For several years now here at the Congress and at the camp we see that we have a GSM network that we operate our own network that we have some services like a recently gprs or Roaming between the different parts of the areas in the camp All of this started around seven years from now with the talk at the 25 c3 and a bunch of product projects emerge from that over the years But wait, there's more right now the the people running these services and Running these projects are starting to play around with 3g and for everybody who doesn't know what 3g is like I did for like Five minutes ago 3g means that we will have hdspa and data services on our GSM networks And I'm very honored to introduce to you this evening Harald Welter Member of our chaos family for several years now known maybe from the kernel development I first read his name While debugging a chip car driver it that stated all bucks introduced by this guy over there So other people may know him from GP a lot relations org where they try to enforce the GPL So please welcome Harald Welter and stages yours Welcome everyone to this talk about Well running your own GSM network or running your own 3g network rather sorry for that and in more technical terms The slide titles with lots of acronyms as it is customary in the telecom world So forgive me if there's too many acronyms, but I didn't invent them. I just try to use them whenever appropriate okay, so Let's start with a little bit of a history of open source in mobile communication protocols You have to remember that we started about 16 years after the proprietary Implementation so the GSM network that we are running here at the event Or that we started to run seven years ago Started 16 years after GSM networks were run first in the public in Europe Public operators so we really really late And if you want to like to compare the status of open source mobile communications with open source operating system Then I would say you we are about where Linux was in 94 or 95 So very far from today for those of you who are old enough to remember these days So I would say capable but not taken seriously is sort of the the general status The developer community working on these projects is still very small. There's a limited adoption in the market and the users Often in niche applications But nevertheless it is functional. So if you look a little bit at the timeline 2008 we had the talk about running your own GSM network with a huge Siemens space station weighing I think 28 kilograms Did my microphone? No, it works. Sorry weighing 28 kilograms and bulky old equipment not using TCP IP but using e1 lines and so on over the years We added more and more BTS model vendors that basically means we can use Ericsson and Nokia and other equipment To actually run these GSM networks today people have been working on gprs support in a couple of Sub projects called Osmo sg sn open gg sn also the Osmo PCU project So we've been growing the stack downwards Also basically implementing the software inside such a BTS Which we call Osmo BTS There are some production deployments all spellings my mistake by the way as obviously so A production deployments in niche applications such as maritime markets So if today you're on a ferry or on a cruise ship and you use GSM services the probability that you're using Open BSC and associated projects in the background is a very strong. There are hundreds of vessels using our software today now then we Then we moved on the telephone side So we thought well, you know network site GSM is one thing but let's do the phone as well That was Osmo combi B started in 2010 We did improvements over the years more and more completed the stack But it's really all only old GSM gprs technology until very recently so in 2015 15 years again after the first commercial deployment of gprs in a public network We start to have an open source implementation of edge and that has just started like two or three months ago So again 15 16 years late compared to what happens in the proprietary world Okay, but this talk is not about edge which is 2.75 g if you want to speak in generation numbers today we're talking about 3g and 3.5g and There's a bit of ambivalence with that subject because well today if you talk to people in the industry They will say ah who cares about 3g, you know, it's dead anyway We have already today at the point where we have peak 3g So in the next few years the number of subscribers and the number of networks offering 3g services is no longer growing it's basically stagnating and Will turn downwards in the near future. So LTE 40 networks is basically what everyone is hot about The other reason not to look at 3g is that it's mind-bogglingly complex. It's not a single telephony system It's actually a toolbox to build arbitrary telephony systems And if you really wanted to start implementing it from scratch including all the lower layers including the phi including the The layer 2 and so on. I think it would be a waste of a lot of time actually So we do what we did with the GSM networks back then we use proprietary Base station hardware and we implement the higher level protocols and then if needed and if there's interest and contributions And so on we drive open source further down the stack and Also into the actual cells so One term that's going to be used here in this context is femtocells Quite some number of people may have heard about femtocells before in technical terms It's a base station which is called node B in in the UMTS Language world and a radio network controller, which is the BSC the base station controller in UMTS in one box and Using such femtocells or similar hardware. It's much easier to interface than if you would use a regular base station So that basically is sort of a path that we think is doable without spending many years of implementing obscure and complex Transport channels and bundles and mappings and whatnot. There's been a couple of talks about doing creative stuff with femtocells They've been talks by Kevin Nico and Ravi Shankar in 2010 2011 about security There's been a recent presentation this year at blackhead in the United States called adventures in femto land those talks focus on basically While the security of the femtocell itself breaking into such a cell Rooting it owning it doing creative things and then from there for example attacking the mobile operator or Attacking the privacy of subscribers by using such a femtocell as a man in the middle platform for example, but To my knowledge nobody has been talking about Free software or open source software to run a network with such femtocells or similar equipment So if we look at the UMTS architecture like you find it in a textbook or like in this particular slide or drawing from Kevin You will find several network elements all over the Network so lots of different elements with lots of different acronyms We have a mobile equipment Which is the telephone we have a radio interface called the uu interface we have actual base stations called node B And we have a base station controller That's called the radio network controller the RNC and then here we have on this boundary We have IUCS and IUP S interfaces that interface the actual base stations with or sorry the base station controllers With the core of the network Which is the mobile switching center the media gateway the serving gprs support node and then other elements here And this is actually the interface line which we have been implementing in recent months At the boundary between the access network or the radio access network and the core network on the other side of the slide So well, you could just get a note B and implement the protocol IUP this is what we did with GSM before we basically started here We only got the the actual BTS or node B and we implemented that protocol However, well and this protocol in UMTS is extremely complex and fairly low down the stack Just to give you an idea every single voice codec frame from a voice call that you receive It has three different classes of bits and each class of bits gets put into different UDP messages And then you get basically three flows of UDP messages and you need to synchronize and enter Mangle and re-interleave those bits in order to get to a speech codec frame So it's and I'm not even talking about the signaling plane So the lower you get in UMTS the more complex it gets let's try to avoid that and that's the kind of complexity that I like to avoid this is from the official spec about the UMTS spectrum it's It's an extremely obvious and self-explanatory slide, so I I leave it at this and say yeah, that's not what we want to do. So we we how can I say we Even though we don't like it We just use proprietary blocks blobs to to to implement that now the protocol stacking on those interfaces that we actually want to implement Is What I'm going to look at the next couple of slides the IU interface and by the name IU has no specific naming It's just the IU interface You could say the A the B the C the Z interface. It's the IU interface. It's split in CS and PS the circuit switched and packet switched circuit switch means telephony services and packet switch means data services and We're going to look at the the protocol stacking of those interfaces In the next couple of slides originally remember Well, basically maybe a good time to go back in history and in sort of history of mobile communications Which should be taught at every school I think including archaeology of protocols which No, honestly, honestly You need to do protocol archaeology if you want to implement certain interfaces today so On my blog you can find some posts about a couple of years ago where I had to basically write a parser for Microsoft Word for DOS text files To automatically extract snippets of as and one syntax for map version one, which is still used today So it's yes, it sometimes you really need to do archaeology So anyway, not for this but any as a when UMTS was specified. This is the late 90s This is when the first comm bubble basically got big This is when billions and billions of euros or dollars or whatever unit of currency was poured into the development of the Universal telephony mobile system the sorry universal mobile telephony system the UMTS Which could be basically be the the grand unifying theory of mobile communications and It was spilled on top of ATM of course because ATM was the Most shiny and brightest technology in the late 90s that all the universities were researching So if you look at the classic protocol stacking and you look at the individual interfaces The uu is the radio interface iub is between the node B and the RNC But this is the IUP is is actually what we want to implement So basically the left side of this slide is what is implemented in the proprietary base stations or femto cells that we are using and the Right-hand side of that slide is what we are implementing so we need to implement the protocol stackings here As you can see the protocol stack is deep and has many acronyms so To make things more complicated the femto cells that you can find on the market slightly different from the Real normal 3g architecture So if you try to compare this slide with that slide you will find some differences here The difference is that they introduce a security gateway, which is basically just ITU and 3g pp language for an IP sec gateway And you have a home node be gateway that doesn't really do anything useful Rather than putting messages from one protocol stack on the left to another protocol stack on the right with the underlying protocols Doing exactly the same thing, but being differently encoded And this is what