Welcome to day two of the Congress. Our next speaker, Paul Gardner-Steven, is fighting for free, secure and resilient communications. He's known as the leader of the Servo Project, building cell phone mesh networks. And also is the creator of the Mega65 computer that you can see right here. So he's going to tell us about his next project right now and also explore some issues that we face about building networks and keeping them secure and resilient. So please welcome Paul Gardner-Steven, creating resilient and sustainable mobile networks. Thank you. Okay, thanks for coming along everyone tonight. It's getting a little bit late in the night. Certainly for me it is, it's past my normal bedtime. So apologies if I yawn, it's not that I'm bored or disengaged. It's just I flew in from Australia yesterday and still haven't really had enough sleep. But we should be fine. So cool. So what we can see here, we have the Mega65 prototype and we have a prototype of the MegaPhone and I'll talk about those two in a minute. So the entire presentation is actually going to be delivered with the technology that we're creating. So a bit of a dog food eating session for this kind of thing is a bit of a proof by example that we can actually do useful things with 8-bit systems because a whole pile of advantages when it comes to the security and digital sovereignty with that. So we can switch the screen to the, super excellent. So we can have a look and make sure I've got the correct disk in there. Yes we do. We'll drop to C64 mode and we'll load the, oops wrong one. Unfortunately we don't have to wait the long time. If I press and hold down the cap slot key the CPU runs at the full speed instead of normal speed. And so now it'll load up. It's Commodore 64 software right, so of course it has to be cracked even if I had to supply the original to the cracking crew because it's 2019. So we'll let that go because the graphics have changed a little bit as we go along and let the greets roll out there. So all of this has been created in FPGA so we have complete sovereignty in that sense over the architecture so that we can really start trying to make systems that we have full control over from that full hardware layer and that are simple enough that we don't need to have a huge massive team of people to actually work on these things. A lot of what we're talking about here has been created in maybe three or four person years over the last few years. So it's quite possible to do a lot with these systems without needing to have the huge resources of a multinational company or something which is kind of key. Okay so we'll do Mega 0 36 C 3. Okay and I'll press F5 for presentation mode which really just hides the cursor and then I can use my clicker. So we have maybe we'll switch the camera here for a moment. Can we switch the camera? Yep. So it's a genuine homemade Commodore 64 compatible joystick and it makes the most satisfying click noise when we use it. So if we can switch back to the slides that will be great. Oh yeah, super. Cool. So I am indeed going to be talking about creating resilient and sustainable mobile phones and hopefully that link when we already have the artifact there of the megaphone prototype and that will become a little bit clearer as we go through. So actually the last talk was kind of interesting talking about this whole from a different angle this whole thing that communications has actually become really weaponized over the last decade or two in particular. That you know we're seeing that you know where it used to be natural disasters that are the main problem that now there is this whole problem of man-made disasters which is a major problem for us. And so we see internet shutdowns, communication shutdowns, we have surveillance happening in different places where it really oughtn't be happening. You know these state level actors that are very well resourced, able to find zero-day exploits and the attack surface as we know in modern communications devices is simply huge. And so this is very asymmetric in the power equation between forces that seek to oppress people and you know the vulnerable people at the coal face who are just trying to get on with their lives and live good and decent lives and need communications to help protect themselves and enable that to happen. And that we're seeing that the value of communications is so well understood by these you know oppressing forces that it really has become a quite a you know it's quite high up their list of things to do. You know you don't send the army in first to quiet and people down you cut off their internet as the first thing. So this is part of the backdrop of what we see. And so what I would say is that the digital summer has actually finished. We're now in the digital autumn. We can see like in the you know with the with farms and trees and things that you know there's still plenty of fruit to see in the early autumn right. And there's lots on the ground. It feels like this time of plenty will continue. And you know we can all eat as we need that there is enough more or less to go around. But the risk that we have is from this parable of the the grasshopper and the ad who here knows the parable of the grasshopper and the ad hands right up because it's really hard for me to see up here. OK we'll swap and say who doesn't know. OK most cool. So I thought actually it was originally a German kind of problem. So this is the story of where the you know the grasshopper is kind of lounging around and enjoying the summer while ants busy carrying all the seeds back into the nest. And you know the answer telling the grasshopper hey you need to get some food and stuff and put away for the winter so that you can actually survive the winter. And the grasshopper is basically in denial about the fact that you know the season will change. And then of course the season changes it snows and gets cold and then the grasshopper kind of goes knocking on the door of the ant hole. Not that they kind of really have doors but that's fine. It's like I'm starving and cold out here and the ant is kind of like well I told you so kind of thing. And I think actually in the end then it kind of lets it in because we don't want to scare children too much with these stories. And so this is actually the challenge that we have that we I love every time I come to these events all the creativity that we see you know we're enjoying the digital summer and all of the things that it's letting us create and you know the great open source software and tools and everything that's going on is absolutely