 testing. Yes. Hello. Welcome, everybody. And thank you for participating in my talk. It's titled Open Garden Mesh Networks and how it helped me protest safer. I hope you enjoy it. Before we get started, let me give you a brief agenda so you know what you're signing up for. And if you don't like it, you don't have to wait 20 minutes to find out. First I'll talk about how the world was back in 2013. There might be a lot of preconceptions in you already thinking how you would solve this problem today, but this was back in 2013, so just to bring us back into context. Then I'll give a brief introduction on what Mesh Networks are and their evolution across time. Then I'll talk about what is or was Open Garden. It's a bit of a weird project that's not fully maintained at the moment, so I'll talk about that. I'll give a bit of a case study or staying connected in a protest. I'll give you a brief demo. And then we'll talk about what's next for Open Garden, what has happened in that world since. There is a case study that involves crypto. It actually does. It sounds weird in this particular space, but I'll talk about it. So let's begin. First of all, a warning. I am going to strictly be focusing on the technological side of it. I don't want this to be a political talk, although the title kind of suggested it a little bit. This is mostly technical and a bit of context about the political side, but that's it. So let's go back to the mystical world of 2013. So many things were different back then. So I'd like to make sure we all see them before we start thinking about different ways we can solve this problem. So to reiterate the title and talk description, imagine that you're in a protest and then the cell phones tower go down for most but not all of the people, and somehow you'd like to stay connected. So the cleverest among you must already be thinking about modern, simple solutions to this problem. But let me address some of the obvious ones. First off, the first thing that'll come to your most people's mind is, well, get the people that have signal, that still have signal, and get them to tether or use a hotspot. Now the problem is carriers were blocking tethering back in the day. This was really a thing. All over the world, they either didn't allow tethering or hotspot, or they severely restricted its capabilities. For example, they would restrict what websites you could watch when you were tethering, or how much bandwidth you could use, or how many devices could connect to your hotspot. This was mostly a measure to restrict consumers from sharing their allowance with each other. I suppose someone in there imagined, well, if person A shares their bandwidth and they have some left over, then person B doesn't need to buy it. We don't make money. Something on those lines. Now that's even if your phone allows it. Now a lot of phones around that time, it didn't have hotspot. This wasn't like a big thing back then. So some only did it by USB. Some had really low-powered Wi-Fi card, so it didn't work very effectively. And some just didn't have it at all. Now as of today, most carriers out of consumer pressure, I imagine, allow it. So you don't have any problems hotspotting. But this was certainly not the case back in 2013. Now let's talk about peer-to-peer apps. So some of you might be thinking about apps that were completely offline, peer-to-peer allowed you to communicate. FireChat got popular. It's from the same people that built OpenGarden, but no coincidence. And that's an example. It routes messages in a completely peer-to-peer fashion. No data needed. So that's great. It's a good start, but it wasn't enough for a use case. So Twitter was a vital source of news at the time. And people in there would form groups to share important updates, such as where the police was mobilizing, when ride gear was deployed, et cetera. And students were also self-organized and implemented a WhatsApp or SMS alerting system. I got this alert from Google just to give you an idea of what an SMS alert looks like if you hadn't seen it. So yeah, they would use these kinds of alerts to notify protesters if police was on the way, if family was arrested, or friends were arrested, et cetera. So this tells you that although it's great to have offline peer-to-peer, it's not enough to stay connected to the wider group. So definitely not enough for a use case. And finally, I've talked about Mesh, but the reality is that Mesh wasn't an off-the-shelf solution at this time in 2013. So this is a pretty typical graph of how everything on the Internet looks like in terms of RFCs. The military did something, and they hacked some stuff together. And then some researchers got together and created task forces and formalized requirements, and then finally it goes mainstream to consumers. So this is kind of how it looks like from the 60s, where the ideas was conceived, to 2010s, where it was actually put in mainstream. But this fails to inform, though, is two things. First, standards were created in the early 2000s, but consumer devices like routers, Wi-Fi-enabled devices like phones that use Mesh actually didn't support Mesh. And