you can see here basically the home node be gateway, which is part of the software that we implemented You can see basically well You have ran up. This is the protocol that really is Sort of what we interested in the radio access network application part And ran up in order to implement that there's several other protocols underneath And on the femto cell which is called H node be the home node be because for femto cells a marketing term and Specs can never use marketing terms. So they have technical terms So the femto cell Basically encapsulates ran up into our UA the ran up a Ran up user. What was it? Sorry. I'm Adaptation. Yes, the ran up user adaptation So the radio access network application part user adaptation on top of the SCTP the streaming control transfer protocol Which some may know is a protocols that's on the same layer as TCP or UDP, but has different properties and This RUA is implemented in the home node be gateway where it is replaced by M3 UA and sccp And then basically the same ran up message gets passed from left to right. So it's really You could think like a think of it like an IPv6 to IPv4 proxy If that's more an area that you're more familiar with okay, so yeah, I said there's some differences between an actual Regular old-fashioned UMTS base station like your public operator would use it and the home node be or femto cell that we like to use in this project At least initially and as that the main difference is that the RNC the radio network control is built in so a lot of the lower layer Protocols are terminated and we don't need to worry about that if we look at the practical protocol stacking again There is a lot of protocol layers here You can see the Mac layer the RLC layer the RRC layer and all the physical stuff underneath is all basically already implemented because it's part of the femto cell in this case so the protocol stacking now looks a little bit like this we have the home node be and the The the home node be gateway and then our core network elements already So the SGSN and the GGSN if you've looked at GSM in the past or GPRS Even the software that exists today and for many years in the osmo-com project we have implementations of those What we're missing is the home node be gateway and it's all the fancy new protocols here and some modifications. So Well, what do we need to do to actually implement This IUH protocol as I said, there's the different protocol layers. There's RUA. There is the ran up protocol and The HNBAP protocol and let's look at those protocols what they do and how can we implement them? I'm skipping a few slides in the middle because it's Illustrative if somebody wants to check the slides later, but it would go into too much detail at this point. So the ran up user adaptation layer Given the spec number above there. So if you look for that online, you can find the actual spec is a very simple connection oriented layer that Provides you the notion of a connection over and datagram Transport layer underneath it has very very few Operations and message types including connect which well surprisingly sets up a new connection Direct transfer which transfers data inside a connection disconnect to terminate a connection and connection less transfer to transfer data outside of a connection and of course an error indication in case Something goes wrong so We can have multiple connections in parallel over a signaling link and they are distinguished by a 24-bit context ID To differentiate those multiple parallel connections think of it like a port number In the case of UDP or whatever else you might want to compare it to so this in you know If you look at this and you really expect like ops, you know, it's nothing It's like, you know you implement like five six message types and and that's it Well, there's a bit more details to that, but we'll get back later to this the home node be a Application no home node be application part the HNBAP protocol Has a couple of more transactions Which basically serve for the registration of the cell to the network the registration of user equipment UE that's your mobile phone and some additional Messages so H&B is the home node be registration. We have registration request accept reject D registration. We have the same for mobile phones. We have some well more detailed transactions that I'm going to skip but also it's really very simple Conceptually, it's not very complex. You don't have like massive state machines or anything like that very few very limited messages Then we look at ran app. That's the radio access network application part. This is where your actual Signaling messages from the phone are tunneled through so if your phone registers to the network, you may have heard the term location update Where the phone basically registers to the network or updates its location with the network? That's the first message. She would see encapsulated inside ran app And transported to the core network element also things like PDP context activation if you activate a data connection to a certain APN over a cellular protocols all this is encapsulated in The ran app layer Also the the number of messages that we actually need is extremely limited again. It's a very short list It's not like hundreds of messages But the messages themselves I can be quite complex with nesting levels up to 12 14 layers deep, but we'll see that later on so we have a couple of transactions reset Well, I don't need to explain. It's a reset Initial UE message means a new phone has connected and it has sent us the first message that this phone has transmitted That's why it's initial message direct transfer is all the follow-up transfer IU release means while we're releasing a connection Some commands to configure the security the ciphering the encryption a paging command by which the network can initiate a transaction to the phone and rap assignment rap is the radio access bearer, which is basically a abstract notion of a Bearer able to transport communication. I mean if you come from classic telephony the bearer was well A analog voice channel if you go to ISD and the bearer is well, it's a 64 kilobit synchronous channel where you have a law U law inside and voice data or you have some HDLC or x75 or whatever Data inside in GSM. Well the bearer is typically voice Bearers with different voice codecs The same is in UMTS And Basically, you can configure those bearers in UMTS because that's a very Universal and flexible part of the system Now one of the protocols we have seen in the stack I'm just going back a couple of slides to reiterate that is the sccp which is introduced here the signaling Connection control part if I remember correctly, it's a protocol that's used a lot in core networks of Mobile operators, so if you look at roaming interfaces at classic as a seven interfaces think of the as a seven security talks And so on we've had here at CCC events a lot of the times This is a protocol that's very often used in a lot of different parts of telecom, but The problem is everywhere except This particular point in UMTS and GSM It is used only in connection less mode and this is the only point where it uses connection oriented sccp And therefore none of the existing free software implementations implemented You can look to yate you can look to the leave Osmo sccp the library that we have in the Osmo com project You can look at the mobis sense mobis sense Java stack For these protocols you can look at the Osmo sccp Erlang code basically no implementation exists, so we also had to Implement That part at least to the point to those features that are required Well once we have implemented all these protocols RUA sccp the RAN app the hnbap then we need to somehow Interface those protocols with the existing network elements that we have for GSM and They're sort of Several challenges in this area in the What people know as the open BSC project Actually the program that most people use is called Osmo and ITB the network in the box Which is called network in the box because it implements all the network elements that you need in one box or in one program Unfortunately, we need to separate those individual pieces which are all in one blob in order to Interface at the point where we want to interface So there's a separation of the MSc part and the BSC part needs to be done inside the network in the box We need the UMTS authentication and key agreement support And we need well the different protocols that I just mentioned and link them in on the SGSN side for the data services we need to Introduce some abstraction to basically Differentiate the packet data connections coming from GPRS networks and those coming from the new 3g networks or base stations that we are Supporting but that's all that manageable now The question is Do we really want to go for the full stack as it has been described or can we take some shortcuts? Do we really need to implement the full? SCCP for example, do we need to implement M3 UA? Which is another protocol layer in there can we basically simplify that The initial idea was if we go back to that slide to reduce the complexity I already mentioned this home node be gateway which basically passes ran up from left to right and Just changes the underlying encapsulation. Why don't we just continue using RUA up into the SGSN? And thereby avoid having to do SCCP and M3 UA Avoid having to implement more protocols without having any functional gain I mean it would just work the same way if we take RUA and we take it all the way into the SGSN So there's been some thinking along those lines, but the idea was to Well go sort of in a compromise So what we're using here is yet another protocol called SUA the SCCP user adoption And that replaces those two layers and keeps things a little bit simpler from the implementation side Okay, now we have all these different protocol layers And the integration into the core network elements now the fun starts we have a plan We know what needs to be done We know what needs to be done and now we actually need to do it So the theory was easy read a couple of specs find out more six seven messages Not too many transactions no complex state machines Okay, now a lot of the more modern telecom protocols use ASN one syntax. It's an abstract syntax notation for defining data Structures or procedures to be communicated and then you can use code generation tools to generate Code in your favorite language from this syntax doing all the marshaling and demarshaling of the messages That's at least what's the idea This is very different from what we used to do in the GSM world because GSM was specified in the late 1980s ASN one didn't exist to my knowledge back then or at least they didn't know about it And or they thought it was not something that you could do in Tell in a mobile phone at that time think about 8-bit microcontrollers and whatnot what they were using these days So the GSM messages basically you have you look at the spec and you see oh There's one bite this then there is a two-byte length field and then there is that and you need to implement that basically In your code based on the text trail Representation now for UMTS almost all the protocols and particularly these that we are looking here are specified in abstract syntax notation Which well on the one hand side you would say oh, yes great Now we don't need to write all this message encoding and decoding code And then we end up interpreting the spec different and we have sort of incompatible messages and whatnot That's true to some extent. Okay now What you need to know about ace and one is there are different encoding rules that define how the abstract syntax notation