fantastic. And we want that to be able to continue indefinitely but we know that as we said that you know the you know the chilling winds are beginning to to come that tell us that unless we actually do something about it that this isn't actually going to continue indefinitely. And just a statement that I really want to make here is this last dot point that I've got. The freedoms of the second half of the 20th century post World War two are if you look at history they are an aberration to my knowledge never before and I fear perhaps never again will we have that degree of personal liberty focus on you know individual freedom and agency and everything that was in this post World era and is now starting to unwind and starting to unwind back to the normal totally asymmetric you know well to say sharing of power is the wrong word it's the greedy collection of power and deprivation of the mass population from having anything resembling a fair share of what's going on and so we have to act if we want for the you know the digital summer to continue or at worst for the digital winter to be as short and shallow as we can have it so that the you know we can come back to a new digital summer because once we hit the digital winter it will actually be too late because if we push this analogy you know the digital winter is the time when there is no food on the tree it isn't any longer possible or at least practical to create new technologies to enable us to you know to feed our digital needs and we can't plant any new crops so to speak until the digital spring comes again after that and so the opportunity like with the grasshopper is now before the winter comes to say right what do we need to have in our store of technologies our store of protocols all of these different things so that when the digital winter comes we don't starve and fortunately we can actually change the length of the digital winter we can empower people so that you know the you know the bitter cold of the digital winter is moderated and that the spring can come as soon as it can and but the the trouble that we have with this we actually don't know when the digital winter will come exactly we see these challenges around in the way that different governments and you know non-state actors as well you know working in propaganda and all of these things that are becoming sadly more intense and acute around us we don't know when that tipping point will happen but given the complexity of supply chains and things that are necessary in this and I think Bunny was talking about that earlier today that this is actually quite easy for it to actually quite quickly flip into the digital winter mode and then you know as with the real winter at the very beginning of winter there might still be enough to eat but it gets harder and harder very rapidly and you know if the winter gets too deep then it's just not going to be possible to continue with these things and so we've tried to think about what's needed to actually overcome this what do we need focusing on mobile communications as a key piece of that and there's a reason for that in that it's a way that we can communicate organize you know collectively protect communities against the threats that come in if we look at things like the great Haiti earthquake just back in 2010 the breakdown of communications and law and order meant that there were quite horrible things going on within only about three days actually of the earthquake there so there were you know militias that were basically robbing medical teams trying to transport people between different hospitals and there were much nastier things with you know gangs of people going around from village to village basically doing whatever they want to whoever they want it was really not cool and so we want to avoid that kind of problem that comes when people are not able to to collectively work together effectively as a community and so the GPL for freedoms that we know from software they're a great starting point but I think actually we've seen enough things like with devaluation and all of these sorts of other challenges that this is not sufficient when it comes to hardware and there's actually some even more complicated things when you start talking about mobile phone kind of hardware as to how we can do that which I'll talk about in a moment but these are a starting point of what I've come up with these things that I see as being necessary there's ample room for improvement and in fact with any of what we're trying to do in this space we need folks to come along and help us we can't do it alone we need to to work together so that we can help one other when the digital winter comes so the first freedom is simply the freedom from energy infrastructure we know critical infrastructure is disturbingly vulnerable that the security of it is quite bad but also you have these like large centralized places that produce the energy that we need and you know we see power cutoffs in Venezuela and all of these sorts of things regardless of who's actually doing it whether it was sabotage or whether it was purposeful from the government I don't know it actually doesn't matter the fact is it happens but also of course in natural disaster power goes out fortunately this is actually one of the easiest things to solve we just need to include some kind of alternative energy supply into the kind of devices that we're creating so that could be solar panel on the back or you could have the you know the Faraday you know you shake it like a martini kind of thing to generate power or both whatever you feel like or if you can find a good supply of X NASA radio isotope then we're generators that would also be fantastic and we'll keep you warm through the winter as well but you know if anyone has a supply of those let me know I'd love to hear so then the second freedom is actually quite similar to the first it's the realization that we need energy to communicate and communications to organize ourselves and be effective and again the communications infrastructure is in many ways actually even more fragile than the energy production infrastructure is much easier to guard a couple of power stations in a country than it is to guard every phone tower and all of the interconnecting links and all these sorts of things between them as we said you know communications deprivation is already being weaponized against the vulnerable around us. Again fortunately there's been a whole pile of work in this space of the previous work I've done with a servile mesh and there's you know a whole bunch of groups working