 Sarmia network and your translators are Zebalis and WMCC and in times of war communication is very important and to communicate is a public duty and how that works in the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s that is what you are next speakers will tell you about in depth please give a nice round of applause to Uwam Reena and Padlun. So first I want to make clear that I'm not a German so I'll do my best to take away my Netherlands accent and not be too serious. I was a little surprised when I moved in this room and so I kind of imagined a classroom with like 20 people that I could talk about the old days with some people and then it turned out to be in this enormous room here. So I'm WAM Dutch I just turned 61 hopefully you can't see that from my my appearance and somehow in the 70s the mid 70s like many of my people in my years I was very much an anti-computer freak an anti-computer person computers were the kind of thing that ruled the world that controlled the world that checked on the world and I was totally against him and my uncle in the Netherlands was defense minister and thought that I needed to do military service in the military and I had completely other ideas about it and so I told him I wasn't gonna do it and he had and had had no other reaction other than throwing me in jail and so I read a lot about computers back back in those days in those two years and thought that's a pretty interesting topic and so and so in 90 79 I did my doctoral thesis on in sociology on imagine that computers are getting small written on a fox a big supercomputer that the atomic center the University of Netherlands needed to cut short summary we had this kind of devices my professor and I we kind of expected these my professor and I in in in two thousand seventy two thousand eighty you have to imagine there was a there was a day in which they didn't exist there were no phones no no smartphones or no laptops in the 80s back in the 80s and they as I was active in an organization called European Youth Forest Action of the World one of the first of these networks that was active in east and west Europe and we pretty quickly know so it was very difficult to communicate with each other over telephone and so if you call Russia or Prague or stuff like that it took hours in our offices in the Netherlands we had a special person who didn't have it do anything else all night except for calling Russia in the hopes that we would be able to get through a pencil to help you call make phone calls and you couldn't repeat numbers by tapping you had you had to sort of twist around with your fingers do you know very shy them rotary dials you obviously don't and so somehow in my studies I learned something like that data communications and so I was able to let one computer talk to the other communicate with each other and if you knew the real the proper name of the computer and used it right you did the right commanders with this friggin editor with all these save and stuff and memorize them I don't know if this is them or something you could talk you could talk to computers and so in the mid 80s there was a invention called the fax machine have you heard of that anyone just is that still a thing this is a device that claims to not be a computer and not talk to other computers that's why people were less afraid of them and so so for the people that want to have things technically it's like a scanner printer and a motor all connected up together so you can scan a piece of paper and then it comes out and the printer on the other side and you could communicate that way and you could do that quite quick you could very quickly explain to people how they worked and somehow a big Japanese company I convinced this big Japanese company to send me a large number of phones fax machines I just ordered them and thought we'll see what happens when they arrive the worst thing that can happen is it is that they throw me in jail and I've already done that two years there and I did my doctor there so you know by the way probably one of the best places you can do your studies and jail no distractions at all lots of time and you know if you know why you're in jail for those that do PhDs actually that is not true it's doing a PhD involves getting the rest of your life sorted out as well because that is something you need to learn there too so because then with the rest of your life here I can't deal later if you're in prison there was a vegetarian restaurant in Utrecht that brought us food every day because they someone thought my uncle thought his nephew shouldn't starve so at least I brought this company to get 25 fax machines developed delivered to my office and as quickly as possible I tried to put get all these fax machines to Eastern Europe this was before 1984 and we thought as long as they're in Eastern Europe they won't come back and picking up of course is impossible too so within a year we managed to do get these 25 machines to Eastern Europe between 87 and 88 so it was before 89 and and they got to places that later in 89 did have a certain certain important role to play within the local revolutions there and some of these fax machine were in Belgrade and Zagreb with a group that was then called Selenie green circuit I can't remember the Croatian name at the moment Selenie Kruch and in the early 90s there were some tensions that became apparent it wasn't people weren't quite of the same opinion anymore regarding whether Yugoslavia is a good thing and war was in the air and one of the things that I learned on the way non-conflict of non-violent conflict resolution or non-violent conflict resolution and in Zagreb in Belgrade they thought well that's practical we'll get those people to talk to us and that's how in the early 90s I came to Zagreb it was supposed to be for only three months that was the idea I was to