 which is the next generation internet at Treasuredrove of IT innovation. Your speaker will be Mikheil Linares. He used to work for the Netherlands Science Foundation for the Internet Society. He is a W3C liaison officer and he wants to keep pushing the innovation of the internet and move it into the next generation. Please welcome him on stage. So, I'm really happy that all of you came out here on the fourth day because I understand after all these long nights this is pushing it. So, a quick trip back in time. So, this room is named after a guy called Ezcal Dijkster who 60 years ago published his PhD. He was a foundational guy in computer science and he did this work, the seminal work in an institute called CWI or at the time Matamati Centrum in the Netherlands. And I mean the association of computing machinery said that no other individual has had a larger influence on researching principles of distributed computing. So, 30 years ago the organization where I work was founded. We became a foundation but before that we operated for seven years at CWI in the Netherlands at the same place. So, these people were really forward looking. And this is what it looked like. So, people with long beards, big computers, they just brought Unix to Europe and they were playing with it and a network of hackers and volunteers basically hacked their way to what later became European internet. Now at that time just to appreciate how early that was, the web was still a proposal. It was still something that the manager of Tim Berners-Lee at CERN called a vague but interesting. And they gave him nine months of micro grant to work on that. And obviously the ideas at the time were that, I mean, this is a representative quote, if you think surfing hypertext is cool, that's because you haven't tried writing it. It was very much the idea that we could make everything and obviously that's not the future that we got. Tim Berners-Lee himself, when he got the Turing Award which is like the Nobel Prize of Computer Science, he said from utopia to dystopia in just 29 short years. I mean, it's gone by amazingly fast, but if you read, the optimism turned into despair where the guy who invented the web says, this is a large scale emergent anti-human phenomenon. That's for an optimist, those are words that go to the heart. And Dijkstra famously has said, well, people don't need to remember much of what I did, only that he would appear as some sort of a conscience of the sector so that 10 years after his death, if somebody would say Dijkstra would have not liked this, that was the kind of idea that he wanted to exert to teach people how to be good computer scientists. So we are in this broken situation, so where do we go? Well, quickly rewind back to 1997 because the people that founded the internet in Europe actually were not professional business people, they were outsiders to the industry, they sold everything, put it into a trust fund and basically they gave it to the internet and that's the reason I'm here. The mechanism that we use is micro grants, we give small amounts of people to independent people and allow them to work for the internet, to work in the public interest. And it's always open standards, open source, open hardware. So these are just some of the projects that we funded throughout the years. You may or may not know some of them, but it's a pretty nice list and this is by far not all of it because many projects don't even have a logo because that's the kind of early work that was funded. Obviously spending money can be a bit of a problem if you don't have infinite amounts. So that's a challenge for us because we started giving away money and it wasn't that much to begin with. So luckily we're seeing people pick it up and some of the people that received grants later make some money and they start giving to us. For instance, there's a company, a security company, Radically Open Security, where the employees collectively decided that they wanted to give all of the profit, pretty much all of the profit to us, at least 90%, but so far that's been an amazing thing and obviously that potentially can become a sustainable thing. So luckily two years ago we ran into something called the Next Generation Internet Initiative and that was a major windfall for us because so far public money on the internet was kind of wasted in all senses of the word. People would just write reports and then fake projects would happen. So early on we helped them to do this study where we established a vision for this whole initiative and interestingly enough we published that last year when we saw the topics of this conference we hit two out of three in that report from last year. So we also had resilience, we also had sustainability but we added trustworthiness. That's the layer that we wanted to have and so we defined those that the higher level goals of the program and then immediately after that the commission started handing out money and obviously we were very lucky we were consider ourselves to be extremely blessed that we got this two of these programs because that will allow us not to write paper but to actually support people and we brought a number of folks along to help us do that. I'm not going to read them out all because you can look that up. But the reason I'm here is to talk about some of these amazing things because they're all small projects but I guess we could fill a conference. There's 120 talks at this event. We have 150 projects. I'm going to do a quick version of them or attempt to do a quick version of them in the next half hour. So we have two programs one of them is called Privacy in Trusting House Technology and the other one is called Search, Discovery and Discoverability and with that you can actually cover a lot of these grounds. An apology upfront. I know there's people in the room and I won't mention their project because I have too many projects to mention and it's just too complex to do that in half an hour. Something like 15 seconds per project so that would not make a lot of sense. And so if you know the project like WireGuard then you'd be happy that we support it but I don't need to detail it. So let me begin with Activity Pub. So I'm going from the bottom up to end at the more fundamental metal layer so to say. Activity Pub is something that is a social networking protocol and you may have seen it emerge in different places and the cool