on a whole bunch of different things in this kind of space for peer to peer secure authenticated communication so yes there's work to be done but this is an area where there's actually already like the energy one there's been quite a lot of work done that makes that quite feasible to work on. So then we start getting to some of the harder ones we need to make sure that we are not dependent on the major vendors of our devices when it comes to the security of our devices so this starts with simple things like that the GPL provides so you know full source code has to be available but more than that we actually have to make sure that we can actually exercise those rights in practice so it needs to be simple enough that we can actually you know go right okay there's a security vulnerability in such and such like you know Yiske was talking about earlier today with some of the Bluetooth things and then to actually be able to patch it yourself it's quite obvious that this is not the case for whether it's firmware or whether it's the regular operating system on modern mobile phones so who here is actually built Android from source themselves excellent I expected to see a few folks here who's tried and gave up in disgust right more hands yes myself as well like you know I work on the server project and we do a whole pile of things and basically just you know after spending a number of hours on it just went like you know this is actually this is a lot of work for something that ought to be straightforward if we want to be able to make rapid progress and so we want to have systems that are simple enough that we can patch but in fact there's another really key advantage to simplicity that I'll probably come over a few times in this talk and that is that simplicity reduces the attack surface if we are in an asymmetric power environment where there are whether they are state or non-state actors seeking to deprive vulnerable people of communications they're going to have potentially the ability to put whole teams looking for vulnerabilities in software in contrast we might be lucky to have someone who's going to try and madly find when things are being exploited and to patch them so we need to have ways around this kind of thing and to my mind reducing the attack surface is the only way that we can actually have any real hope of you know being able to keep up in that arms race of security so freedom number four is related to this previous one it's actually saying not only do we want to be able to patch it we actually want to be able to change enhance all of these things and again it comes back to the same basic need that the software is actually able to be compiled and the hardware designs are simple enough that we can actually you know to work on these things so that we again not really in theory have permission to innovate but that it's in practice feasible to do so and again the simple of the system that you know the more probable it is that we can actually succeed in this kind of space and then you know again these a lot of these are quite interrelated to this part of why I say it would actually be great to get feedback on how we might restructure these to make the boundaries really clear between these freedoms that we need so we need the freedom to maintain the devices for the long run so who here has or has had a fair phone for example I love the fair phone by the way yep a number of us I've had one as well and you know if you talk to the people at Fairphone I think you know they have a team of a bunch of people just trying to maintain Android on the Fairphone 2 for example and also now on the the Fairphone 3 as it comes out and this is actually really hard work but again the complexity and the barriers that are there make it really difficult to be able to just keep the thing running with the same hardware let alone each time you want to target new hardware with new capabilities good this is just going to be you know as a community we can probably do one or two devices if we kind of all collected our effort in but to actually do it for you know devices that meet individual needs or you know appropriate for a particular area might have you know as we say a different energy source so I might want to try putting you know some thermal electric thing or whatever that at the moment to do that with mobile phone hardware is just prohibitive in the complexity and the you know the resourcing and effort that it would require so we need to find solutions around this and then again related to that overall we have this problem of scale dependency and I think this is one of the really key things at the moment to make a mobile phone you need to have a big enough market and you need to have a big enough enterprise and enough capital and all of the rest of it to actually be able to go through the very expensive process of you know designing the thing getting injection molding tooling and all of that kind of thing made that you know to do that for a modern phone it's I suspect it's a few million euros to do it reasonably well and if you did it on the cheap and skinny it's probably still going to be something like a million euros to achieve so we have to somehow break this down to make it feasible to do and as I said earlier simplicity is a key theme to my mind but it's the only way I think that we can actually do it so we've already talked about the challenges of just building an android ROM let alone modifying it to do new things in any kind of sophisticated way and even if you do the hardware is actually too complicated and there's a whole pile of trust issues around the complicated hardware if you can't understand something by definition it's a black box and if it's a black box by definition you can't trust it because you don't know what's inside so you know we have this problem again the digital winter you don't want any black boxes or if you do you want them very carefully monitored and managed and so the system has to be not simple enough to make once it is simple enough that we can actually remake it again and again and again as we have need it's a bit like the difference between a chainsaw and axe right if you're going to be in a remote area and have to be self-sufficient much better to depend on axe to chop your wood because if you need to you can make a new handle for your axe and you know with a bit more effort you could do some very simple metallurgy and metal smelting with iron or if you happen to be lucky enough to have an area or copper or whatever it's going to be a much easier proposition than having to do that and