gets Converted into a concrete binary representation. There is a basic encoding rules be our there is All kinds of encoding rules as even Jason encoding rules these days There's also XML encoding rules, but what's used here in these specs is called aligned packed encoding rules This is a particular encoding rule that was not is not supported by Any of the ASN one compilers that exist in open source that generates C code So we first had to teach the ASN one compiler this encoding rule And the second big problem is the ASN one syntax used in those protocol specs uses a construct called information object classes Which is sort of well, you know a an interesting way how to express or how to have yeah a different notation on how to construct those messages and how to construct operations that have like an Initiating risk quest and successful response a successful error outcome or something like that And you can express that in a really nice way, but then you need a compiler and the code generator that can parse that and that's really Difficult in the free software world Within some constraints. I'll get into the details now the next thing is that The way how they use ASN one in these protocol specs ASN one being the abstract syntax notation is not abstract enough They need have another abstraction layer. So they use ASN one to describe Containers containers for information elements containers for messages containers for lists of information elements and Containers for pairs of information elements. It's very important. You cannot just have a list of two. No, you need to have a Pair that says well, this is a pair of two information elements Not sure why but somebody probably had his reasons for doing so now The point is basically you use the ASN one syntax and you generate some code for encoding or decoding And then you're not really done at that point Because then you basically oh, this is a list of containers and then you need to look into each of the containers and then call the decoder again for each of the elements in the list and then in there there might be another level of containers and you unpack it again so it's a little bit like Matushka or you know these Dolls nested in each other or somebody sends you a large packet and so on Well, so to illustrate that if you've ever seen ASN one, this is a relatively simple example describing authentication tuples or triplets or Quinn tuples Basically the authentication data that's used for authenticating subscribers in networks. This is what is used also in GSM It's relatively simple. So it basically tells you well There is an authentication set list which contains of a choice of either a triplet or a quintuplet list Each of those lists either have a length from one to five And then you have basically a sequence which is sort of a struct or a record of the below items in those lists That is how is and it should look like and how it normally looks like now In ran up and these protocols they first as that they define these containers. They say well Oh, we have so it reminds me a bit of you know some mathematicians It's like oh well we define we have this and then we have that and therefore we can construct such a new Well structure and whatnot. So basically they define first a container for protocol information Elements protocol IE's and then the protocol IE is the actual information element each element has an ID It has a criticality the criticality tells you whether if you do not understand such an information element should you ignore it? Should you reject it? Should you ignore it but report to the sender that you did not understand it despite Proceeding with your operation and then the actual value so and the value is an any type Which means there is another as and one syntax in that value that you then need to parse So you need to do this two steps in the code You first unwrap the containers and then you you decode what is inside the containers So working with ASN one really is not as simple and is straightforward and as automatic as it should be And you end up with messages looking like this in wireshark So believe it or not The content the useful content of this entire message is four bytes here the C0 Is The four bytes starting from C0 and those people who have seen an IP address an IPv4 address in a 192 168 address range will recognize those bytes here at the end So the C0 is 192 and so on and in order to communicate this message actually This is a message that tells us to which IP address something has been bound to in this case It's the GTP connection for communicating packet data And you see all these abstractions and encapsulations and the nested tree so it's like starts with well, okay This is an outcome. It is an outcome to the radio access bearer assignment. If you do not understand it, please reject it We have an assignment response It contains of a list of one item of protocol information elements this one item is a setup or modified list Which again has a criticality of ignore if you don't understand it Oh, no, sorry here. It says if you don't understand it. Just ignore it. Don't report an error It's quite interesting because you have a message that only contains one element and it says well You should reject the message if you don't understand it But then the information element says oh if you don't understand it, please ignore it So, okay Then inside the setup or modified list We have one item which is a protocol ID container IE container with one item Which has an item which is the setup of modified item, which is a radio access bearer modified item Which contains a radio access bearer set up a modified item with a radio access bearer ID of one and a transport layer address of this And in case you're wondering why the IP address has such binary crap in front it is because It's too difficult to express in as and one that this is an IP address You could not just define a type for an IP address that would be too simple No, you need to refer from this specification to another specification Another 3g specification which then refers to it ut x 213 Which tells you how you can encode any possible transport layer address in any possible network protocol on the planet? by using a hierarchical structure like OUI IDs or something like that and 35 means it's an ITF allocated address 001 means it's an IPv4 address and then you actually have the payload and you can see why a shark is too stupid to decode such brilliance Yeah, so Then it's hard to find example traces you want to implement the protocol and you want to find some example traces So this is a male. I actually I was looking for this this year in 2015. I was googling for IUH protocol traces and what did I find my own email from 2009 where I was asking for protocol traces But nobody ever responded So the situation is better today You can actually find I think two or three public p-cap files containing each maybe a handful of messages of those on those interfaces It's really it's odd You know these are protocols that are specified publicly. They're used in production Billions of users are using these networks, but nobody even has an example protocol trace of those protocols Okay now We have a couple of protocol traces. We understand the nesting level is deep. We are happy that wire shark decodes at least most of it Which by the way, we have to thank one particular Ericsson employee who is contributing those dissectors to wire shark and Yeah, so then we need to basically set up a toolchain to generate code for these from these as and once in Texas So there is an as and once see a compiler from Lef Vulcan It's good for a lot of things and I'm very happy it exists But it lacks money many if not most of the features that you need in the telecom world That's sort of unfortunate. There's no information object classes. There is no aligned PR support There's no support for prefixing the type names because we have three different protocols We want to use them from one program We need to prefix the type names because of course each of those three protocols has a type called protocol information element container But of course, it's not the same protocol information element container there is and you know each of the protocols has its own containers Yeah, so We had to add these pieces to the as and once see at least in a minimal way in order to use it and Unfortunately, I don't know anyone and I'm certainly no one who understands something about compiler theory So it's a little bit Challenging now Alternatives to as and one see well the the most complete toolkit you can find for working with as and one exists in the Erlang OTP system Well, I used this in the past for a lot of Osmo-com projects But well the fact is the C projects There are other developers and people that contribute and the Erlang projects. There is nobody that contributes except from me So I thought well, okay, it's very nice to work with as and one in Erlang But then if nobody contributes, I'd rather go the difficult see way and then have contributors in the project Also, of course in the Osmo-com project. We're mostly low-level C guys and people are very how can I say wary of virtual machines and and the at least perceived bloat they introduce The third alternative is to use a proprietary as and one compiler and in my day job. I actually use such tools, but Well in the first time on the first site you think well, okay, so it's a code compiler it compiles code and The copyright law says well code that was generated by a machine is not copyrightable because the act of automatically Compiling code from one form into another form does not make this that does not create a copyrightable work in as itself So basically you can take a proprietary as and one compiler Compile C code and then use the resulting C code in an open-source project without having any problems with the license of the as and one compiler That's true. However, all those compilers. I know and I think I know all of them they have a runtime library and that you only either get in as a binary library or You get it in source code. That's not available under a free software compatible license. So Well, no option to do that So we have to stick with as and one C Which as I said, I don't want to complain about it. It's a great project It's just doesn't do all the things that we need, but then it was not written for us So of course it doesn't do everything we need so, okay, luckily a research group at a urecom the European Communications research Organization has developed a patch for adding a line PR support to as and one C Unfortunately, it was against an old version because well, they probably don't want to submit this main line and they don't care about Porting it and and rebasing it. I did that It probably still needs some cleanup before it can be submitted But my goal is to have this excuse me to have this included in as and one C And also we found quite a number of bucks still in the in the code So it's it's in in the process of being improved now information object classes are hard at least for me Basically, we skip that I manually added the as and one syntax for not using Information object classes anymore. So I'm rewriting the as and one that's supposed to be there to guarantee that the encoding is a Well, so circumference sort of the purpose the idea is you take the as and one from the spec use it You don't modify it, but I'm modifying it because well the tools we have are not good For what we want to do type refixing is done now. We have the information element containers Urecom has another idea about this. They have a long Perl script. I recommend you not to look at it. It's It