 First of all, I need to make a little apology. The title that you see here is not the title that I advertised on the agenda. Talking with folks this morning, we've done a little bit of a bait and switch. We're looking at exactly the same problem, but from a little bit of a different perspective, from a community perspective of how wide we even need to do this. And so I just want to talk about the simple reality that we need to confront. The digital winter is coming. So some of the things that we can't cover in this talk, if you have a look at the two videos that I've made from Talks1, it was at CCC camp a couple of months back, and then earlier in the year at LinuxConf in Christchurch in New Zealand talking about the megaphone device. And so everything that I'm talking about, you know, the megaphone is what we are doing to address this whole issue around the coming digital winter. So what on earth am I talking about with a digital winter? And it's actually tightly interrelated with the freedoms that we have enjoyed in, you know, modern liberal democracies, really kind of came about at the end of World War II, right, that the Pax Americana for all of its other problems kind of pushed this idea of individual freedom. And so we had, you know, this huge growth in technology and art and culture, all sorts of things that came about because of that freedom. And so around the 70s and 80s, you know, the real digital spring happened where digital devices started being useful. People started having computers at home and at work and using them and mobile phones came along. And this was really fantastic. And we're like, oh, we're so excited about what this will mean when it comes to fruition. We could see the flowers. We could smell what was going on. We could see that something exciting is going to happen. And then later in the 20th century and really sort of until about now, we've been enjoying the fruit of that. In fact, the fruit is so plentiful it's sitting on the ground. We don't even have to reach up to the tree. You know, we have a device. I mean, who here doesn't have a mobile phone with them? I'm curious. One of you. Excellent. Everybody else has a mobile phone with them because it's so easy and so convenient and so tasty, right? It does all of these things that we want. The trouble is in the digital summer. And I think we've just passed the end point of the digital summer. Everything is plentiful. Everything is easy. But the seasons march on. And we have seen the use of technology by nation states, by all sorts of malevolent forces being used against people, depriving people of this food source on which they have become dependent. So you cut communications off during elections now to avoid unhelpful criticism of government. And we're seeing this kind of thing more and more. And attacks on press freedom at home in Australia, right? We have our government basically backing police raids on journalists to try and find out who their secret sources are because they embarrass the government. And so this is a growing problem. And so this is why I say that we've actually, I think, in the last decade, we're actually no longer in the digital summer. We're in the digital autumn. There are leaves that are going funny colors. At the moment, there's still plenty of fruit on the ground and there's still some fruit on the trees. But we can see the writing on the wall, the freedoms, the digital freedom, the digital sovereignty that we once enjoyed in the 1980s and early 1990s is now largely a thing of the past. And the thing about the digital autumn is it's actually dangerous because autumn is the most beautiful time of year with trees, right? We have these beautiful golden red colors, you know, people go for drives to see the autumn leaves. We see them on the ground, it covers the ground. Everything looks fantastic. And we still, there's still plenty of food coming from these late harvests. And so we're lulled into a false sense of security saying, oh, it can't be that bad. Winter is still a long way off. We'll figure out ways to deal with these increasingly diminished digital freedoms on the ability for us to maintain communications in the face of adversaries. The ability for us to create hardware that we truly own, that does what we want, that does not actually, we pay for it. But I can see an Apple device there with its happy piece of fruit facing me at the moment. And this is fantastic, you know, that Apple devices are beautifully built, lovely to use, but particularly if we're talking about the phones, do you really own an iPhone or do you merely pay for an iPhone and have its physical form in your hand to enjoy, but only to the extent to which the vendor is willing for you to enjoy, and only in the ways in which the vendor is willing for you to enjoy. And so these freedoms are being restricted. And I think there is a very real chance that we are going to go into a digital winter. And the trouble with the digital winter is once you're there and decide that you should have prepared for the digital winter, it's now too late. You are fighting for your survival. You are fighting to maintain the remaining digital capabilities that you have. Supply chains are no longer trustable or no longer working or no longer present at all depending on how the future pans out. Now, if we had another global scale unrest at some point, this whole interconnected global supply chain that's largely focused in a few countries is going to become unavailable to most countries. How do we maintain the ability of people to create digital artifacts to meet their needs when you can't even manufacture a new device? Or it might be that we don't have outright war, we just move further into this rights-restricted dystopia that we seem to be heading into of all of these actors wanting to restrict what we can do with a digital device for economic reasons, for political reasons. It actually doesn't matter what the reason is. So we need to prepare before the digital winter comes so that we don't starve before