then somehow make fine machine tooling and make new chain parts and motor parts and all of this kind of thing so it has to be if it's going to be resilient and survivable it has to be simple enough that you actually can build it with relatively simple tools going forward electronics is always going to be a bit challenged in this area because you need to do PCB fabrication you need to get components and things but we have to try and reduce the barriers as much as we can so that at least for example components scavenging for example might be an option or devices that will be available because they're still needed by other industries that have more protection as we head into a digital winter environment that we can take and repurpose that kind of hardware and so then this kind of leads into this tension then of saying okay if we make something which is simple enough we know we as a community we only have limited resources available to us to make this kind of resilient device do we make one or do we all kind of like run off and make different kind of things and I think the you know the this is a tension I'm not going to claim that I know the absolute best setting for this I think we need to have as I say kind of multiple germ lines so that if one system gets chronic you know critically broken or proves to be ineffective in that you know there are others kind of in the wing that can kind of fill that niche in the environment but we don't want to have so many that we actually don't get anywhere and so this is a bit tricky my gut feeling is you know making a an initial device that can kind of demonstrate some of these kind of positive properties and then so other people will look at it go like well that's really great that's got us forward but you know that was a really stupid design I think this is a way better way to do it in the way that we have that freedom in the open source community to do is probably a pretty good way to do things and I would say we're not yet at that end point of that proof of concept but we're trying to move things forward to that and that point so come actually to the the megaphone that we're trying to create and so in terms of what we've actually set out to do for the goals and kind of the methodology you know we want something which is simple secure self-sufficient and survivable a lot of the work that I do is for example with you know NGOs so you know we've worked with folks from Red Cross we've worked with folks from the UN World Food program who part of me interestingly are the distributors of communications in the UN cluster system for disasters because they kind of like hand out blankets and they hand out rice and things someone basically said to them well you should also be handing out the communications and so that's just kind of how it's fell and so you know it needs to be able to do smart phony kind of things like we would be great to have some navigation it would be great to have in the disaster context the ability to fill in forms on the screen with a touch screen and the rest of it and have that uplink through so for example you think you Ebola outbreak in Africa for example to be able to collect you know that case information to track down the you know the case zeros and all that kind of thing you need communications that can work often these outbreaks happen in places where law and order and civil society is not really working because if it was then they wouldn't have had the outbreak there it would have been managed more effectively and so you need this kind of you know dependable device that can work in independent of everything else that's going on and that might have to do software updates for example over a really expensive narrow band satellite link that might be you know tens of bytes per second or less so that was kind of some of the the motivation around this to create it and separately have been working on the mega 65 project for a couple of years at that point and it just kind of dawned on me that actually this kind of simple a bit architecture is powerful enough to actually be useful to do some things and that's kind of you know well I'm doing this you know the fun proof of you know proof by example really of delivering the slides with this machine to show that you can do useful things if you write the code carefully and carefully written code is more likely to be verifiable and secure and it's probably I don't think you can get any simpler than an 8-bit system and still be useful like I don't think we want to be trying to use an Intel 4W4 derived 4-bit CPU to do things by all means if someone what you can find a way to do something with a system that's that simple and they can still do everything we need and it makes it even easier to verify fantastic my gut feeling is it would actually be worse on every point because the amount of work that you would have to do to do each useful thing you only end up with code which is actually larger in size that I think my feeling is that the 8-bit architecture is about that sweet point and so anyway so as a result of the mega 65 work it's based directly on that so the phone actually is a mega 65 in portable form and we'll show that in a little bit and yeah and so we're getting towards that kind of proof of concept stage so we had the first phone calls back in Linux Conf so if you kind of dig back through this the video of that talk where with a much earlier prototype we actually had people calling the machine which is quite fun and I'll talk a little bit later as well about the some of the audio path kind of issues around that so let's look at those six freedoms again now in what we're trying to do with the the megaphone so energy independence the first step is we've got a filthy great big battery I hate it when phones go flat and when you're in a disaster zone or these kind of vulnerable situations you really don't want it going flat at the wrong time so we've put a 32 watt hour lithium-ion phosphate battery that should have 2,000 full charge cycles in there the device is about the size of a Nintendo switch in terms of surface area so putting high-performance solar cells like you would put on a solar racing car or on your roof we can probably get about seven watts with that and this you do the kind of the math that's you know four or so hours of charge time but we know in reality that the you know the solar environment will often be much worse than that it might be only 10% it might only be 1% of that if you're talking about these kinds of latitudes under cloudy conditions and so you really want to have the big battery and