consists of a never-ending sequence of regular expressions Basically graphing out certain parts of the as and one syntax without really formally parsing it or lexing it or tokenizing it And then based on those regular expressions generating C code that then you can use with as and one C and link against it And surprisingly it works surprisingly good actually We had to teach it all the things that we needed in addition to that but really it's it it works surprisingly now Putting the things together Copy and paste the as and one syntax from the 3gbp.doc files because 3gbp specs Are published as PDF files and as word documents and you don't get the actual syntax as a text file You have to copy and paste from each page make sure you don't get intermixed like headlines or something like that Then you use the hacked up patched as and one C to generate C code We you have to modify it to make a shared library of the the runtime for the as and one compiler Because we have against recent taxes that we want to mix and that doesn't really work with how as and one C works We use as and one struct to remove this what I call the obfuscation layer these containers We write some code to dispatch the messages and then finally we see some messages So we have those h&p register Initial UE message and all these things. This is what you can now get from osmo ioh.git It's a git repository on the osmo comm server which contains all this code It takes a long time to compile because as and one C generates one C file and one header file for each type And they have lots of types in those specs So you end up with like 300 400 C files and header files Compiled into a 5 megabit megabyte binary and then finally you want to get four bytes in a message So well, where do we go from here? We have a couple of other things to do One interesting question is and I'm going to do a demo in a few minutes is what kind of hardware can we use? Well the hardware that I currently use for this development is undisclosed manufacturer very expensive It's not actually a femto cell. It's a real cell Costs several thousand euros not really suitable for hackers. However Many consumer great femto cells have also this ioh protocol with the same stacking The problem is they're locked down In a way that they have certificates and connect over ipsec to the operator network and so on so if somebody can break This ipsec layer and insert his own certificate or disable the ipsec all together Then you can talk ioh to the osmo ioh and then you can use that hardware This is something that a couple of people have looked at and hopefully in the near future We will have one or two femto cells that people can use Inexpensively in order to use the software at the moment as that unfortunately. It's not possible so well as a summary before I go into the demo of demonstrating it and you having Basically a look in in the marvelous depth of the wire shark decodes And ioh is conceptually very easy to understand the lack of good as and one tools is the biggest problem in the free software world You need to overcome these containers and in the end you spend 90% on the tire of your time in improving the tooling fixing the tooling and Working around these level layers of abstraction rather than doing the actual functionality We have started the work on the Cornetwork components the integration I was hoping that I could do a full demo with a call or a full demo with actually having a data connection Over the setup that I have here over the test setup. I'm almost there The signaling everything gets established the authentication works But then somehow the data the actual ip data doesn't want to come through And that is under investigation But I'm sure it will be Available rather soon. Okay, so now before we go for q&a. Let me just do a quick demo and let me show you how This looks at the moment Okay, this is still a protocol trace. I'm Basically that was running in the past I'm just going to leave this here on the left-hand side I'm going to leave the on the right-hand side. So what we can see is basically on the Left-hand side we have the RUA encapsulated messages This is basically the I UH interface between the home node B and the home node B gateway Then we have the Osmo I UH home node B gateway invisible in between here That's the program running in the background And then the other side is this protocol stacking here where we see we have the SUA this sccp user adoption rather than the RUA on the left-hand side The ran up messages are the same on left and right is basically just converting What I'm going to start in the background is Is basically This is the wrong window. I I thought I had prepared everything just yeah, exactly good. That's the one part That's the other part. Yeah, so I'm going to start The I know the font is too small. You don't need to read that. I'm just going to tell you the The I can make it larger, but then we won't see really a lot. What's this? Why is it not? Cannot listen on So good now, that's the demo effect Why on earth is it not binding?  I'll try it very quickly So I'm trying this it does it cannot bind to the socket. It's probably my IP address has disappeared on the laptop While I've been talking here and now it wants to bind to an address that doesn't exist anymore and That seems exactly what has happened Don't shout you pseudo It will not like you. I can tell you Yeah Okay, now Now this should do the trick I'm starting this in Valgrind because I'm still debugging. Yeah, now it's actually running Okay, now we do the same on the other side. We go for a huge font size And I'm starting the H&B gateway. We see a yellow line that a connection has been established. So now We are waiting for the initial message from the From the home node B to arrive We should see it here at the bottom of this trace We should see a couple of reset requests basically the home not be this other the the not be here is Trying to reconnect all the time to its home not be gateway Of course, there's some backup some back off included and given that it was not connected for the fast 40 minutes or so it will take some time to reconnect to the SDSN and then I can have the phone that I have here Is there somebody somewhere at the mic mic to please So if 3g is so annoying why not skip it and go directly to LTE? well As a couple of reasons for that first of all some people really need it in terms of there's an actual demand for for 3g Small networks of 3g cells in applications where it's used the second reason is it's Relatively limited incremental step because the layer three protocols of GSM and UMTS are the same and that's why basically we can Use reuse the call control and the mobility management all those parts from GSM reuse them with 3g I'm not saying we shouldn't do the same with LTE as well But they are actually quite a number of projects already involved in that area and LTE well to be frank It's so much IP. It's not really telecom anymore So You know, I've always interested in the more obscure things that people are not really looking so much at IP I found IP boring when I stopped working on that filter in 2004 I said IP while everyone knows about IP. That's you know, we need something more interesting Okay Microphone one, please So you say that you have a lot of trouble passing as and one but if it's always the same containers Can't you simply have a static dump of the binary crap before and after that stuff and ignore the whole parsing part? You probably could but then how can I say my code aesthetics? Demand How can I say demand better behavior from code? I've right then just doing something like that So yes, you could probably but I'd rather have a more clean way of doing that And continue on microphone one. You said that UNTS or 3g is a toolbox for creating arbitrary Telephony systems while my knowledge tells me that GSM is a much more rigid standard But if you could please elaborate on that concept of arbitrary networks Okay Well, I could illustrate that very much with a certain protocol trace and okay UMTS basically when UMTS was specified. They didn't know where the journey was going to basically It was not clear that the internet would be the thing that we know as of today They didn't know that smartphones would exist. They didn't know that IP data services are the type of data services that people are interested in rather they were thinking of In generic terms, so it could have been that we needed all x 20 Sorry x 25 over over a UMTS It could be that you know people wanted to do ATM over UMTS It was not clear that circuits which services would basically go downhill like they did Meanwhile with I voice over IP telephony and so on and it was not clear that modem calls or actual Video calls that exist in UMTS would not be the future So it was very unclear and they try to define something that's as flexible as possible to do Anything that you could imagine and if you look at the way how the layers are structured and the fact that you have transport channels and transport channel bundles and radio access bearers and so on basically the structure and Even only to transmit voice again. You have to set up With AMR for all the codecs you need to configure in the physical layer. I think For the three different bit classes ten different combinations. So you end up with something like 30 Parameters or 30 sets of parameters that you need to communicate to the lower layers only to configure it for establishing a voice channel And then the transport channels that where the bits are included The payload like how many bits fit into one frame doesn't match with your codec bit rate because they didn't know what codecs They would use so it's really it's all arbitrary and with padding and universal. So it's not It's not like GSM GSM is very simple and straightforward Okay, we have five minutes left So we will have two quick questions from the internet because everybody on the stream you can actually ask questions on the chat Please okay. Thanks. Um, we have two questions that you said the first one is if there would be interest in Implementing, you know the whole stack in a safer non-vm based language if the tooling was good enough Well, I mean I it depends on I don't want to find language wars here I would have been tempted to do things in Erlang But then as that the the question is who else would have been tempted And I don't think I mean the point is what we're trying to do now is to basically use most of what we already have with the least additional effort And I don't think anyone will want to start from scratch all over again but if they do so I would be happy to see a clean implementation, but I'm not so sure that will happen Okay, thanks, and the second question is Why don't we just start over from a clean slate with hardware and software and do a basically a hundred percent nerd and hacker driven mobile networks Sorry 100% nerd slash hacker driven networks. Ah Well, I mean the point of implementing all those specs is you want to use the existing devices out there You want to use the existing billions of mobile phones that exist on the planet? And if you want to talk to them then you need to implement those protocols and those systems that they implement If you want to start from something else and do things from scratch. Well, yes, you can do that But then keep in mind that you will have very bulky end user equipment with large like clusters of FPGAs and ESPs Draining batteries having fans inside because you will not be able to implement your system in the same level of energy efficiency and the same level of you know asics and and optimized silicon processes and so on like Is the case for the billions of existing devices? Okay, thank you. All right, Walter. Yeah, thank you