be there for three months and teach to the police and hospital staff that you have to communicate instead of wacking your brains in and I was sitting there in the hospitals in Ossiek and the first grenade came from above and you then think to yourself well it didn't quite work I don't want to say that it was my fault that the war broke out but I didn't do my best to stop it so somehow it was there before I noticed what really was going on and the first thing those idiots do in Yugoslavia well idiots the different governments that were active the first thing they do is cut the telephone lines you couldn't call Belgrade from Zagreb anymore from Sarajevo with lots of effort you could called Zagreb but no longer called Belgrade so all these different countries were isolated from each other and the funny thing was at that time there was an existing network that was called ARPANET from the universities and all the universities in the whole world were more or less connected to it and the ARPANET well they had they broke that too you could only reach each other via detours and that's the great thing about this network you could break things but then messages still found their way that was the whole idea when half of that system is destroyed by nuclear bombs then the messages still find their way from sender to receiver so so that works but most people that were active in the peace movement in the women's movement in humanitarian organizations and all that had never heard of computers no that was simply not a thing that in the early 90s as a normal activist you were you dealt with even within the greens that was a huge conflict when one of the greens took one of these machines into the parliamentary group you still had the feeling that this is something you should be wary about they control us and pretty quickly in Zagreb they found there is a way we can that we can communicate with bergerade we send a fax to the UK and in the UK that was where the central office for the association for professional communication was the first alternative network worldwide and these people were then prepared to send that fax on with their machine to bergerade and vice versa so if you were quick people took a few hours and you would get a reply within a day which in those days was really fast because the other way was to take the bus from Zagreb to Budapest and from then on to bergerade and that was a journey that took a whole day so there was another system there the x25 networks that you could reach if you knew how to do that and I came to Yugoslavia with the 300 bps modem does anyone know what 300 bps is roughly yeah if you're lucky 300 board you can read quicker than so that way you could connect to those x25 networks and actually send messages slow very slow you could read it well when you can follow the come the data coming in you can read it as it came in you could see it too every bit you could see as it came out there and then and listen in I don't know to be there are people around that still recognize or remember those noises I one day I got it got got soup that thing up to 9600 and with that sound I could communicate with tele with fax machines on the other side if you have this many fax machines with all these places in East apparently supposedly hackers can can make noises with their can whistle into each other's ears that's how they make sex apparently whistle until you until they connect and so we thought this isn't working in England and we couldn't get in contact with our friends in Belograd and there were these computer networks there were news groups you could subscribe to and one of these news groups was social cultural Yugoslavia and social cultural use Yugoslavia included every so everyone in the world had access to it and mostly people who had some ancestors that was born a new squabby or something like that and so I experienced there I experienced something that I had never seen before on the internet war completely full-formed war when one when one person would write one thing someone else would respond that that's not true and if these days if you talk about fake news or not even Trump achieves the level of fake news that they they were on about back then it was pretty obvious that somehow if Serbs and Croats if you try to communicate with them you need a faster way to communicate because not everyone has has a modem with 300 BPS and not everyone had an x25 knew how an x25 network worked and knew all these codes had them have them memorized and an American Eric Bachman who in Bielefeld which by the way exists or referring to the Bielefeld community conspiracy I should look it up on Wikipedia people that know it existed back people that know it didn't exist back then this translator is from Bielefeld a peace center and they heard their there were there were nets networks that were directly connected to the phone where you could call each other and then exchange data and this system is called the Cerberus system and there were different systems but Cerberus was a very developed and and and good working system and the nice thing about Cerberus is for the users there there is a program where the user could call the system and download some his information and answer it on his home computer Eric was was with near us in the Bielefeld area and was involved in the center and he found that there was such a there was a thing as such a thing as mailboxes and mailbox communication and he just asks us all kinds of questions because Padloon and I who were with what was then called Furbud we were operating a network a mailbox named Bionic and and Eric wanted to know everything and Eric took care of finding computers he took care of getting people involved and finding the money you have to imagine that phone calls to the other countries these things were unbelievably expensive at the time there was a big