as big a solar panel as you can and you want the power consumption to be as low as possible so we've got CPODs which are kind of like little teeny tiny FPGAs that are managing the whole power environment and wake up the main FPGA only when something important needs to happen so we believe with 32 watt hours we should be able to get about a thousand hours standby with a 4G off the shelf cellular modem and that's with it you know assuming that the solar panel was actually you know like you know in a black box even the light here if we had the 7 watt solar panel and had a sunny side up we would be able to maintain charge indefinitely on the device because we only need to have about 8 milliwatts coming in so we're talking about one one thousandth of the capacity of the solar panel okay so for communications for independence we really want as many possible ways to communicate as we can and the naughty little things that we can't trust in particular the cellular modem we want to have as sandboxed and quarantined so that it can't spread its naughty plague of whatever vulnerabilities it has in there again there are black box we can't trust them they're too hard for us to implement so this is kind of a decision that we've taken we'd much rather have a fully open 4G modem when someone makes one fantastic we'll incorporate it straight in right because the system is designed to be easy to change but in the meantime we have to kind of do with what there is the great thing is that these M.2 cellular modems are used in vending machines in cars and all sorts of things so they're just they're common as again if you had to scavenge them in the future this would be quite feasible and also means we can upgrade so and we have two of these slots so we could actually have a dual 5G Commodore 64 so that you know because who wants to have to lay you know wait extra time when you're downloading your games right and 40 kilobytes can take a long time to download if you only got one 5G link right so we'll have two of them so we can do it in parallel because who wants to wait more than about you know four milliseconds to download new software and again limited communications availability in these kind of impressive environments this is actually key you might only have short communications windows so whilst it's a little bit tongue-in-cheek it's not entirely and of course with a several mesh we've been doing you know UHF packet radio so we've put in tri-band Laura compatible radios in there not Laura Wan we're doing it fully decentralized we're just sending out radio packets and listening in with the modules we've also got ESP 8266 Wi-Fi and some Bluetooth in there so that's some other potential options acoustic networking so we've got four microphones that are directly connected to our FPGA so we can do crazy signal processing on that and we've got a nice loud speaker that should work up into the ultrasonic range so we could even have quite decent communications over you know 10 or so meters in the acoustic band and there's a crazy bunch and I've forgotten the name of the research group that do air gap jumping and they've done some quite crazy things with acoustics with you know if you leave your headphones plugged into your computer on your desk in a headphone jack you can software reconfigure that and make that so that's a speaker and microphone I don't know there's anyone that's interested in that hollow after and we can have a and I can try and find the links for you we've also got infrared LED and so the idea with all of these kind of kind of things and whatever else you can kind of do is that it should be really hard for an adversary to actually jam all of these things at the same time you know you might be able to do broadband RF jamming but that's not going to stop the acoustics or the LED and even if you can kind of make a lot of noise it's going to be really hard to block you know the IR LED if people are kind of holding the devices near one another to do delay tolerant transfer and of course any other crazy things that people come up with again a simple system design that you can extend it easily yourself okay security independence so the operating system runs in our little 8-bit CPU which is basically a slightly enhanced version of the Commodore 64 CPU it has a 8-bit hypervisor which is 16 kilobytes in size hardware limitation because we don't want it getting bigger if it gets 16k then you have to throw some other things out and go right what does it actually really need to do so that you still have a system which is actually much more verifiable and this kind of small software it should be quite possible on this machine to run a simple C compiler for example to be able to compile the software that is actually running the core operating system so we can have that whole complete off-grid operation we've already talked a little about having the untrustable components fully sandboxed so for example the cellular modems only have an AT command serial interface to the rest of the system and so this is going to make it much harder for an adversary to work out how with a fully compromised cellular modem you can compromise the rest of the system by giving presumably bogus responses to AT command requests and because we know that's where the vulnerable point is we can put a lot of effort in our software to really interrogate the command responses that are coming back and you know look for any AT command responses with you know semi-colon drop tables and all the rest of it in there it should be pretty straightforward to pick up so we also have an integrated hardware and software inspector so that you can real-time verify so this is a little bit fun so I can hit mega tab and so we call it matrix mode for a good reason so the system is still running in the background so the slides are still there so I can go back to the previous slide I can't think of anything to say it was a joystick actually when I'm in there there you go I'll file a bug for that but we can if I go back into it we can look at all of memory in real-time so if you are truly paranoid and you're about to for example do some encrypted email on your you know digitally sovereign device you could actually go into this stop the CPU and then inspect every byte of memory and compare it to your physical printout of the you know 30 or 40 kilobytes of your software and go well you might every time you might do you know half a kilobyte or something right and verify so that progressively over time you've actually verified that the system is always byte identical at that point in time