 Thank you and thanks to everyone at Fostum for organizing this event. So as you can see I have I've made a presentation about creating a computing revolution that centers on private servers But first I I want to take a look at Current events and see what's been in the news lately Yesterday in the New York Times. We see that there's a story about Russian Campaigns of misinformation and the fact that Facebook just can't control this and a little bit earlier We saw that it's not even clear that Facebook knows how bad the misinformation problem is and Just about 10 days ago. We saw that Google was hit with a 50 million euro fine Because of his failings with GDPR compliance Here's another story My boss is at the freedom box foundation Mishi Chowdhury and Evan Moghlin wrote a story about how WhatsApp in India is being used to game elections so that disinformation can be spread in WhatsApp chat groups and This problem is so big in India that there are even lynchings that happen on account of what's being sent on WhatsApp And here's a story that was really thought really popular a couple of years ago This is the story that popularized the term data is the new oil and With all that data that's being siphoned off of us and our online activity Comprehensive psychographic profiles can be created and this is a good diagram to take a look at after the talk And these slides will be uploaded So it's clear the internet is broken and I'm speaking to an audience that knows this already But to fix the internet and to solve these kinds of problems in particular we need to Re-decentralize the web all the problems that I just talked about are enabled by centralized network Infrastructure when tech companies control all of the data at the center in the servers that they manage That's what goes wrong And to re-decentralize the web. We need a revolution in computing It's not going to be a problem that we can solve with just software or just hardware. It's going to require a lot of cooperation So I want to look at the history of computing revolutions And there's a quote that really stuck out to me when I read it a couple months ago This is Tim Wu. He's the person who coined the term net neutrality He said no one dreamed that the personal computer once little more than a toy for hobbyists would displace the mighty mainframe All right There was a time when computing was mainly done on these giant machines about the size of this table called mainframes and then in the mid 1980s personal computers like this laptop Started to become mainstream and eventually they displaced the mainframe So my question for you today is why can't personal servers do the same? Why can't personal servers displace the large centralized servers at the center of our network infrastructure? Okay Well, I'm going to propose that there are two main reasons why this hasn't happened yet there's a problem of poor user interfaces on Server operating systems and there's a lack of hardware accessibility So people don't usually get access to their own server hardware, and that's why people don't have them Freedom box is a simple private server that aims to solve this problem We try to solve the UI problem and the hardware problem by making it easy for anyone to host their own private server And when they can host their own private server, they can re-decentralize the web one freedom box at a time Freedom boxes are Roughly this big So let's start by by taking a look at user interfaces. This is the first problem There's a book that was published in 1997 by a Psychologists who specializes in technology called named Sherry Turkle And Sherry Turkle wrote a book called life on the screen in which she tells a tale of two aesthetics She talks about the fact that the early personal computers Invited users to imagine that they could understand its gears as they turned And so this is the kind of interface that early PCs had this is MS-DOS It looks like a modern council a modern terminal and it wasn't until 1984 that Apple introduced the Macintosh and the Apple introduced this iconic style of simulations where now You have a simulated desktop with icons now it wasn't until this happened that PCs really took off Personal computers revolutionized computing because they made it easy for anyone to do it for non experts and non programmers But this change hasn't happened in private servers yet freedom box aims to do that So this is what we do with our user interface at freedom box We want our user interface to be simple so that you can just point and click and make things happen We want it to be beginner friendly So that it automates whatever can be automated in the process of administering a server And we also want to have an aesthetic of an integrity to our visual identity Because you guys have been neglected in server operating systems up to this point So here's what freedom box looks like when you first plug it in you get this screen that tells you freedom box It's setting itself up 15 minutes later you get another screen that says start set up so you click that button on the bottom and You make an account enter a username and a password and that's it now you have your own private server Then you go to the apps page you see we have about 24 apps and you hover over one of the apps and the color appears Here's the system page. So these are all the settings that you can configure on your freedom box and If you want to install an app you go to the apps page And you just click on the button install one click and it installs now This sounds like something that we all do every day on our desktops But this isn't something that's been made easy on servers yet, and that's what freedom box aims to do So now let's talk about the problem of hardware accessibility from wanting to doing There's a quote in a book written by one of the board members of the freedom box foundation. This is Harvard professor Yochai Bankler he talks about the capital constraints on Producing information in the economy He says from this team engine to the assembly line from the double rotary printing press to the communication satellite The capital constraints on action were such that simply wanting to do something was rarely a sufficient condition to enable one to do it If you wanted to do something you couldn't but now It's because now that that constraint no longer exists But the problem is that server hardware is a lot like the mainframes in the 1980s. It's out of the reach of most consumers Traditional server hardware is expensive anywhere from 400 to $4,000 just to get yourself started plus the cost of Administration which usually means you have to hire some kind of an expert Not just that but traditional server hardware