the digital winter ends. Because the digital winter left to its own course won't end quickly. If we don't have, and if people around the world don't have the means to communicate, to self-organize, to hold governments to account, we will actually just drive deeper and deeper into the digital winter. Who has read or seen the Chronicle of Narnia series, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, right? If we don't act, we are actually headed for a digital, not just a six-month digital winter, we are headed for 100 years of snow and ice under a variety of white witches. Because as these actors deprive us of the ability to create our own digital futures, they will continue to set the agenda and work against us having the ability and the freedom to do these things. You might say that I'm being horribly pessimistic about things, but look back at the history of individual freedoms in this world. The time that we have had since World War II is an aberration in the world. Never before in the history of humanity has there been as much personal freedom in at least some countries as there has been in this post-war period. Now, what's somewhat ironic is that it was created in order to further commercial gains for the United States in particular, but it had this side effect of creating freedom. But if we look back prior to that, you know, European history, prior to that, we had endless wars. Asian history prior to that, plenty of wars. African history prior to that, plenty of wars. And across the world, very limited freedom for the average person to live to try and make the world a better place. But we are not without hope. I'm convinced that we can bring about a second digital spring or possibly that we can even avoid the digital winter by, if you like, creating a digital food source so that, yes, it might get cold. They are chilling times at the moment. But that is we hold governments to account as we empower citizens and we empower everyone to be a functioning civil society because communications is the basis of civil society and transactions are, of course, merely a form of communications. So we need to find ways to sustain these capabilities. We need to think very differently about how we do things because what's clear is that the current approach that, you know, of devices of phones, they are so complex that they are just this beautiful garden in which adversaries can plant the weeds that will undermine those things that will choke out the real important uses and deprive us of the sovereignty that we need, the agency that we need over these devices. So how can we make sure that we come back to a digital summer or that we can avoid a digital winter altogether? We need to act now. We need to start thinking how can we create devices that are independent of the internet, that are independent of vendor support, that are possible to be secured and for that security to be maintained going forward in the absence of a global internet, of global support, even from the communities that we know today, if things become more balcony-ized on the internet, it may not be possible to have global open-source projects anymore. How can we reduce that capability burden, capability maintenance burden, down to the level where one or a few determined users are actually able to make something which will be sustainable and insustainable in the face of determined adversaries whose intention it is to deprive us of these things. And so this is where the megaphone project has come in. So this is why this phone is bizarre, right? We've made a phone device is quite large at the moment. We're obviously going to make it smaller. This is how large it is just from making it in the lab for 500 euros, right? But miniaturization is totally doable. But this device is based on the Commodore 64 architecture because we kind of think what is the simplest, i.e. the easiest to maintain, the easiest to inspect, the easiest to detect compromise in that can still do useful things. Because you go back further than the early home computers of the 1980s, they weren't user-friendly, they weren't usable. There were mainframes that were kind of crazy complicated or there was extremely simple hobby devices. But the early 80s marked the first time where you could have productivity software on your computer at home. And it was usable, and yet it was still just tens of kilobytes. So the prototype dialer app that we've made for this thing is about 28 kilobytes written in Commodore 64 basic. So this is extremely easy to inspect. In terms of can one determined user maintain it? Well, one possibly slightly determined user, a student working for one semester 20 hours a week wrote the dialer from scratch and he had never touched a Commodore 64 in his life before. So we know that it is possible to make these kinds of devices. What we need to do is to grow the community that's looking at these things and think about how we can make hybrid devices where the simple, trustable architecture can enslave a modern complex untrustable processor so that we don't have to lose any functionality. And that's the next iteration of the megaphone that we're working on at the moment does exactly that. We're putting a Raspberry Pi that can run Android as a slave processor. The 8-bit computer pretends to be the touch interface and the video output and everything so that the Android thinks that it's a ship and a bottle, right? It just continues as it was. We have to make no changes. We don't have to recompile it at all. So we have no capability, maintenance burden whilst someone else is maintaining the Android port or even if it's unsupported, we can run it in a complete isolated manner. So we can still play Pokemon, well Pokemon Go requires internet, right? But we could, there's a whole bunch of things that we can do offline. We could have encrypted email clients and things that are in the complex processor if we need to. But we also need to think about saying, well, we actually could do email on 1980s computers. Let's take that spirit