to what it should be doing and again the simplicity we only have one program running at a time so you know exactly what the system is doing and we can task switch we've got a built-in freeze cartridge if I press the the restore key anyone who's used a Commodore 64 and with an action replay will probably recognize the the inspired format and so that's our program they're running with hardware thumbnail generation the colors are a bit wrong we need to fix that but you know we've got other software that we've had running on it and so if we wanted to you know whoops break up the presentation with a a quick game of Gyrus for example we can do that I need to switch the joystick port I can do that in here as well Jay if we wanted to we can do that and then we can go back and you know pretend that we weren't doing anything naughty at all and of course I forgot to save what I was doing first right so I have to load the program again so that's my bad but that's right because reboot time is about two seconds whoops so the worst part now is that we actually we haven't got a command to jump through the slides and so it actually takes a little bit of time to for it to render each slide as we go through so that's my punishment for not saving first but actually what we might do we'll skip that for the moment and because we're kind of at the right point any way to talk about it which is the audio powers in a mobile phone this is a really important area to protect so it's so important that it's the only diagram that I've put in the entire presentation so at the top we have a normal mobile phone so basically what we see is that the untrustable cellular modem is not merely untrustable it's like an evil squid that has tentacles that reach into every part of your mobile phone that you really don't want it getting into so it has the direct connection to your microphone and speaker the normal CPU in your mobile phone usually has to say pretty please oh untrustable completely untrustworthy cellular modem may I please have something which you're going to tell me is the audio that's coming in through the microphone whether or not it's actually the audio or not that's a whole separate thing it might be doing all manner of crazy things first because you can't tell because it's a big fat black box in the way and then just to make sure that the you know it can fully compromise what you're doing often it's on the same memory bus and so you know you might go oh I'm being all secret squirrel from the cellular modem and not asking anything and it's just quietly lifting the covers and looking at what you've got under them going like oh no no no that bite's wrong you really want that value in that bite and likewise the RAM and the storage so you know the cellular modem can totally compromise your boot loader and all of that kind of stuff along the way let's just say that that's not really a very survivable model or a very resilient model or a very secure model for a phone so what we have instead is that we've basically put the the fully untrustable thing completely out in its own little tiny shed we've got the tin can and string between us and it with a very controlled interface and the microphone and speaker thank you very much are directly connected to our FPGA so we can do encryption at the microphone and decryption at the speaker the storage is secure so we could even have massive one-time pad so we could actually do Sig Sally style provably secure communications over distance if you can set up the key material beforehand for one-time pad so it's a radically different approach to what we see with devices out there at the moment so we'll just get the the last few slides up again oh I've never gone on so even simple software can have bugs this is what we need many eyes think if I load this one first yep now I can load the other one because it just hadn't loaded the the fonts in yep cool coming yep and you can even use the joystick to move around in the text if you want to okay so if we think then about this whole you know like what are we actually trying to you know achieve around this and what are some of the things that we need so I mean and the the Commodore derived 8-bit platform advantages as a basis for doing this now we could have done it with a completely different platform you know like some you know we're thinking like risk five for example as a nice open platform could be an idea might actually be that the risk five CPU is actually still too complicated to actually verify and trust yourself is my kind of view but I'm totally happy that other people might disagree with me again multiple gem lines totally different ways of doing things so at least one of them keeps working at any point in time would be really really good and we actually you kind of combination things as well so one of the things that we're looking at is having for example a Raspberry Pi running the Pi port of Android that somebody else maintains I don't have to do it and then having the 8-bit layer actually virtualizing all of the I.O. around that including access to the SD card storage including access to the screen and it's actually also makes it possible for us to to make custom mobile devices for people living with disability and actually so that the Android again is easy to maintain because we don't even have to recompile it we can just get the standard version and then make it think it's got a normal touch screen when in actual fact it might have some completely different input method going on so there's a bunch of advantages I've run out of the official time that I allotted so I'll quickly go through and then we'll go into to questions so the 64 platform is really well documented so there's and a whole pile of tools and everything programming languages so this is pretty straightforward to go through we've already talked about capability maintenance again so there's actually another key point making the hardware big actually is a massive advantage because then we can do normal PCP fabrication we don't have to do any BGA part placement which is a real pain to do in your home oven it is possible but you don't want to have to work to learn how to do it in the digital winter and yet it's actually this kind of the similar size to existing kind of devices out there so there's a bunch of advantages with that there's a whole pile of different things that we really would like some folks to help us with to try and get this finished and out there for people to try out and to you know to be able to mature it and make it work so it doesn't matter whether you ever program an 