Is this going though? It's going okay and feel free to drink Yeah, we should just feel comfortable about it but the way the way that I think it would start Would be that I would say hello on your mossy and welcome to the We are the problems podcast, okay for the first one, but basically I'd be putting these on YouTube yeah taking the audio and releasing the audio as a as a podcast, okay I don't know what you call a video podcast. No one has Nailed a good vlog a vlog or a vlog cast maybe Vodcast yes, that's accurate, but it's really inelegant the way it would work is that what I might as well just just do it now I've been writing comedy Well, we've both been doing our thing in the entertainment industry for we've been aware of each other like 25 years Yes for 16 years. I've been writing with a Writing partner. Yep, and I split up with someone about two years ago, and I've been doing okay Yeah, I really miss writing material with someone else right another Comedy writer. Yeah, which would be great, but You know they're hard to come by so I thought why not why don't be promiscuous?  Yeah, and that would mean that I could also write material in real time with friends and Former colleagues from other disciplines, which is why I wanted to meet up with you So thanks so much for being my first. Thank you. I think I'm gonna call all of them a pilot Yeah, endless pilot. Yeah, the we are the problems comedy writers podcast with Neil Mosse Pilot zero zero the endless pilot. Yeah, the preparation never ends. Yeah, and I'm gonna put cap on because it's the hottest day of the year Yes I've got two things That I can offer you one is that any Material that comes up Is ours. Yeah, and there's videographic evidence Yeah, and if we wanted to find You online, do you have a place online? Just just mark a right on Face face book really and I put the a in because Everyone thought we're not everyone, but I was the guy from Tau See I didn't think that we would get such a great filming position. We're in the new Sussex pub, which is gorgeous Yeah, it is in Lansing. I Write jokes about topics But I have negative feelings towards yes That's where the comedy comes from. Yes, and if you go deep enough into the subject You can see the point where it goes beyond Pointing my finger at it. You realize that you are the problem, right with the problem And I've got like this permafrost Of about 20 topics that I haven't I haven't tackled. Okay. I've got indecisiveness Black tie that might be a good one where those regularly. Yeah plastics My email inbox YouTube energy companies theater Personal finances electric cars privatized trains I haven't had a single near-death experience be ironic if I died just after this but would So that wouldn't that but that wouldn't still wouldn't be near-death experience. That'd just be a death experience shuffle the pack These are topics that I haven't even been able to look at right. Okay. Okay personal finances. I've got this word association for All aspects of Right personal finance bang banks are greedy Banks are a hassle We always attach emotion To banks Like like it's like it's like it's a personal insult to us or they've personally got it in for us And we need to learn to move away from that and learn to move away from feeling aggrieved By the actions of a bank right because they're just doing what they do they do what they do I'm but but we know this is what they do That's the trick with banks is to not take it personally which is difficult to do when you've been indoctrinated with Pigs and money boxes and stuff when you're a kid can't see about it because we can cut this out you I Don't know what how would you describe yourself? It is been sent to your job Even though I've known you for 25 years I would consider myself a professional entertainer, but somebody wants to describe me as party Elvis So if you listen to an Elvis or watch an Elvis concert and listen to an Elvis concert He didn't do many of these biggest hits So quite often he would he wouldn't do suspicious minds. He never did Viva Las Vegas He never did those songs But I figure most people the Elvis album that they might have above all else's Elvis number ones Did you have to get the the costume and the We're gonna. Yeah, the costume. Well, I got a cheaper costume to begin with But but then I then got some professional costumes made by a company called being cutting states And they're made from the same patterns as Elvis's own the exact replicas So they're costed almost two grand each and that was in 2004 But people would like to see the authenticity of it. So you all kind of got our recognize that costume In Vegas, you might go out during love me tender and take six minutes giving everyone a kiss and a handshake He wouldn't stand on a table You know getting Mick Jagger stole getting everyone to interact. He never did that whereas I do that that must wreck the Two thousand pound jumps. No, no, no There's a reason why they were designed in the way they were designed So Elvis could do these moves with freedom. Yeah, and they were designed on He wanted the freedom to move in the way that he could in a karate suit because he did karate moves on stage So those jumpsuits which are obviously very open down to just above the navel They're actually very free The next one on the list is pounds Oh our Paracel. Oh, so are you all right? I can't plug you. So our Tents blown away So quite near the coast here in Yes, this is wonderful. Look at this. We've got fish goose on chicken goose on. Thank you So we've got more personal finance terms. Is there anything about cash that is annoying or useless or Unnatural coins Right I had this discussion my son We've got the we've I think we're agreed that the one pound coin is the the best coin the two-pound coin is It's just really annoying. No, just the look of it itself. It feels a bit gawky and awkward There's something about the one pound coin the proportions are right. It feels like one pounds. Yeah, two-pound coin It's got ideas above its station. Is it twice as big? I don't think it is. That's another Reason why it's a bit rubbish. You know, it wants to be a fiver Really in an ideal world.  I do a job. You need something small. I'm your man Get a little bit more than that You can't actually you're just all you're useful for things that cost one pound fourteen That's where you come into play one pound fourteen. That's not that much more than a pound Do you feel like you have savings if you if you have debt? Yeah, which is crazy But even the even the debts are outweighed by other Savings yeah, and stuff that are you in credit in life All right generally. Yeah, but I've got I've got Nothing too Scientific to base that on I feel ahead But if there were some Catastrophe, yeah, I don't cavemen felt that you know, I've got this cave But if there's some tsunami or Rockfall What gets that how would the cave men and we assume it is the men that did this Allocate the caves because there must have been some caves that were nicer than other caves, right? So it must have been in the pecking order You think there's a system?  So there's a bit of privacy the other ones I mean you're just on show it's up cave for the little ones Yeah, I Think they did but that would have been allocated through Brute force and strength so so the cave man that would have had that yeah He would have been the cave man that that were was able to kill The bison on the buffalo And so providing food so therefore they would have been different so so it came from brute force All status would have come from Lord of the Flies So I think it's only relatively recently that society has stopped being Lord of the Flies So money money is the invention of wimps to gain control over people that might punch you in the mouth Yeah, and then because what happens when people get lots of money when they move far away from everyone else Round other wall around their house or detached house or a gated community To prevent force taking it away. Yeah, yes Yes to prevent them from being punched in the mouth by someone tougher because they know if it came to that They would lose so they have to put back the value on that And but so they apply themselves to move into an alternate system So on our bank notes it should be I promise to pay the bearer one punch in the mouth if it was done like that We we would be so in debt But we would be so in debt because we're wimps, right people wimps created money To to control to control the world and so they didn't get a punch in the mouth and to keep tough people at bay No, I've got some more words here. It might be easier. Should we just pick one more? You pick my cards Cards, okay. Yeah, we've not talked about cards. Yeah It felt really special when I got my first Money card and yeah, there's a choice of plastic things that you could get we had a count with them Hallyfax it was a building society so there were no gimmicks like that and I can remember as a kid looking at Nat West And I want to like a comedy pig. I'm not sure branding agency woods a line of bank with Right, I'm not sure that no that wouldn't be the obvious icon. Oh, yeah, but that was a time when It's all about getting rich.  Yeah, would you do you do that? I don't all the time, but I think there's something good that your car you have to penetrate a machine that there is a physical Union You're looking at the figure as you're doing. Yeah, but then I'm now picking out the bacteria from everyone Else's been king You don't do the knuckle No, the knuckle press. Oh God, that's genius. Why am I not doing that? Well, I need to do the knuckle press thing Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've got I always do that. Hey, this is the circle. So you're back to the punch in the face. There we go That is that's I'm keeping it. I'm punching That's what I'm doing. There we go. That is a perfect place. Yeah, I love it I feel so much better now about this I think we found we found the problem and there's no shame in being the jester and being a wimp because your nose is straight Right, thanks so much for sort of interrupt your sweet potato chip. Do you want to go for it? Thanks to the new Sussex pub in Lansing for hosting this Thanks so much for watching if you've got this far in the video if you could click on The thumbs up just to let us know that you got this far. That'll be a awesome thing an awesome gift Why not click on the subscribe button? YouTube unleashes all kinds of Yeah When you hit a thousand subscribers, so we're undoing everything we talked about now are you begging for these gifts? All I'm saying is I will never reach a thousand I don't think so gonna 800 to go but just taking me one notch closer would mean the world to me Validate me electronically as a completely made up arbitrary figure. So thank you for subscribing Mark, thanks so much. Don't forget if you want to see Mark electronically online the link to his Facebook home is there Yeah, just search mark a right Elvis and you'll find me Remember to put the a and otherwise you will get the guy from Tau. Thanks so much for listening And we'll be back with another problem to go through on the next video in the playlist. Thanks again