thing is because of the money that we now have we can actually support all these smaller projects so Pixel Fed which is trying to provide a sane alternative to photo sharing so the stuff that people do with Facebook and with Instagram Funk Whale is a personal music server Spritely is a more ambitious overall social network project X-Wiki is a well-known wiki and it's going to be added to the Fediverse. Open Engiadina is trying to connect hyper-local events so local music chapels concerts in the library small events and then make sure that all this stuff isn't aggregated on Facebook or Meetup but actually comes and stays on the web that people can actually get these events integrated. This course you may know as a community platform and it's also being Activity Pubized so to say. Librecast is trying to create an alternative to tools like Twitch by enabling multicast live streaming from just a simple device. The Pearcher project we aren't supporting them directly but we're supporting what will likely be the largest deployment with over a, I don't know how many million hours of content that they will put on built-in gliders to national multimedia archive of the Netherlands and they will stress test this and add all kinds of cool stuff about copyright open content licenses subtitle search and so on. ForgeFed is a project that rose from the sale of Github to, well it's sparked by the sale of Github to Microsoft but in general the idea is that people should be able to host their own software and host their own issue trackers and then to federate these because ultimately it's just a website so why can't we have these integrated. A Fediverse space is trying to map out the whole Fediverse and we'll make it possible for you to have a look and see where you where you fit if you don't want to host yourself because like in the real world there's a room for pubs there's rooms for hotels and there's rooms for people's own house and for Fediverse the same holds. So for search I guess one of the founding projects is Circs I don't know if people have used that but it's a meta-search engine and it's trying to add the one thing that Google will never be able to do is to have private resources that can stay private and have these be integrated into the single search box that we all use all day because we're lazy people we don't want 20 search boxes we only want one so if you want to have alternatives to be able to provide these private search domains so one of those domains is MailPile quite a well-known mail server and NextCloud is another one that is going to add with budget from us this private integration WebXRate, Paul May is here is a project that is going to help you understand when you're searching to not just click on the blue link and then find out that there's a gazillion trackers that are going to kick your ass there but actually show you up front because that's the kind of knowledge that they're bringing together with the WebXRate project so you have a better understanding of what traps lie behind the link so to say and the green web foundation on a similar note it wants to reward people that do good in terms of carbon offsetting so when people host a website in a green data center well, I'm going to have 60 million results you're going to show me 10 why not show me 10 that are hosted green and then you create an incentive for companies to do the right thing and obviously there's all kinds of cool new technologies on the planet such as the interplanetary file system which we're supporting with a search project the dot foundation is trying to get the DAT protocol into the private sphere so you can host your own DAT spaces building a tool to make those private repositories available too Sonar is a search engine that will look into those it's a German project that is looking into those DAT spaces so that will be an ideal combination of public and private resources again and then there's an upcoming browser called NEXT and they're trying to create they're not satisfied with the state of the art in terms of browsers where it's just point and click and all you can do is wait for the thing to do it should be more programmatic should be more programmable and on top of that they're going to be able to work with both DAT IPFS and XeroNet and then there's more cool search stuff for private communities like the transparency toolkit like Mindive which is sort of a mixer that allows you to mix search results from other people basically an overlay network just before the search engine kicks in so your queries end up with other people and are relate without UBA being able to see them and without them being able to see them and you relay other people's queries and that way you confuse the AIs and get a privacy distributed search technology open food facts is an amazing library of something like 650,000 foods that you can look into and obviously those foods are all the things that you want to know about allergies about maybe ethical things or about where they come from all the things will be combined in a personalized search environment that you can use and Yasi which is a well-known peer-to-peer search project for a long time is going to build capacity for people to actually set up an instant search shop where you can index stuff for people if you don't have the knowledge including the whole fulfillment so as to create an army of search providers and then the next app folks who created previously the flex search project which is quite a well-known project they're now trying to create a search engine mechanism that doesn't just favor the biggest bookstore from Washington all the time so they will experiment with new ranking algorithms applications we have a plenty too so for instance silk server is not a really well-known project just yet but we think it should be because it's an open source conferencing server just like the ones that people use from the big vendors but actually it's very much standards-driven so it can use XMPP it can use SIP and it can use WebRTC and it's encrypted it has in-session uploads it can do screen sharing and chat and in general it's a cool thing and to end sync is a protocol that starts with the basic premise that if you are using a cloud hoster to put your calendar and your address book in why should they be able to read what you put in why can't you just lock the black book before you send it there and eat the sync is just doing