is hard to find. It's not marketed to home users or consumers We want to create a personal server revolution that puts these products in the markets that consumers shop Freedom box is hardware neutral. This is a fact based on the software that we've built freedom box is a Debian based Operating system for private servers because it's Debian based that means that it works on any Hardware that Debian works on now we picked Debian in part because Debian is known as the universal operating system It works on almost anything So if you have an old netbook or Chromebook from 2010 Chances are you can probably turn that into a private server But beyond that we also want these servers to be inexpensive and so we've specifically built them Built our software for single-board computers like the raspberry pi 2 which costs around 30 us dollars or all mx's lime 2 about 50 us dollars and We specifically build Custom images for around 10 different single-board computer models And this is all the hardware you need to make your own private server, right? This will cost you around 50 us dollars or maybe around 50 60 euros and Here's an example of what I have right here. This is the Allamex lime 2 this is a this is special to us because this hardware is what's known as open source hardware The schematics are online all of the details that you need that you need to know about this Hardware can be found online because it's open source Now that's important because one of the constraints on a lot of hardware decisions is the fact that the hardware isn't free You can't trust it and so that's why people like me have to use think pad x200 models Which are very old, but that's all we have if you want to rely on free hardware So we're also trying to make sure that we're inclusive of the latest open source hardware So what's the future of freedom box? We want to partner with universities We want to partner with organizations and communities to put these freedom boxes in places that need them Right now there are more than 10 villages in rural India that rely on freedom box as their primary source of Routing and internet services. That's how powerful this software is right now at Yale University and Cornell University Students and instructors are using freedom boxes in the classroom Because this is a powerful example to their students of how you can take control of your own data What we also want to do is grow our community of developers and contributors So that we can continue to expand and In 2019 we want to enter the hardware market for the past nine years of our existence We haven't sold any hardware kits, but we're working on it and in 2019 we're gonna announce something exciting So what's at stake this is where I make my final appeal to everyone in the room Your privacy is at stake your autonomy your civil rights Democracy freedom our future if we don't fix our network infrastructure, then these things will be jeopardized Those stories that I showed you at the beginning of my presentation. Those were mostly recent stories every day You read something new like that So what can you do? You can lead the change you can use software like freedom box You can advocate for decentralizing technology. You can contribute to projects in this area And you can also help us lead the change you can donate on our website Here's here's how you can connect with us and learn more. Thanks everyone for your time I'll be in the hallway to answer questions Thank you very much very very well within the time. There's even three minutes left If there's someone with a very urgent question that you think might be relevant for everyone We can take it now in those three minutes and the rest we can take outside if you want to continue talking Anyone with a burning question? I'm gonna run to you with the microphone. Hello Congratulations on the progress on the freedom box project what I wanted to ask is Do you value also the freedom of the software inside? your operating system as much as you do for the free design hardware because as far as I understand The hardware neutrality makes it that you also make available no free firmware for Wi-Fi for instance. Yeah, good good good question. So we have a question here about I think two things the first is what's our stance on Software freedom and what's our stance on? Hardware that requires non-free firmware the first is we are a fully free software project Now I omitted it from this presentation because I only had 15 minutes, but our software is licensed under a GPL version 3 and We're free software from the from the top to as far bottom as we can now There's a now there's a further point made here about What if we have a device like the raspberry pi 2 which requires non-free firmware? Right now we support devices like this even though they have non-free firmware because we want to reach as many users as possible The the problem is this is the most widely known and accessible Single board computer to most casual consumers. So that's why we support it, but down the line what we want to do is support Only hardware that has fully free firmware, and that's why we're so excited about all max That's a vision for the future though. So today. We unfortunately have to make a small compromise Okay Any other questions we have one minute left Okay, so I think one problem I have run into if you're running a server at home or the more advanced users essentially that most of the Consumer grade Internet service providers are let's put it politely not particularly friendly towards the running and sort of consider services I would even mention this kind would be to put behind three layers of not So have you actually put anything and In with a freedom box software so far tries to address this kind of problems. Yeah, that's a good question So we have a question about Some of the problems that internet service providers give home users about running their own private servers I have 30 seconds here. So let me just address this quickly We have a number of settings and instructions that Give you specific directions based on your use case So if you're behind a net router, there's there's different instructions than if you're not behind a net router second We also use our entire Community resources to Test these freedom boxes in different settings on on larger networks on smaller home networks And so we're always trying to think of innovative ways to solve these problems with our system The short answer is yes, the law. Yes, we can do this, but the long answer is it's gonna require some work to perfect Okay, thank you very much So if you would want to continue talking Danny will be outside and big tanks work warm applause for Danny for the good talk