have to kind of consider all of them if possible and not one because Bluetooth is often the easiest connect but really slow where Wi-Fi is harder to connect but much faster than the largest I mean using that as the largest it's like terabytes of data the way I mentioned with the forums copying around that is generally copied around on the on the internet that's the largest one that I can think of and the last question was oh routing so that's I think for a lot of to lead really with the this wouldn't really be on the kind of transport layer where you're thinking about routing the the idea more is to say like well so if you want to do ad hoc routing then you would build a mesh network because mesh networks are all about Matt ad hoc routing fire chat does some I believe they do some ad hoc routing in a very small scale in Bluetooth and some of that I think is freely available if I remember and so really the idea is more that so like in the case of after I think is the easiest is that you make we had there's a system so we have a concept of a repo which is a collection of absent etc. etc. files and it has a kind of globally unique ID it's the signing key so that means when the client and kind of encounters some files you can easily identify it as oh it belongs I know this is after a door because it's the matching signing key and it can just say wherever it as long as it can talk to these files I mean what then it can exchange data so there's no routing there if it's on a mesh network and it gets an IP address on that network and it gets the same files the index knows so it's about in the app you have to think about okay how what are the things we need to discover what are the bits we need to move around and how can we do that in a way that's reusable you know it's very easy to just connect to the internet internet and say oh yeah use this domain name assume it's always there and I think for that for it so after is one example I think briar is probably a very good example where they're integrating internet and Bluetooth and local Wi-Fi to do messaging okay just to check is there a question from the internet no questions from the internet so then number two was there before and one of the things that I noticed is that you're talking about apps and asteroid and distributing apps and then connecting to local nodes what about IPFS that and and some of the other distributed networks have you sure you looked into those and you were talking in the beginning about like integrating with other initiatives like matrix and so on was on the slides and talk about that and yeah IPFS for people who don't know is interplanetary file system the idea of one file system that is accessible all over the world I think IPFS is great example for this kind of thing and we would love to integrate it it's just it's only so many hours of the day in the day question really we've been focusing so right now it's something we I'd very happily if someone knows IPFS and wants to try and integrate it into something I would happily work with them we my personal focuses is on the lower hanging fruit I think or at least from my perspective based on what I know and that's like some of the mirroring stuff some of the like the library box local internet free box the Bluetooth so that's based on my or the pool of skills and interests of the people who've done the work that's part of what I hopefully am trying you know what it conveying here is that this needs to be decentralized in effort there's so many ways and it's like okay how can we find ways to tie all these things together and make it so that you know messages can go from a Bluetooth mesh over the IPFS to then the centralized internet and back and work without people thinking about it okay unfortunately our time is now up so find and because of your at the congress if you have more questions later at any place around here I guess so and yeah let's give a warm hand of applause for