that and it has applications for all the larger platforms if you're involved with one of the smaller platforms like Sailfish or else approach us and maybe we'll be able to fund you too because we love the smaller platforms as you'll see Cryptpad is after we all started using Etherpad we did realize that ended up with clear text on the other end so Cryptpad is doing a wonderful thing where they encrypt all the data client-side it gives you collaborative editing on spreadsheets on text documents on polling on all kinds of things but the server is blind it cannot see anything everything is client-side encrypted we also have a lot of cool fundamental stuff so for instance Verif Paal is made by Nadim Kobaisi he's in the room he's the creator of Noise Explorer and Verif Paal is actually the tool that should make the biggest chance of making symbolic verification palatable for normal people because we all understand that computers are really good at seeing the flaws in our thinking so for instance this is how Nadim uncovered some holes in proton mail and nicely reported them but this is all of it if you know anything about this kind of proof the manual you'll be able to write this which is pretty amazing so Rio is trying to get rid of the socket mechanism that we inherited from the very earliest PSDs which sucks you open something and everything can start using it as soon as they are your user so it's not good and Rio Wolf is the centre of mathematics in the Netherlands or CWI as these days called I think they introduced Unix in Europe and now they want to repair that flaw Opax Sphinx is a project driven very much by Hungarian cryptographers and developers and what they want to do is we still have passwords and it's still a need mechanism but passwords should never be on the wire and they are still so by implementing both a password store on the device that is so good that you don't have to trust the server on the one hand so you can use a separate password server and on the other hand you have protocols that unlock those passwords for you but they never get stored at the other end so you create a system where you have the benefits of something simple as passwords without the negatives and the Andros Sphinx project is creating apps for it to go with that a GNU mess is trying to solve another problem if you're developing an operating system you will have to accept that you can't just write code and then compile it because what do you compile it with you will have to take on something what they call a binary seed that has been passed on like like a kefir plant from one computer to another and you don't really know what's inside so what GNU mess is trying to do is replace this all with a legible scheme based bootstrapping system and also reducing with a factor the dependency that we bring in Rover and developing a robust DHCP server and DNS resolver as a unicolonel I think there are also people from Rover in the room perhaps and DHCP Canon is trying to implement something called DHCP anonymity profiles which is a new internet standard that not a lot of people are using but it gives you when your computer enters a network it gives you just a little bit extra of a little bit the R2 project is a cluster of projects and it's probably not everybody gets excited about middleware but if you think about it middleware is what's running pretty much every company on the planet and we don't have it at internet wide scale so what they're trying to do is actually quite fundamental for instance doing getting Kerberos which is still in every organization on the planet is using to make that federatable and to improve the security characteristics to integrate Sassel and Realm crossover to provide all kinds of filters to LDAP so you can have other people share bits of LDAP and yet keep some privacy there too to propagate system settings when you don't have to ping say Google which websites you don't trust but you can collectively combine resources yourself and of course to make everything that has a user not have to have a user database because that is just a stupid way of working and then to have access control that is actually clever and understands that you may want to not give out your real name or your real identity to just anybody else so you can give out pseudonyms but still have access control on those Autocrypt is a mail specification we've had OpenPGP for a long time it didn't get traction beyond a few million people we have a few billion people on the internet so we need to reinvent the protocol and that's what Autocrypt is doing we're funding a number of smaller projects around that to make sure that this specification which is already supported by many others is getting this critical uptake identity based encryption and I review my attributes are two projects that are independent but when they are combined have a beautiful synergetic value because I review my attributes is something where you can prove to somebody that for instance to prove that you're German or to prove that you have a dog and you paid your license but nothing else so you don't have to give your name you don't have to show your passport that has your photo on it that has all these other things about you including biometrical details but just that single attribute and you can take it out of the context this is something you can carry along you prove it once and then a year later you can prove it which is very different from this real world checking that all the background identity management perpetrators are using and identity based encryption is really cool because it allows you to encrypt stuff the first time before you meet people and then there's a secure mechanism for people to resolve this and this will be combined with this attribute mechanism so you can say the person with passport X if you would know their passport can open this email and nobody else can and the encryption behind that would be automatically taken off by very good cryptographers we have a few mobile operating systems, small operating systems we love independent mobile operating systems so Replicant is trying to get a fully free android distribution Memo Lester is trying to revive the Memo ecosystem that was well the legacy of the Nokia phones and trying to get that user experience into modern phones the Mega 65 I mean if you thought that Nokia was sentimental then the Mega 65 will surely be rocking your