difference between local calls and calls across the whole country within the same country there was an eight minute charging cycle and it was very expensive and if you called abroad it was way faster that the charges came in faster and calling at different countries was obscenely expensive and the way around this that we found was rather than sending a fax to London and back and then five from Belgrade via London to Zagreb to automatize this with a mailbox but still taking a detour because direct phone calls of course were not possible anymore as you've heard so that's how Bielefeld became the central hub for the Zahmet international network which was then set up and we from Bielefeld were calling Zagreb Belgrade, Ljubljana, Sarajevo, Tuzla, Przestina and Kostevo, Mostar came later but when I was there all that was still the future was still a promise for the future because when I met Eric the first time in Zagreb he said in Germany there is this group that is called Bionic and they have a system and that may work yeah he only noticed that it was Furbut what the name of the group was to to reiterate the name and the name Bionic was the mailbox and because Furbut was such a difficult name we renamed ourselves digital courage their digital courage is our current name Furbut was the old name and Bionic was the mailbox so now we've got that sorted and Eric arrives in Zagreb and tells me all this there are these people in Bielefeld I actually only know Bielefeld because of the traffic monitoring that takes place on the motorway there you get photographed if you exceed the speed limit so you told me about all this and meanwhile in Zagreb we had found an organization that was the the anti-war campaign different women's organizations environmental organizations and one foreigner that was me and meanwhile I could understand the local language a bit and we actually managed to get donations I get a few computers donated to us and the people in Europe or North America thought come on we'll send them something good we'll send them Apple machines that was the biggest mistake they could have made because if you look at an apple you can't open it you really have to have very specific tools crew drivers to to get the damn thing opened and one apple in Sarajevo means one apple being thrown away because there is simply was no space to get it repaired you couldn't connect a modem to it so long story short a completely useless thing but I had an old AT with me you know what an AT is right 386 processor yeah okay did it have a hard disk well it had the what was the largest hard disk I bought up to the time 40 megabyte he said megabytes 20 was the largest and I was told that I would never in my life have to buy a new hard disk again that was in 1982 1982 but now we're talking about 10 years after and that network was working on my AT that was the amazing thing so it probably won't work on Windows but it was all DOS in those days and that became the first node in our network and the idea was to quickly well how should we call this how do we call such a network and we then had the maximal amount of letters that we could give and that limit was eight a larger number of letters would simply not fit you couldn't name the files that way anymore and pretty quickly we came up with Samir which means for peace that was very clear Samir network and the different hubs that we build simply must be given the names of the cities so mine became Samir ZG for Zagreb and I was there standing next to my bed with this 300 BPS modem which I was allowed to connect officially something that was not allowed in Germany well we still did it anyway so you get those sounds and that's how it started we could exchange messages and Eric then went to Bergrade and found something in the peace center there who said yes I can operate this and we have a telephone line too so that was the biggest problem at the time at the time to actually have a phone line because I don't know people here that were born in the former East Germany and the phone system in Yugoslavia was even worse so on average you have three cables for telephone you had three lines with two telephones and you couldn't make as many phone calls as you would want and if you put a modem up that telephone was occupied all the time so if someone annoyed us would simply they would simply pick up the phone get it off the hook and we couldn't get online couldn't connect and we couldn't find out whether this other person was living as well and getting a new phone line in store wasn't a hundred German marks it was in West Germany at the time but it was more than a thousand and it took two years too so many was timed and so in Zagreb we mostly rented houses to get at their phone lines because if you could work if you were looking for house the first question was do you have a phone no sorry won't take that that was the very important so we had at certain months we had three telephones altogether that was great that was later though the first thing we were confronted with I said there was this group of these news group the social cultural Yugoslavia this youth group called social cultural Yugoslavia and I spent a year living in 1989 and so I knew a lot of people and they told me over the internet over the arpanet that the orthodox church in Zagreb was there was an explosion there there's and and I and I could see this church every day and there was there were no attacks no explosions there and and so just like proving online that beef out exists you can you can prove that that there was an explosion at a church and you need to know that Wikipedia wasn't developed to a point that he could actually find out what really was true you couldn't send images you know I was expecting I was expecting when I said that Wikipedia tells the truth I would I would have expected more of a laugh from the audience