of crazy optimization that exists on the Commodore 64 in particular and say, well, let's actually make an email program that is sufficiently functional to be useful but that can run in the secure 8-bit environment. So we can go down, we can suspend the running of the 8-bit computer. We've designed this in and we have what we call matrix modes. We have the nice green letters come down and then you can inspect the entire state of the machine and it's frozen at that point. So there's nothing that malicious software can do to hide. And you could actually have a printout of every byte of your email program, for example, and compare that if you're in a particularly paranoid mode to not even, to not just confirm that it was once secure, but that right now it is unsullied, uncompromised. And I know of no other approach to digital sovereignty and secure computing that's able to deliver that, the full sovereignty back into the hands of the owner of the device so that you can truly own the device. You can repurpose it. You can do whatever you want with it. And our next challenge is how we can try and create a viable business model around that. We're actually looking at creating bespoke mobile devices for people living with disability because this is a horribly underserved sector at the moment. There are people who, for example, if you have cerebral palsy, you might not have fine motor control. So using a touchscreen is really hard because your hand only has really coarse movements. But they might be able to, for example, use a joystick interface. So we can make the 8-bit supervisor that we call the little brother can pretend to be the touchscreen panel but driven by a joystick. You're right, here is now a phone-like device that someone who could never use a smartphone before can now use and it can run all the Android apps that they want. They can participate fully in the digital world and that this is a use case that, as I say, can be economically profitable, socially profitable, and that the community, the broad, non-technical community, are like, hey, this is great. This is a, we need this kind of technology because it bridges a digital divide. It gives agency to people who need agency. And we can further show that the digital sovereignty really helps in that space. And say, okay, we can actually make a predictive text input model that is general for folks that might like that kind of device, but then they can say, you know what? I can actually modify that. I can change the code on this simple machine because it's simple. I don't have to even think about how do I compile Android? I can modify it in real time on the device and say, oh, look, now I can do this and I can now do input 40% or 400% faster than I could with the one-size-fits-all kind of approach. So we think that there are viable business models around making this kind of device. And this is actually really important to us because remember, we're in the digital autumn. Who knows the ESOP's fable of the grasshopper and the ant? Not many, maybe have a read. So the general story is this grasshopper is, you know, playing is fiddling and having a great time in the summer while the ant is busy putting food away to the winter. Because the grasshopper says, oh, but there's always more food. There's always more time. We don't need to do anything now. The ant knows winter is coming. And so then when winter comes and the ants are well-fed and warm and well-supplied and the grasshopper is begging the ants for food, let us not. We are the community who are aware of this need. We know winter is coming. Let us not merely be idle as the grasshopper was, but let us work diligently and have fun while we're doing it to create these technologies that will help us to survive a digital winter where everything is stacked against people being able to communicate and maintain civil society. And it might even be that in that process we can stop the digital winter in its tracks before it even happens. Are there any questions? Feel free to come up to the microphone. Hello. You said that you think this is a profitable project. I'm having a little bit of trouble hearing. Sorry. No, it's on the microphone. Maybe that sounds better. Even closer. It's quite... It's okay. Okay, that's it. You said you think this is a profitable project. Do you remember what happened to OpenMoco project? Sorry, do I know? OpenMoco. OpenMoco. M-O-K-O. Oh, OpenMoco, yeah. Yeah, so they're making cellular modems and all of this. I love what they're doing, right? The more things we can do on the more fronts, the better. But if the cellular networks are not available, we can't use OpenMoco. Cellular transmissions have been used in the past. So when Russia was invading Crimea, the Russians were targeting Crimean artillery by their mobile phone emissions. So we need... I love OpenMoco and I want to see it continue and do great things, but we need to have a whole variety of things so that if there is any one particular attack that society, civil society can be resilient to it. We need not a monoculture, but we need to have a diversity, a complete ecosystem of different things. I don't want everyone just to make megaphones. I want people to make all manner of sovereign devices so that we are truly resistant. So that if even one gets some terrible disease to use the ecological model and is wiped out, the rest are there and more keep coming up. Cool. If there's any further questions, I'll be outside. I'm easy to find. We have 15 seconds. How do we get friends and family to care about this if we believe this story? How do we get family and friends to care about it? This is hard. This is why I think the disability angle is a good one and just the need for family and friends to communicate with one another and not have to pay for the privilege I think is actually the best angle to get family and friends to think about it. It works in Vanuatu. I can't see why it can't work here in other countries as well. So I need to clear the stage, but happy to catch people outside.