I'll sit in front of this, as you can see, typical agroforestry parkland from West Africa and talk about our research which, as Steve mentioned, was actually just about to appear online in world development in the next issue, volume 66, which will come out at the end of this month but it's been available since the end of last year. This research is based on work essentially done by a PhD candidate called Karen Rousseau, a French PhD registered at the University of Montpellier, on a jointly financed, jointly supervised PhD project by C4 and SIRAD that was started just over two years ago. So Karen's actually in her third year of doing her PhD and has been a pleasure to work with her in West Africa and I hope we'll be able to continue working with her. So West Africa, in terms of the distinguishing features of the context within which this research was taken, West Africa is very different from many other parts of Africa by virtue of what I call its distinguishing feature of having landscapes of exchange, quite different from the settler colonies that distinguish many other parts of East and Southern Africa. The colonization was also based very much on looking at ways to enter into many of the trading patterns in that region with varying degrees of success and our research is specifically focused on the sheer nut value train. Now you may know the sheer nut vitillaria paradoxa is a tree that occurs in many of the parklands across about 4,000 square kilometers in the West African region and stretching almost as far as Uganda and East Africa. It is one of the dominant trees that is kept by farmers. It's not planted, it's protected by farmers in their fields and represents a major source of both fats used by households for cooking but also a very significant source of income, particularly for women. So this research is very much built in terms of its theoretical foundations on the global value chain approach that's been developed by Garefi, Peter Gibbon, Stefano Ponto with regard to many other agricultural commodities but with a number of distinctions which I'll go on to explain. The research specifically looked at one particular value chain which is the predominant value chain associated with the significant growth in trade that has occurred in West Africa in the last 15 years and this has been associated with its use as what is called a cocoa butter equivalent. The chocolate industry worldwide, a multi-billion dollar industry, has been particularly since an EC directive allowed to substitute the use of cocoa butter with these cocoa butter equivalents and the best equivalent is in fact the sheer butter and this is what has driven the enormous growth in demand and we've seen based on the paper we've done and analysis of data between 2000 and 2005 there was a three-fold increase in the demand and between 2005 and 2012 a 12-fold increase in the demand to meet the cocoa butter equivalent demand globally for the chocolate industry and I just want to make a distinction vis-a-vis the much smaller this represents only 10% of the trade of the direct sourcing so it's a very different value chain associated with the cosmetics industry and for those female members of the audience you may have heard of the Body Shop or Oxytani who are the two British or Anglo-American and French companies that produce many products used by women in the cosmetics industry but this is a relatively small and quite different value chain this value chain that we did the research on is the predominant trade which is looking at the trade in unprocessed nuts and we used both the global value chain approach but also transaction cost theory as a way of trying to understand whether globalization has had any impact in terms of long-established patterns of trading by women in the West African region through local periodic markets but also regional markets with the West African literal where the largest demand occurs for particularly cosmetic products so we looked and in terms of the sample size a sample of almost 200 traders in western Burkina Faso scattered across 13 provinces in that part of the country which is one of the most significant areas where the parklands occur and where trade has existed based on archival evidence that goes back at least 200 years and we suspect probably much longer back in time in terms of the links to the expansion of Islam in terms of the key findings that I just really want to highlight we found that globalization has had little impact on the structure and organization of the upstream share value chain it is still largely organized as it was during the colonial period by a small oligarchy of wholesalers based in Bobo de Olasso which is the regional capital and the second largest city in the country after the capital Wagedubu it's based on a complex pyramidal networking system of purchasing share nuts which link the women collectors of the share nuts and then who sell in the local periodic markets through a series of small medium bulkers up and traders who then sell on eventually to the wholesalers and they in turn are now linked since early 2000s with three transnational corporations one a Swedish Danish corporation called Orhus Olja Kalsjum another a Malaysian company called IOA Lordus Kroklen which is part of a parent company based in Malaysia called IOA Corporation and the third with the very lovely name three Fs, Fats, Foods and Fertilizers which is actually an Indian transnational corporation and these are the three companies which have set themselves up in Bobo de Olasso since between the period 2000 and 2005 what our research has highlighted however is they have not been able to change in any way the structure of that sourcing of the share nuts it's exactly the same patterns which have been maintained unless the same families that existed since early 1900 when the colonial trading firms were first set up to trade in this commodity so globalization has not really had a major impact the impacts that we found from our research have largely been in terms of the growth in the volume of share nut that has been traded the prices which have been gained and it's growing importance as a source of income particularly for both women producers at the end of the value chain upstream but also all the actors who are part of this and some of the preliminary research we've done suggests that there's a quite equitable distribution of the benefits along the value chain perhaps counter-intuitively and surprisingly so we argue in the paper that in fact we should recognize more clearly the role that these wholesalers even if they may be distinguished by an oligarchy actually pay in actually continuing to support distribution of benefits along the value chain and the critical role they play now what is the relevance of this research vis-a-vis global value chain research more broadly clearly the share nut value chain in West Africa bucks the normal trends which are associated with most agricultural commodities which have been distinguished over the last 20, 30 years by increasingly trends towards buyer driven markets where we've seen specialization, the introduction of standards social and environmental standards, increased volumes shorter time frames associated with many of the trade in these products and we've seen associated with this in many commodities the vertical integration, the best example probably is the international trade in bananas where we see the companies who are involved in this are involved from simply growing the bananas all the way through the shipping to the sale at their retail outlets in other parts of the world this has not occurred in the case of the share value chain and we explore in the paper many of the reasons why we think this is the case why is the share nut value chain so distinct and we identify a number of reasons one is we're saying it's clearly not a plantation crop unlike cotton, oil palm, bananas, rubber, many other commodities which are associated with land use, land cover change very often clearing forests these are traditional customary agroforest departments that do not involve any change in the existing land use patterns or not significant changes and we think there's potential here to explore and do further research in terms of some of the climate change benefits that might be associated with these customary land use patterns secondarily, there is no evidence anywhere throughout West Africa after a hundred years of scientific attempts to regenerate and plant the share nut of any share nut plantations it is not a plantation crop during British colonial rule in Northern Ghana there were attempts since the 1920s to regenerate this tree unsuccessfully there are current new efforts to do so in parts of West Africa the other aspect which distinguishes the share nut are the complex access rights to the share trees which are quite distinct from the access rights to the land on which the trees grow and this has had a major importance in terms of structuring and the stability and resilience and continuity associated with the share nut value chain however, we've also done some research we've just submitted a manuscript to the Journal of Agrarian Change which is actually looking at how new patterns of trade associated with global trade and internal migration patterns in Bukkina Faso are actually changing the customary arrangements vis-a-vis access to the trees so that is something where the global trade seems to be having an impact in addition, what we found with the share nut as with many other agricultural commodities in Sub-Saharan Africa there is the classic atomicity there are very small transactions small quantities that are being traded very often over large distances very often involving access along difficult infrastructure roads that are in poor condition and we also have the problem associated with as I think you've heard from Lu Versho the major significance of inter-annual climatic variability which also influences the variability of the fruiting patterns of the shear trees in the parklands all of these mitigate against any attempt to get vertical integration and because of the additional transaction costs associated and one of the reasons that explain we think why there has been the continuity in this pyramidal sourcing pattern it's actually the most efficient cost-effective way of sharing the burden of the costs across this complex network of different actors working to ensure that you can get from the women collectors and producers in the local periodic markets to the wholesalers in Bobby Villalasso and this is one of the reasons why we think this continuity has occurred in terms of the future research plans that we have we just submitted, led by Sirad a proposal that's called Globalizations in a Nut Shell opportunities and challenges for women shear producers and shear parklands in West Africa which we are hopeful will be financed to enable us to continue doing some additional work focusing on three main themes that have come out of this research one is we recognize as per the great anthropologist I think he's deceased now Michel Rolf Truyo who used to be based at both University of Chicago but also I think John Hopkins who did some fascinating work on the role that history and historians play in silencing the past and also on looking at anthropology in an age of globalization and he was the scholar that I have read who recognized that globalization is just one of a number of different factors that actually influence decision making by resource users that are always mediated in a local context he also recognized globalization as a fragmented and incomplete process and I think our research suggests this is the case why is that so? our research has also highlighted that the context within which our findings that have now been published suggests this continuity may now in fact be also subject to additional change one is the fact that the European Union falling on from its earlier directive to allow the use of cocoa butter equivalents in chocolate manufacture has just adopted a