then the other thing is that Venezuela, which is where I'm from, is usually 10 years in the past versus the rest of the world, on average. So when everybody was playing with the PlayStation 2, we were like, oh, PlayStation 1 just got launched. So we're a bit behind. And yeah, so Mesh wasn't quite there yet, but I'm getting ahead of myself. So what is Mesh in the first place? So Mesh networking is a topology where nodes have similar authority. They can adapt to changes, they can route each other's traffic, and they can avoid single points of failure. So this is the one that you see on the right, the one called distributed. Now, this all sounds a bit utopical, like all the nodes share all the data for all the devices, and everything connects beautifully. But to give you some network background, the internet isn't quite distributed. It's actually decentralized, something more akin to what you see on the left, where there are some nodes that are more important than others, things like routers, edge routers, ISP points of presence. And they interconnect segments of the network. So then how is it that Mesh networks allow us to have a meaningful connectivity, like I said, access Twitter, access WhatsApp for your friends, groups, etc., and connect this then part of the networks if there are indeed more important nodes? How do we reconcile these both ideas? And more importantly, who does the Mesh? Is it the end devices? Is it the routers? Is it every device? How does it work? So let me give you one more idea. So in this case study, Mesh, in this case study for Mesh, there are nodes that are more important than others, and those are the ones with internet connection. So those are the ones you can see on the edge of this circle of animation. So it's trivial to think about a mesh network where one device is connected to the internet. That's basically the router of the whole network, and it's not really fun to reason about it. But in this visualization, you can see the idea what happens when multiple devices have internet connectivity. They make a network that better adapts to adding or removing internet connected devices. And this was the idea of using OpenGarden in our use case. If our mesh is sufficiently large and has sufficiently enough nodes, and some of those devices still retain network connectivity because their carriers haven't shut down their cell phone towers or they're far enough from where the protest is happening, then those will still have connectivity and they'll share it with the rest. And the network will continue to evolve and adapt over time when things change. So let's get to it. What was OpenGarden? Or what is what was? I'll talk about that in a second. So simply put, it'll create a mesh network where devices would share the network connectivity with each other. And crucially, they would do this using Bluetooth, not Wi-Fi, not ISP network, no peer-to-peer, nothing just Bluetooth. It's easy to do, most devices have it, it's peer-to-peer, it doesn't rely on central networks or complex topologies. So summarizing, all these devices would form a giant network where the links between each other are done through Bluetooth and then those devices that have internet connectivity through their carriers or through some Wi-Fi or whatever means would become routers for internet traffic and they'll share it with everybody in the network. So how does it work in a protest? So it's demo time. So I'm going to be showing a video of it because it makes it more practical for a big audience, but if you're interested in seeing how it works live, I have a couple of test devices, so reach out to me at the end of the talk and you can see it. So on the left, you can see a device that has internet. You can see that by the green line that says internet. And then a second device joins, and they both have internet initially. But I'm going to go now and I'm going to disable the Wi-Fi on the second one. You'll see that it quickly loses that green link to the internet, the one that's called Burner. But then it still detects that it has internet by going through the second device. It has a weird name. I don't know what happened. It kind of bugged it. And then if I open a disabled Wi-Fi on the phone on the right and then I go on the internet and boom, I have internet. You can also see that the network counter, the number of megabytes being transferred on the left, keeps increasing. So what's happening here is the two devices are communicating through Bluetooth. The device on the left has internet. The one on the right doesn't. They detected each other. They did some handshake. And then the one on the right has internet by sending all its packets through the one on the left. Now, I did this with only two devices, but you can create as many as possible. You can see that on this slide. You can create mesh networks that are quite big and it can grow a lot. Now, two things I found funny. This burner phone that you see has no usage and has a brand new Google account. And yet when I searched test, I was shown testosterone and COVID tests. So I don't know what that means, but I thought that was funny. It's a