world because that's going back to the Commodore 65 and they want to create a there was actually a talk here by Paul Lagartner Steven they want to create a phone that is simple enough for people to actually understand because nobody can understand these other phones they used to be simple so why can't we just have devices that do those things on the other end of the spectrum the completely looking forward stuff is mobile Nixos I don't know if people know the Nixos ecosystem but Nixos is an amazing next generation package manager and if they can support it then you can unlock about 50,000 packages that Nixos is supporting on those devices we have a lot of open hardware projects too so for instance the Nitro key used to be the crypto stick it's an open hardware USB key we have an open hardware laptop which is going to either base itself on either risk 5 or open power and it wants to be secure, fast, inexpensive open, robust, upgradable and sustainable and not compromise on any of that we have the be trusted device there was a talk about this from Bunny at the conference so you've seen that we have a project that's trying to get a system on chip so basically just like the Raspberry Pi is a system on chip you want to have something that gets risk 5 or open power that is completely open including the GPU including everything which bone is a specification inside those devices inside the system on chip you need that kind of a system but there's only proprietary systems they may be free to use but you can't change them you can't modify them or actually look very well at the security characteristics so we have a project that is trying to add streaming to this wishbone specification we have a project that is wants to develop ASIC production flows so really make it possible for normal people that are not willing to sign three levels of NDAs to produce a bit of hardware that they design themselves and I guess another project very much in the same vein is called Libre Silicon we have a number of projects from that community many of them are actually linked to Germany but it's a global effort to make fully custom design period and to own all the whole stack because if you design a chip set now what you do is you go to a vendor and that vendor will tell you just give me the recipe I'll put in my own stuff so you can say tomato soup and it will give you tomato soup but you don't know what they put it in terms of silicon then including a standard cell library including a placer and router and just to not be caught on a single on a single project the Core Elite 2 project we're also funding them they have an alternative if you feel as I back end tool and they can also do placing and routing and we don't want to be stuck with a single tool instead we want to have multiple good tools and we want to do each do new things and to come back to the pillars that I previously sketched for the next generation and I said we were going for resilience trustworthiness and sustainability and when we wrote that we actually said in the efficient technologies embedded in concrete circling in space and is increasingly entering the intimacy of our human bodies a little bit we know that somebody would propose to actually make a pacemaker consider putting that in their body but if you've seen the talk from Ross Anderson there have been hundreds of pacemakers recalled because of leaky networking capabilities so it's certainly not a trivial thing to do but it's really cool and it shows the importance of well getting this this whole mechanism right because you can't have those risks if you put something in somebody's heart and you have to rip it out and replace it with something that's not a free you can't go away my phone because it's broken you can't do that it requires heavy operation could kill people so we have a lot more projects this is just a tip of the iceberg that's why it's called a treasure trove you can find all of them online we have them at these websites and if you see those two logos anywhere that's we hope that people recognize that nothing they don't need to know our names just to have the association oh shit interesting, should look at that well my time is almost running out so I want to give a big thanks to the European Commission especially to the DG Connect that gave us this money to do this without their support we might not even exist at this point and the thing to remember is all these projects need help on a done deal this is not a product that we can give we don't have the money to fund all these projects to the level that they need so it needs uptake so fixing the internet is a huge collaborative thing and we need all your brains because the brains are the critical thing here to quote Dijkstra again the art of programming is the art of organizing complexity and there's a lot of complexity to deal with the dependencies and so many layers of the system as you've seen we try to bring together these things and make them work together and that's the kind of a value add that we try to give as a funding agency we need your brains and there's so much work to be done on all layers if you're a legal person or if you're a usability expert or a designer, you've seen some of the logos they're ghastly some people don't have logos some people don't have any idea how to organize a community so if you want to do something cool and basically there are so many opportunities on so many different layers you can do internships if you're a student or unemployed but there's also a very senior task that people have lying about for which they don't have the capacity to do because they might be working for a nuclear agency and have a good idea so it's not like they can then quit their jobs and tell their family I'm going to do this full time so people can sometimes take money and look for other people to work with them so if you have an interest in one of the projects that I showed or one of the projects on the website please look at them and perhaps, well, maybe next year you will be here on the stage the last thing I want to say is if you have a great idea or somebody else that has a cool project we still have money for the next year have a look at their open calls go to this address and I mean the moniker is that we want to reinvent the internet because we believe that there's only so much time before it fossilizes and it's so stuck in everything that is ossified so if