new regulation since November last year regarding the labeling of vegetable oils which now requires greater precision in understanding which vegetable oils are used in which products this as with other agricultural commodity chains as I've suggested may result in the emergence of new standards that may result in the usual trend towards a bio-driven market time will tell whether that is actually going to be the case the other factor is that many of the agroforestry parklands within which these trees occur are increasingly subject to growing pressures to convert them to intensify the production of agricultural crops and or meet the growing demands for local energy particularly firewood and charcoal and we think these different trends may pose additional threats in terms of the future of these parklands and the future sustainability as a source of livelihoods so I think Steve's just giving me a reminder I'll stop there and you might have some questions thanks very much thank you Andrew we have questions from colleagues Will Hello, thanks Andrew very interesting story I have a it's an interesting comparison to look at your case to for instance Brazil nut in the Bolivian Amazon where you have a similar case Brazil nut which is for which the demand has really increased over the last 20 years or so where you can sort of I'm not sure if you can talk about an influence of globalization except that demand has increased tremendously I think a lot of the conditions were the same but it has really sort of the whole value change has changed dramatically basically initially because when demand increased sort of the oligarchic intermediaries they invested tremendously and then following that you had a big wave of land reform and forestry reform which really sort of dramatically changed on who controls the production and the trade of the whole product which that sort of a comment of two cases that are very different but then my question is what really influences why globalization does not cause the changes I guess it's because the whole production of the product because Brazil nut can also not be easily produced as is in the case of Shia Butter and changes do occur if you have all these sort of I guess tenure and governance reforms related to the value change well I think it's an interesting point our ultimate ambition that we've talked about particularly with Pablo in terms of the flagship 5 plans ambitions and also with Bimbika Esther and others is that we would ultimately like to try and mobilize additional funding to do a global comparative study of up to six non-timber forest products which have now particularly in the last 20 years entered into global trade but you know the gap between our ambitions in terms of funding and actually securing the funding sometimes as we all know means we have to modify our ambitions I think one of the distinguishing features in the Shia nut value chain is that the fact that the three transnational corporations have established themselves in the region has been linked to their ambitions to try and get greater vertical integration their polemics about wanting to see greater benefits accruing to the women producers but it actually hasn't happened nevertheless they still play a critical role in terms of being the source of financing for these oligarchic wholesalers and then the distribution of that pre-financing that occurs across the whole of the pyramidal networking for the sourcing Shia nut so they still play an important role and I think in terms of the academic literature questioning the assumed benefits of participation in global markets being necessarily better than participation in local or regional markets I'm still ambivalent in terms of the sense that I think the Shia nut value chain clearly shows there are both advantages to participating in the global market but the distinguishing feature in the data we have from Ghana and Bukina is that roughly 50% of the total production is to meet subsistence needs as a cooking fat but also a little bit in cosmetics and only 50% is actually entering in global trade so it's still harnessing the opportunities that both local, regional and global markets are affording what might be changing which is some early anecdotal evidence we have is the growing influence of oil palm coming from I'll give you one guess which country this is coming from come on no Indonesia an oil palm is increasingly appearing on the African market and for example I know several women associations that are now substituting the use of Shia to mix with Shia butter in the local production manufacturer of soaps so the influence of cheap oil palm as an alternative vegetable oil may also have an influence so we'll see and clearly I try to make the distinction between the value chain we focused on which is the unprocessed nuts as distinct from the cosmetic value chain which is now distinguished more and more by direct sourcing and more a typical agricultural commodity chain but this represents a relatively small proportion of the total trade so they can coexist and this is again where the complexities come in one last factor that we would like to do more research on is that within the last decade a new multi-stakeholder platform called the Global Shia Alliance has emerged particularly with support that's come from USAID in West Africa which I think provides an exciting new opportunity to actually try and assess and look at the role of collective action particularly may play in terms of the role that women's associations and women's producer groups could continue to play to have influence in terms of how this value chain as it evolves and changes in the future may be structured but that's still research to be undertaken Teddy Thank you under it's interesting story what I would like to know is what is the role of this Shibata cultivation in the livelihood income portfolio because if we take example in Java for example some of farmers when they want to involve in the globalization for example in certifications they know there are some potential incentive for them to do that so is there any chance for them to improve the incentive for example the economic benefits from joining global markets in the Shibata case At the moment Teddy as I try to explain one of the distinguishing features of this unprocessed sheer knot is that there are no existing systems of certification in place however the global sheer alliance has now actually submitted a voluntary first draft of a set of standards vis-à-vis sheer knots and it has not yet been adopted across the industry or across the board so we'll wait to see but I would express a cautionary note the results of C4's research particularly vis-à-vis certification with regard to other commodities whether it's timber, whether it's bioenergy feedstocks suggests that the introduction of new global certification schemes may actually mitigate against the interests of small and medium enterprises because the technical and transaction costs associated with compliance are too high and it's only benefiting larger transnational corporations so I think we need to be careful in assuming that certification necessarily will bring greater benefits except perhaps to the three transnational corporations but that's again research that remains to be looked at in terms of the importance the published literature an American scholar published work a few years ago from Mali that estimated that 55% of revenues retained by women in that country come from the sale of sheer knots our own research in western Bukina Faso found that 94% of all households are involved in collecting sheer knots for their own use and or sale of which 60% are selling so it's involving a large number of there isn't a village in Bukina Faso where you will not find someone who's collecting those things you know should we have one more question thanks Andrew for interesting speech I would like to ask perhaps in the the value chains of Sina there is a kind of local institution or producer organization to strengthen their involvement or their benefit in the value chains and also a way to accommodate or to decrease the cost of certification at this axis because it's very important to have kind of group, kind of institution and organization for what them and a bit in the case of furniture in Cipara actually the I think it's one thing that important to notice that a woman is more fragile to the global shock of market if there is a decrease of furniture demand at the global level woman is more fragile than man but not the case in the Sina no I think Harry I would concur with your last remark I think this is a classic gendered value chain and again the historical evidence is unequivocal for at least 215 years women have been the collectors, the processors and the sellers of sheer knot and it's really only since 2000 that we started to see a restructuring of the local and regional trade and the growing involvement of middle men it's colloquialism but it's very appropriate in this case as the market has grown and the global demand for this particular niche market in terms of your first question I think for the value chain associated with the unprocessed knots there's very little evidence that there has been any effective collective organization amongst women producers however in contrast there has been a lot of effort placed on supporting the emergence of women associations, women producer groups in both Bokinifaso, in Ghana but also in neighboring Benin in other countries in West Africa but associated with the cosmetics industry and the pharmaceutical uses but as I said this is still a much smaller market and here again you've got very clear lines based on the colonial histories the French companies are working in the former French territories and the Anglo-American companies are working in the former British territories it's almost like the map of Africa has been redrawn again in terms of these divisions but time will tell whether these associations may emerge with the unprocessed knot trade but at the moment no for the interesting discussion thank you


the word. How are you going out into your community into your other board members communities and saying we're underrepresented here. This is what we're looking for. What are you doing? So again, we haven't done that yet. So we're still doing our own work and there's a really incredible journal out there journal publication that we're using as the basis of our work, which is different ways that white supremacy show up in organizational systems. And I'm going to give you one example. I used to run our board in such a way that it was like, I have an idea. We're going to implement. We're going to go with it within 24 hours. Instead realizing through that article that we all study as a board, realizing that that kind of method of not slowing down and allowing for input is a huge way that white supremacy continues systematically in organizations. And there's there's probably 12 different points that we identified that we're guilty of, right? And so we're working through those 12 different points. So when we go to our curated networks and say we don't have you represented, we want to have you represented. And these are the 12 points of work around white supremacy that we've already done and that we hope to continue. So it's it is our one little hope that by approaching people that way, we will and inviting them to serve on our board that we will be communicating that this is not a tokenizing issue, that this is truly an inclusion issue, because those are almost different sides of the same coin, right? Wanting to include everyone. Yet, can we get there without tokenizing?