8 bit computer or I've ever done in the FPGA work or PCB work or whatever you know there's lots of space for people to to join in what is quite you know we think it's actually both an important and actually a really fun and enjoyable project to work on and so really just want to finish by actually saying that I think it you know this is thinking about this talk and preparing for it I think actually it is a call to action you know the digital autumn has begun digital winter is on its way we don't know when it's going to come and it might come a lot quicker than we would really like it to come you know myself and the people who are already working on the project we can't do everything alone we're we're doing what we can we're going to try and organize another event in early April up in Berlin but there's no need to wait for that to get involved you know we'll be around at the vintage computer area if anyone wants to to come and have a look or you know or ask anything about how you might get involved or just play around with the the platform it's quite fun to use whoops and yeah we'll leave it at that point so any questions would be really welcome that was incredible you have the best presenting setup that I've ever seen at the Congress thank you that joystick is amazing and the joysticks also open source hardware I can give you the plans to make one of those yourself from from parts it's a spare joystick parts for arcade games basically yes please yeah okay we're taking questions I remind you we have six microphones in the audience we also have the amazing signal angel that's going to relay questions from the internet and we're going to take one right now okay so you already talked about some events but maybe can you bit more elaborate on how you're planning to involve the community okay so how we're going to involve the community basically any way the community would like to be involved the moment in terms of with the phone is myself and kind of so I work at a university and we have kind of a couple of part-time students working on things so the bus number is disturbingly near one at the moment so there's ample scope to help we've got there's a few other people who are helping with the mega 65 project itself and so there is obviously there's crossover in that but what would be really great would be to find for example a couple of people who are willing to work on software primarily coding in C so you don't even have to know any 6502 assembler to begin with to do things like you know finishing off the dialer software and things that we demonstrated back in January around with a pair of large plastic bricks by our heads talking on the phones that we've actually created that would be a really great way to get some initial forward movement and then things like case design there's a whole bunch of stuff that you know we'd welcome involvement on thank you do we have more from the signal angels yes we do so okay there's a question when a prototype will be available okay when a prototype will be available I'm happy to give out you know blank PCBs or post them to people so I've got to actually pack them with me we've got like you know the next prototype is actually being built at the moment so you know these can be built for about 400 euros at the moment so it's like only you can buy like five of these instead of an iPhone right so it's already it's it's economically survivable as well in comparison especially it's one of the really quite funny things is we kind of making this and going like you know a few person years of effort and we can already make a mobile phone okay it's not as small and schmick but it's got a joystick port right does your iPhone have a joystick port so you know it's it's amazing what we've actually been able to do quite quickly so it's the kind of project where if we do have people kind of come in to help us you know I think like you know by next congress we ought to have people running around with megaphones and being able to you know communicate in fun and independent kind of ways so yeah thank you microphone one please thanks for a cool talk and I have another question because you want to reduce black boxes but what's about encryption because it's really complex and how do you plan to reduce this black box ah okay so an excellent question so the best encryption there is is actually the simplest it's called one-time pad so if you can actually meet with people so again if we're talking about focusing on supporting local communities with one another if you get your megaphone and the other person's megaphone and you come in infrared range for example and then you shake them like Montini's to generate some random data and you do that until you've decided you've got enough one-time pad and that one-time pad is secure enough in your device then actually like XOR is pretty easy to debug right thank you microphone number three so you talked about the form factor right now be Nintendo switch do you have plans on going smaller than that more like a classic mobile phone yeah I think it's actually quite possible so the so this is if you like that the first version is this one so you can see it's about five centimeters thick the second one we think we can get down to about four centimeters thick but it's otherwise the same size PCB we've got a student at the moment who's going to try and work on making one that's about the size of only the screen still probably about four centimeters thick and we think that that's going to be quite it's the PCB layout he's basically been cursing me for the last three months to try and get all the tracks routing without it needing to be a 15 layer you know sponge taught kind of PCB but that should be quite possible to do and again that's the kind of thing once you've got a working prototype then some people go like okay we're going to be on the miniaturization team to you're part of me try and make something which is even smaller but you know there's always trade-offs in these things again the smaller you make it the less solar panel you can have on the back so there's kind of these things but certainly trying to make it as thin as we can I think makes a whole pile of sense honestly you can make it smaller but I don't think you should because when the zombie apocalypse happens it's a communication tool and the weapon yeah and exactly that's right it's kind of you know exactly or you can use a full-size one as well right it's kind of got you know quite a nice solid metal keyboard in there as well a question from the internet please sure so what do you think about the open