I I'm sorry so either my jokes are not that good or the stupidest thing about this is there were people that I knew and they didn't believe that the church was still there and this church it played a central role in this whole thing because this church was in Zagreb and so the Serbs in Zagreb could say that the Serbs blew up our church look at these fring creations are fascists and explode blow up our church I tried to try to take pictures and and develop them so these digital cameras on phones didn't exist back then either you had to take a picture first and then have it to be developed counterfeiting photos was harder to you had you had to be able to do it was yet to be skilled for that so so you got someone organized to take a bus from Beirge to arrived in in Zagreb at our in our place and took a picture of the of the church and sent it Beirge couldn't do that electronically so it was the first moment when I notice how important it is how incredibly important in such situations to fight misinformation fake information because from this fake information people wanted they wanted to derive the reason for fighting fighting the thing if we break down break your church we're gonna our church we're gonna break your blowpures but that's just how people are in church church paying paying money a church for a church a tooth for a tooth so it was only with faith you could perhaps see whether there were different nations language the language was the same but still in Serb cinema's creation movies were subtitled and well that was later that was the incredible thing that people went to cinema to see how their own language is how their own language was sucked up in the same language so for one term you would have a slightly different term perhaps but there's these minute differences I as a touch man in the head of state in Croatia was said to have developed in the holy new Croatian language because somehow we had to state that these were separate people with their own language so someone in us lab it would say telephone everyone would understand that in Croat it's a different word with the same meaning which is fast speaker yeah well long-distance table device with charge display as a German complicated term for a phone that was around at the time creation names were much much longer and this was the kind of situation and I thought initially I would be there for three months only but I well human being as a human being and I fell in love to some extent with the country and and with a certain person you just whistled in someone's ears until the carrier connected yeah we connected the very first evening actually connect at first sight that was not bad we didn't even whistle I was a new kid on the block to foreign computer with him knew something beautiful foreign man everything you needed at the time to be to stand out and I was the only foreigner there anyway at this moment besides the U.N. with their white cars and but they didn't have any contact with the local people and and she said at some time you know if there really is war and people shoot at you you really can go home and then I said the magic words I would stay in Yugoslavia as long as the war until the war would be over and I didn't have to say that in 1990 took five years and then another three in Kosovo but I kept my promise I really stayed there for all that time and one reason that I'm now speaking to you in Germany is that I was became very tight after five years and took a rest here and then just got stuck so I was there in Yugoslavia and it was clear that and I was part in in the Zabri network there wasn't weren't many people here in Zagreb or Belgrade and Eric couldn't be anywhere but these two people were there and I had a really bad feeling because I had children a girl and two boys and somehow dad was gone for a very very long time and I thought I will start writing to them what I am doing every day every single day and if they would be often they could still read what dad had been doing there and that then turned into the Zagreb diary it was simply meant to tell my children what was happening but after three days something happened which I wrote about that had such a lot of influence on the world there that my diaries were no longer part of my private sphere there was a place at the border between Bosnia and Serbia and Croatia so there was a triangle in Zagreb we had a fax line with that place nobody knows why but the people that were living in their city wrote to us saying that Serbs had raided the place so the they were called the white eagles there were jetnicks they went from door to door and the first fax arrived when they were five houses away and with every new fax they were one house closer and the people on the way were just taken from the houses and shot on the street and someone writes that and we get that and for green net I'll publish this on the internet in this news groups social cultural Yugoslavia and the first reaction came from the US from someone who said why you are exaggerating because it's not on CNN and at that moment I realized if it's not on CNN it's not happening and just don't believe it and three days later CNN wrote read my report and said true and from that point my diary suddenly was passed on and more and more people had had it and I don't know I completely I was completely unaware and it took a whole year until I realized that my diary had just found a huge audience and of course it has to be said we should say you basically said was on the internet it's not true it was in mailboxes it may have been on newsnet where it was spread a bit but the interesting thing was that for the first time this is something where the world realized that there is a wave of communicating in text communication that was not via telephone you could write something send it and spread it for us in fact the Zami network