The Cube at OpenStack Summit Atlanta 2014 is brought to you by Brocade. Say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade. And Red Hat. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. Hey, welcome back everyone. This is day one wrap up of three days of live coverage of The Cube here at OpenStack Summit, live in Atlanta. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events, you can see them from the noise. I'm John Furrier. Here with Stu Miniman. Stu, we're wrapping up day one, a long day east coast. It's hot in Dallas. I'm looking out the window here. I see the CNN building. Eat your heart out CNN with The Cube. We love coming to Atlanta. What did you think of day one? My first impressions were good vibe, just not seeing the customers. Stu, I'm just not seeing the customers.  But I've just not seen the customers. Same old, same old. Certainly a momentum on the foundation side. I feel that that's a big story. The foundation and the technical committee had a board meeting last night and word has it. That's a solid meeting. A lot of solidarity between the communities and overall just the attendance is off the charts. Big news there. Piston Cloud doing a telco deal. Outside of that, just again, a love fest. Not a lot of mud slinging going on. What's your take? 4,600 people double what there was last year. Icehouse is out, but I really think we are poised to go into the trough of disillusionment. There are, you know, gaffes in the solution set. Neutron has some bugs out there. And I agree with you 1,000%. The companies that are talking about what they're doing are the big service providers, companies like, you know, big, big, big companies that you know like, you know, Disney, Wells Fargo and the like. And there are plenty of people trying this out and there's a lot of people here trying to figure out what OpenStack is.  And I think it's going to take a little bit of time and that's a big risk for this community because if we don't really start seeing revenue in the next 12 to 18 months, this could all implode. Stu, you use the word implosion, I totally agree with you. But I got to tell you, the excitement from some serious players involved in OpenStack here, pretty, it's going to prevent the implosion. In my opinion, you have way too much muscle, both in mind share and muscle from old school dudes like Lou Tucker, Eileen Evans, only female on the board on the Linux board from HP. We had Evan Powell, the CEO of Stackstorm on. He was awesome, he's the founder of Next Enta. These are some serious dudes who have experience. This isn't like, hey, we're trying to, you know, get some hype and I'm right out of college trying to put a script together. You know, this is guys who are all saying, by the way, the same thing, it's still early days. I think what's happened with OpenStack, and this is my take, in my opinion, synthesizing and reading the tea leaves. I think the OpenStack Foundation and its community has realized, this is a BFD, big freaking deal. And they realized, let's not push this forward too fast, let's win the cloud, let's make sure the foundation is firmly set. So I think what you're seeing is a lot of wrangling of the troops in the community saying, let's get this right, there's too much at stake, there's way too many people with big minds and big budgets saying we are going to make it happen. And I don't see any red flags do on the foundation side. Not a lot of politics, not a lot of mudslinging, but certainly a calm before the storm. That's the only rationalization I can see from not seeing customers lined up. Yeah, I mean, John, on theCUBE, we're big proponents of open source projects. I definitely think that we're pulling for OpenStack to be able to move forward. The question is, we've been saying soon, it's coming soon, we will have good solutions that customers can deploy and it's a very fragmented solution set. I agree with you, you don't come here and say, oh geez, company X and company Y are really going to sync this. When VMware got involved in OpenStack originally, it was like, oh, they're going to just slow things down and there's too many companies involved that are going to be the lifeguard here. I mean, IBM is going to work hard to make sure that this stays open source. HP too. HP, absolutely. I wasn't just singling out IBM. Monty Taylor is an impressive guy. Eileen's impressive, IBM, we talked to Todd Moore here and Meg Swanson, all players. So John, the question is, who's really going to make out when you talk about this? We were at Red Hat a month or so ago and Red Hat's now a $1.3 billion company. Is somebody going to make a billion dollars and is it going to take 15 years to get there? Or what are we going to do? I love the quote from Evan Powell earlier today and said, if you think that you were going to out Red Hat to build a distribution for OpenStack, you are setting yourself up for disaster. But Red Hat's got to get a fire lit under their butt because what's happening is seeing a lot of momentum going on. And we love Red Hat. I think they have the pole position in my opinion and you want to use the NASCAR analogy. They certainly, at the start of this race, they got a good, they won the first heat. They're at the pole position. It's theirs to lose in my opinion and the rest are moving fast. So the question is, this is all out in the open. So I think Red Hat's got the chops to do it. And I think the container is a huge undercurrent stew. It's not stealing the show. There's no container announcements. There's no docker stuff going on here. But the talk of containers has been big, certainly on our crowd chat. It was our number one chat voted up over hundreds and hundreds of votes on it already. So I think containers will be a big part of it. Yeah, and John, I liked the, where's the white space? Is some of the solutions out there that can help orchestrators simplify this? We just had MetaCloud on and talked about how can we deliver OpenStack to people that don't get OpenStack. It's great that there's all the developers here, the hoodies, the beards, you know. Here's why I like MetaCloud. MetaCloud's entire delivery process is very DevOps-like. The customer experience is seamless upgrading.  You push some code, all the versioning control takes care of itself, not a lot of patch updates. This new generation of developers doesn't want, they don't want to load patches. Those days are over with automation and orchestration. That stuff is now going away. All the guys that program in that environment will never go back.  What they're doing in MetaCloud, really, to me, telegraphs the future of delivery. Push button subscription, completely abstracting away complexity around what's in it to the outcome of the solution. And I think that you're going to see that in vertical markets. So I think that Storm Ventures is very smart to invest in them because one is a leverage model on the economics, but I think that's going to be the preferred experience. And to me, that's what I'm looking for at the show. New enablement creates new experiences, new customer outcomes, and we're looking for that stuff that hasn't been seen yet. Mark Shuttleworth said, he said, the stuff that's going to happen in the future, no one can see yet. And that's really what we're looking for, Stu. Yeah, so John, maybe I've been to too many of the big vendor shows because I'm looking for a big announcement or a wow or kind of an aha. And I haven't seen it yet at the show. There's some more announcements to come over the next couple of days. There's a lot of good community building, going beyond the developer, going to the operators and the users. And there's a lot of goodness here, but I'm looking forward to digging into it. We don't have that first shot. We need the first shot heard around the world. I don't have, Stu, I want to see an open stack shot. Someone, the first shot's fired, something big has to happen. It's not happening in my opinion yet. It's a lot of like, the big swell has not come in. Yeah, there's some waves were surfing on them, but the problem is that I just don't see the big punch. I mean, so we're waiting. Yeah, I agree. And really good guests on today. We've got another two days where we're going to cover it, John.  And, you know, I'm excited to be here. Well, I want to thank the folks out in the Twitter sphere and LinkedIn and Facebook for coming on our crowd chat. We had a great crowd chat today. Just scrolling through some of the numbers here. 3000 folks, 2.2 million timeline impressions reached. 356 posts on crowd chat is 53 people online right now. Go to crowdchat.net. That's our new beta product. It's going to come out of beta for the public probably about a week. And it's an engagement container. It's a new cutting edge technology that was developed by the new startup crowd chat. It's an engagement container. It originates the conversations, activates them and measures them. It's all in a container, shoots it to the hashtag. Go there, it's going to be on the record. It's recorded as is with votes sorted to the top. So get in there, make a comment, thread a conversation, vote on your favorites and the vote top votes will go to the top. Of course, this is theCUBE. We'll be back all day tomorrow and we'll be watching the crowd chats for your questions. And three days of wall-to-wall coverage here of the stack. We'll see you tomorrow for day two. This is theCUBE.