you don't change it now we will be stuck with it perhaps for a thousand years and it's sad but it's not stuck with something for 150 years almost so it's the amount of devices that we're putting out and the amount of technology that we're depending on stuff makes it more difficult to switch so if you don't switch it now we there's no way we can repair it later on and well the final quote from Ezka Dijkstra the tools that we use have a profound and devious influence on our thinking habits and therefore our thinking abilities the way currently the internet works is bad, it's broken by design and there have been many talks about this but we need to do something and we try to bring together so many efforts we're not alone, there are other people inside the next generation internet initiative that are doing stuff as well they have different methods they have different looks and feels so you can check them out in particular before January 4th they help the folks at Dobsi they're a marketing agency and other agencies that aren't that first in understanding what needs to happen they're asking literally can you help us to tell who we should be giving money to what kind of things we should prioritize if you have time please look at that URI and fill out that thing and that's time for questions okay questions, there are three microphones but I see the signal angel already has two questions from the internet let's take the first internet question should be on, okay the first question from the internet is how to make the public mass transport adopt those great projects and how well did you in the past so in the past we have content that we were funding all these amazing projects and we were trying to get them to scale technically for now we have actually changed our ways slightly and so one of the things that we do is we try to package everything inside at least one operating system called NICS packages or inside one packaging system we help people with accessibility every project that we fund is getting and will be officially certified as that and that removes the number of blockers in terms of practical adoption for instance by governments because they're not allowed to use technologies that aren't accessible we help people build up communities so we have special community folks that are good at community building so for us the abundance of funding that we had for a short period of this project is actually we're trying to make the very, very most of that and well it's not been tried like that before so we like to give it a try and also of course very much talking to the people that need to adopt it so if you develop something that is changing the routing of the internet then you need to talk to the people that run the internet so the technical operational community so we're very much we have people that help with standardization really, really good people that know how to pass the mustard around so to say and yeah if people have any advice on how to do any better we'd love to know so my email address is healethanelnet.nl just send me a mail if you think we're doing something stupid or you think we're not doing anything that we should be doing by all means contact us because we're there to make it actually work does that answer the question internet no feedback so far but I hope so well there are no questions in the room yet so we'll take the next one from the oh there's one over there sorry hello there are you able to talk about the size of the grant that was allocated to NL Net in order to talk about this on the average grant size so the average sum is something like 36, 37,000 euros the total sum is 11.2 million euros for three years that's for both projects combined so each of them 5.6 million euros so we currently have 150 programs running so you can do the math and see that we still have money left but a year from now that might be very different and then you'll have to talk completely different shop because the way we do this is not common we're quite proud that we think we kind of hacked the system into making it a very easy application procedure you should be able to write this in half an hour if your ideas are clear in your mind then we don't ask a lot of information that's exactly what we're trying to solve is to make it lightweight for the people that apply and the amounts can be the smallest project we have is 1400 euros the biggest project has now received a second grant and will ultimately end up with something like 170 but it can theoretically can go up to 200,000 euros can be individuals, can be organizations can be a monastery can be a government, can be anything we don't care as long as you make something and we pay you when you make it and not before thank you and now with the second question from the internet second question from the internet is are there any existing projects that you wish would join your initiative but haven't so far that's a good question well I recently reached out to a number of the smaller operating systems such as Sailfish and Minix and I believe that they have some unique properties and we want to support their work but so far not a lot of people from that community are, I guess they're not used to being able to get money for the work that they do but in general the independent mobile operating systems that's the thing that we're very interested to see improve but yeah we are quite forward as soon as we see something we also ping people and then one of the biggest way in which we retrieve projects incoming is that people know good people so people read about us, they see the little logo a few times and I think somebody might be crazy enough to fund my project or they might be crazy enough to fund my friend's project we don't have any marketing budget so it's a really word of mouth but in general when we see stuff people are quite willing to push new projects to us because it's quite a clear there's no spooks behind us it's all full and clear public benefit organization so essentially we don't have a threat we just give you money for the good of society so to say so I'm not answering the question unfortunately thank you Mikhail for your talk and for the questions unfortunately we're running out of time I'm sure you can reach him on the congress if he's still speaking around and discuss the topics further and if you have to leave now please leave in that direction but first give him some warm applause