was a stroke of luck because the media finally took an interest in our system because we had been building systems that people could use for a long long time in Germany perhaps one million were using several CL and other networks and no medium ever took an interest but now there were there was this this one this huge networking effect that Eric Bachmann in in ex-Yugoslavia had built with BAM together and just this whole UN embargoes to subvert these and subvert the embargoes get computers smuggled in transport planes I think someone I think you were a UN employee Eric was formally I was the one that had an official contract with the UN so that was a way of getting low tech communication established as you said the 286 processor you could compare that with the computing capacity of perhaps the C64 that's the thing you worked with and with one telephone line that wasn't multiplexed only one data stream could go through there from A to B with that you communicated and then it was spread and then in some mailboxes like ours there were some journalists who received that as a so-called point people that downloaded the data and read it and then others took that and printed it and so that was before the internet existed we're talking 92 93 94 when it slowly started but before all that started with the internet there was a sense in the public that these networks are useful for something these are not just technical idiots that are playing games and and look at naked girls and and and Rob and pirate software but that was actually not what was on our networks that was only text no pornographic stories political things political groups using them and networking APC green net and all anti-fag groups were using these networks there was some real serious work being done this was an interesting network and the internet actually destroyed all this but that's a different story that should be told in a different place but that was the interesting thing and your diaries that that was a content that people could look at it was interestingly written well you were there in Zagreb you you were in the refugee camps you you saw the W VW buses and people looking for the families and and they could then use those computers to find these that was a genius piece of work but that diary to to write about this this experiences that didn't just tell people that there is a war going on but that people live and laugh in the war and there are fantastic stories from Sarajevo even under attack that competition will I make it across the street without getting hit people really playing those games to just find to get a sense of that that showed the people in the whole world what all this new data network could could be and the and that was a very different aspect beyond war and the people in Yugoslavia you were traveling there you you got to know people that when we heard that you came from bionic people were in tears and thanking you for bringing their families together as a figurehead so that's the one story but the other story is that it helped the world to help Google helped Microsoft that's what we're fighting these days because we want our own structures we want to we don't have the networks yet don't have control of the next anymore because we forgot how important it is to have your own structures with low-tech computers with modems with just one telephone line with deliberating how you can use donated satellite lines decentralized working these days we are no longer working in a decentralized way we are depending on one switch that someone can switch and switch off and that's another story that has to be told in this context you heard you guys are quite busy with that I didn't even know them I only knew them over the internet I actually saw them for the first time about 20 years you gave a talk in Berlin that's when I saw your first time once in my diary I got an email out of the blue from an address I didn't recognize at all and what one of them I recognized sounded familiar white house dot gov and and the guy who wrote it was called a dot gore and in this at this moment I had no idea had no clue that this was the vice president of the US and so I'm sitting there in Croatia and doing my thing oh he's saying you're sitting there in Croatia doing your thing do you need anything and of course plenty of normal people ask me that question and I asked for like a few things like discounts at White House but L dot gore at White House I gov I kind of felt like I could they could get interesting in peace and you come into contact with people that you would have never come to contact with and I really got I was pretty obvious to me that I could just write whatever I wanted it's not a lot you can break in it in a war-torn country anyways everything's already broken anyways if you walk around in Syria but back then all half of the buildings were broken anyway so there wasn't a lot you could break and wrote some stuff like imagine in this world there's a lot of factories that produce lots lots of crap and they have this crisis of conscious in Sarajevo we have about 40,000 people and every day they need dialysis there's no dialysis liquid and you 70,000 lot all these people need dialysis I can imagine to have their to have their consciousness settled a bit they could donate a little bit of a dialysis fluid and at the same time I thought there's lots of mostly American mostly American helicopter pilots that had done things in Vietnam of which after which they still couldn't sleep and so there's a way here here there's a way to come to Bosnia to Croatia and to do good stuff with your flight we just needed a helicopter 20 more minutes we just needed a helicopter and so of course we thought never never the next day on Fort Plasmo that's the airbase next to Sagreb three big pharmaceutical industries sent medicines not just dialysis fluid