weird world we live in. So how can we take this concept even further? So unfortunately, OpenGarden evolved and diverged. Their last ventures were number one and network error. So they became, again, a central network. Which is a bit boring. Or their second venture was a tool that you could install in your OpenWRT router. So that's an open firmware that you can install in your home routers to get more features. And if you install that tool of them, then you can share your leftover bandwidth in exchange for Bitcoins. No, not Bitcoins. Some other coin. But the point is you are doing crypto in your router with your leftover bandwidth. Sounds good. It didn't really catch on. And the project went defunct. They also unfortunately didn't reply to my requests to be here. I think they're preparing for a relaunch that involves a new internet provider or something like that. And their Telegram channel became filled with bots, scam bots. So that was quite weird to watch. It was like a relic of the past and now it's riddled with dangerous AI bots. But this kind of reliability is popular in some circles. So Gotenna, which is a product that you see on the slides, scaled this idea way up. And not only does it provide a way, provides a way to have more convenient and more powerful devices, which are, which is the one that you see there with a key chain. It's a more powerful mesh device. It has more Wi-Fi antennas, more transmitters, and it's more convenient, doesn't get tethered to your phone. It also interconnects all of these devices so you can get an idea of the coverage at all times. So the graph you see of the world is the geolocation of each Gotenna. So then when you go to a specific place, maybe you're camping in Yellowstone or you're in the middle of Leadbury and you don't have internet, you can get an idea ahead of time of who's gonna be there and what kind of connectivity you can expect. So it's kind of like a mesh ISP. So it's the best of both worlds. You have points of presence that are geo-distributed, but they're also offline peer-to-peer so you don't have a single point of failure. And then finally, consumer routers have also leveraged this protocol. So you might have seen some of these devices. The one on the top left is the Google Home Wi-Fi, something like that. And the one on the top right is TP-Lynx Echo, or no, yeah, Echo, I think it's called like that. And they are implementing the mesh protocol and they allow you to have different routers distributed across your home to have better Wi-Fi coverage. Now to be clear and to give a word of caution, this doesn't implement the fun bit of mesh where all the devices are interconnected and they are all connected to internet. In this case, only one of them is. So it is kind of a single point of failure, but it does leverage some things from mesh. It leverages the automatic discovery and ease of use across all the devices. So although there's three, you all see it as a one big network and if, say, you need more coverage, then you go and add more devices and they detect each other automatically, much in the same way that we saw OpenGarden use it. So in this example on the bottom, you can see that someone puts a router on the bottom of their house. Maybe that's the one that's connected to the landline or to the fiber. And then the ones on the top floor and the rest of the house connect to that one and create a big network. So let's recap then. So first off, mesh is a form of distributed, not decentralized, distributed network topology. And it adapts to changes quickly and it's more fault tolerant that your typical network installation which usually has single points of failure. Now it can be useful when you can't use hotspots and you don't have internet. The case study that I showed, a bunch of people were in the streets, phone lines went down and a few people remain connected and they could share that bandwidth at scale with everyone else. OpenGarden is one of the implementations. It's unfortunately defunct, but many more are coming. So Gotenna is one of them, but you can also try this at home. You can buy a mesh router and try to get way better coverage than you would if you had only one. You can buy Gotenna and become completely detached from typical ISPs and there are many more products. Now these are some of the heritage of OpenGarden but there will continue to come more. And then finally, hacking is great. I took a lot of time trying to set up that Bitcoin mining, sharing network bandwidth tool from OpenGarden that didn't quite work. But regardless, it's interesting to take network ideas and kind of demystify them a little bit and put them at practice in your own home. So for example, OpenWRT is a firmware that you can install in your router and get many of the features that are only famous in enterprise grade hardware for free. And then you can get way better coverage than you would if you buy the same router that you've been using for 10 years by not paying any more money. So yeah, networks can be great for many use cases beyond the ones that you know at home and that we've used for tons of years. And with that, thank you very much.