and we had 36 helicopter pilots within three days and two helicopters and there is applause all around in this moment it seems like it works we can do this stuff and so I wrote there's all these people here in refugee camps all these all these kids have been sitting in refugee camps for months and nobody does anything for them the UN gives them food a tent and medical care but they're sitting there for months without anything to do and I went by UNICEF and asked can I play with kids in refugee camps they they called me and said of course you can play with kids in refugee camps can I invite my friends to play with kids in refugee camps and they're like sure but they'll never come and I grew up there in the the border to Slovenia there is it there is a train on it on its way to Germany 600 people going to Germany and went to Germany and it was sent back 8,000 people came 8,000 people were ready to pay their flight to spend a number of weeks in the refugee camps to play with the kids and these days we know we realized that that was a good thing that we did back then that we brought kids into contact with culture from the whole world that we said very consciously we don't want people we don't want people from from one country we want people from lots of different countries all together that's what I wrote in my diary that's the most important thing we were the first people in the world that had refugee camps with internet connections can you imagine and they were really internet connections because in this moment CERN was just getting started and they wanted something that came every day actually I prefer that we use the last 15 minutes for questions from the audience and mainly I have a question to the audience and would you please show up who of you is actually from one of the former Yugoslav countries that there are a few have any of you ever used the Zamiya network or are you too young for that okay I can't see any hands okay great so I would like to ask our herald to get the microphones organized and take the questions okay I think I'll speak for everyone to when I thank very warmly for his witness report we have four microphones in the room two in the middle road to one left one right you can line up there please hold back with expressions of gratitude we want to get some questions through and does our signal angel have a question from the internet no question from the internet so microphone one please is it often yeah okay today we have refugee camps back in Germany we have people that engage and we have people giving them internet connections by Freifunk do you have any experience having worked in a similar way do you have any advice what is important what you can do this next to getting the routers to run the internet phones are the most important things a refugee has it's his street number it's his house it's the way to reach them the first thing that we we did in the city I something like Bad Belzig the city Eleven it's somewhere between here in Berlin the first thing we did in 1996 in this refugee home was a breath was an internet connection and I and communication is a matter of life for people in and I think it was communication is so important that people stay in connection with our home country and then I see about the internet it's a very brief anecdote it just five minutes imagine imagine pristina pristina pristina lives in Kosovo pristina most people are Muslim people people people like men can go out and women have to stay at home and the men go out to coffee shops every evening and we had two women that we called the electronic witches and they went out with little laptops and taught the women in the homes how to get in there and those were ladies that didn't even know the computers existed they never they never had a typewriter and and so they learned their their typing and writing on computers and we're in touch with people in America and Australia and the thing that we achieved was women in pristina in contact with the whole world and then men sat well while men sit in coffee shops talking about the world empowering is the most important word in this whole thing give people give people opportunities to do things it's not about it's not just about the technology so about the technology that's been put into practice we can have the nicest handis in the world but if we don't use them for something that actually is meaningful then it's just just just a pure environmental all right then I'll tell an anecdote as well because I ran workshops for women from all parts of the country and I got to know women that were in the free Bosnian army and fought there and that had built up the center for raped women in separate in Zenitsa and donated computers they they turned donated broken computers into functioning computers and even in Zagreb also in Zagreb there were women that were engaged in that system and that then was discussed in parliament in Croatia and they were said these are all Serbian communists that run these mailboxes Serbian communists and you are under underestimating them because they are women they are dangerous you have to imagine when you look watch TV and and you see your own portrait and that of your girlfriend and another friend and they and under that it says a good Croat knows what he or she should do with those people yeah well we're getting close to that in Germany too maybe one hint for those that have just come in because they were expecting more info on technology we didn't really have to do that because we have had a talk on that before about the mailbox technology different technologies that were there at the time and I watched that talk just now before this and it really shows you all the details with their protocols and all that how the whole thing worked so I don't think we have to do that here now and talk about the thing that the question how it was used I of course could add another anecdote because mailboxes in Germany were an interesting thing too and the interior Secret Service was building up mailbox networks there was the spin and nets the left radical network and the tool network a right-wing net radical network and the tool network had contained a bomb making instruction manual of course in a secret area that you couldn't openly you couldn't just enter the open area didn't have much but the private part had this instruction manual but that was written by someone that was a system admin with us by Onik in Bielefeld I don't want to add that this same guy is still is now organizing big hacker congresses but he was there in school interested in chemistry and he had this one board that contained info on power technology those that wanted to experiment with explosive well I tried it if the results were this small because I would have liked to have information but the young people there did chemical hacking they met at a nice camp I I'm getting reminded I have to keep it short and this bomb making manual led to a house being searched under strange circumstances the subject had been the little terrorists and at two o'clock as we had indicated with our opening times at the door there was a policeman at Hado and he had been charged by the prosecutor to take all the computers which wouldn't have been wouldn't have been great so I said okay well look here I have this press ID and that would give you bad press and and the head of the police crew said okay I'm not interested in bad press and I replied okay that's good you it would be bad if you cared about bad press but we have help convoys being organized networks and if you read the people had died in Sarajevo because the convoys hadn't arrived then you would have a bad conscious wouldn't you and that got him thinking and he supported he got on the phone and fought with the prosecutor selling saying that he would not want to take any of the computers so that system actually protected us right and we have a oh just one more anecdote and two months later the phone rings and hello this is the state protection agency at Bielefeld my son needs to do an internship can I do it at your place hey hold up I told them you know that your your colleague was here a few months ago for a raid for a to search the place and it was so enthusiastic about the place that's why I'm calling you now how was the frequency of what was the frequency of messages in the zombie network and next to your diaries what else was being what could you read that we we have learned that cat videos didn't exist we had about 1200 users in Sarajevo 600 in Serbia and number in Croatia Kosovo and 400 and Slovenia that was the users in the country on average that was a higher number of users than in Germany at the time more people in Croatia were using computers for data communication than in Germany I actually doubt that anyway it was about 20 to 30 megabytes per day that we distributed a lot of mail and sometimes I was sitting in the basement there looking at the computers and every bit that went to Sarajevo I could see because for a while our system was always getting stuck and we couldn't find what was the problem and somewhere in America at the university someone could order for games and these were then transmitted in blocks to someone over the network to people that ordered in blocks which will put into emails and someone in Sarajevo had ordered doom doom in the middle of war where there was enough of that happening I saw that later in Sarajevo someone was playing doom on the computer and on that computer screen you could see the same building that was on the other side of the road so we could it was just text that we were communicating with and it's still I still I'm a text only guy are there any more questions I can't see anyone anything from the internet signal angels shakes his head so we have three more minutes for a closing joke so Sarajevo then the mailbox stopped working often around noon and a woman who worked on the systems tried to figure it out and follow the cable and and discovered that in the basement another person living there the janitor turned on an oven to heat up his his food and and the power went out and so then we realized and so from it we needed some extra plugs our mailbox was was in the post office of Sarajevo and in on this post office and an inscription here is this is pro Serbia and someone had added idiot this is the post office graffiti on the wall or something so maybe for us to learn something so we so that we can learn something for future wars that may come we at some point had a phone call from someone who somehow within the secret services and had been in radio communications and now retired and that's what he said and he gave us a good tip it's because he said what you're doing there in your ex-executive is very dangerous it can actually under martial law regard be regarded as espionage soldiers could come and get you out and shoot you on the spot without any legal procedure so this is the tip don't do it in secret do it in the open right on your walls in large letters of what you do post notices show what you do and do just that because that protects you and another thing never communicate in encryption because that will make you much more prone to being accused of espionage and that's why we wrote because what that's why we had this featuring in our Z connect protocols that asked for non-encrypted responses for areas at war this is very very important don't always think ah this is a war we have to send them an encrypted message no the exact opposite just think a bit further and just look at military intelligence and and until then we should take care to not have a war and use encrypted communication for that the spot at the time please another thank you to one rena and paddling and