moco phone the open moco phone so I'm trying to remember the details about the whole again everything that's being done on all of these fronts to make fully open devices with as few black boxes as possible is fantastic so as I say if open moco can make an m.2 form factor cellular modem that we can put in the megaphone I would be so so happy but we can do a whole pile of stuff while we're waiting for that to happen thank you we actually had a talk yesterday about from one of the people behind the open moco so you can watch the recording if you want next question microphone one sure hey thank you for the great talk I was interested in the mega 65 itself is that is that available is it yes it's all okay so the two most common questions we have about the mega 65 is can I buy one now and how much does it cost unfortunately the answer to both of those is we don't yet know exactly it'll be a three-digit number in euros for the price this is pretty certain but at the moment our big challenge is we so this one is it's a prototype made with vacuum form molding so each case cost upwards of 500 euros for the case this is not really sustainable so we know we need to make injection molding tooling for that and so the guys from the German part of the mega 65 team are running a fundraiser just to be a little bit careful with that as Australian law for fundraising is a bit weird so I'm not doing any fundraising some people here in Germany are doing some fundraising to try and raise the money for the mold so if you look at mega 65.org you can find out what they're doing in that space and you know and have a look at that thank you do we have more internet questions nope cool cool I think that's it so thank you again for the wonderful talk my pleasure thank you


Happy birthday, Bitcoin! 12 years have passed since October 31st, 2008. On that date, a pseudonymous entity known as Satoshi Nakamoto published a paper called Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. The paper set the theoretical framework for a new form of money that would be fully decentralized and censorship resistant. The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto remains a mystery to this day. Still, few people have played a more significant role in the creation of Bitcoin than Professor Adam Beck. Adam is the inventor of hash cash, the proof-of-work system used in Bitcoin mining. He is also reportedly one of the few people ever directly contacted by Satoshi Nakamoto himself. His name was even mentioned in the Bitcoin White Paper. For Bitcoin's birthday, we asked Adam to bring us back in time to the years where Bitcoin's roots were founded. Well, to get started, you'll need to get connected to the internet. You do that through an internet service provider. What's that? The origins of Bitcoin traced back to the 90s when Adam Beck was a member of the CypherPunk movement. It was a group of hackers, programmers and geeks that used cryptography as a tool to protect people's privacy from government surveillance. Typically, there were regulations and rules providing rights to privacy that were created over hundreds of years and started to get eroded by the online world. The CypherPunk's viewpoint was if you wanted privacy rights, you should build technology to obtain them. If you have these rights, you have to assert them otherwise you will lose them. Web privacy, email privacy and electronic cash was a big one. That was kind of the Holy Grail application that was much more challenging to achieve. Back then, the public use of cryptography was heavily regulated. The US government even imposed a ban on the export of this technology. As a way to protest against these restrictions, Adam Beck started promoting t-shirts with cryptographic code written on them. And so they were t-shirts, they were tattoos, people were using it as a signature at the bottom of their email saying that this is not exportable, of course they're exporting it while they do it. You can get a magnetization picture, it's all the Apple laser right now. The CypherPunk's dreamt of creating a new form of internet money that could evade government control. In May 1997, Adam Beck invented hash cash, one of the earliest proof-of-work systems. It is used to limit email spam and DDOS attacks by requiring a certain amount of computational power to be sent along with each email. This makes it unprofitable and difficult to send a large amount of emails. Who would have thought that the precursor to decentralized digital money was actually a frustrated response to spam emails? No, it was a fascinating thing because you create in fact, it turns out, create a cost, even though there wouldn't be a reusable value. Email, I heard that's really neat. My cousin has a 10lb Sweden and they write back and forth and it transmits right away and doesn't cost anything. Despite its name, hash cash is still far from being a functioning electronic cash system. The value of transactions cannot be reused by the recipient, it is essentially a one-way street. Still, the proof-of-work system deployed by Beck became the founding principle of cryptocurrency mining. Proof-of-work became an interesting and important building block, a system to create value by individuals directly mining coins, so they didn't need a partnership with the bank to move value into the system. The internet is revolutionizing business. From egghead.com to eBay. After hash cash, other prototypes of digital money were invented, such as Wadeye's B-Cash and Nick Szabo's BitGold. Eventually, only Satoshi Nakamoto found a way to transform the proof-of-work concept into a fully trustless digital cash system. Previous electronic cash systems were central servers and you had to trust the server to some extent. I think one of the clever things that Satoshi invented in the Bitcoin system is reusing the proof-of-work as well for bringing new coins into creation and processing transactions in arbitrating this race condition, which basically allows the system to be decentralized and self-sustaining. So if one person leaves, another person can join. So the system has this fabric property that it just keeps operating without any central plan. The invention of Bitcoin represents a milestone in the evolution of currency. That is why the 31st of October is a day worth celebrating for more than just Halloween. Actually, it is rather curious that Satoshi specifically chose Halloween to release Bitcoin's white paper. We would love to hear your theories on that decision in the comments below. Still, the journey towards the democratization of money doesn't end with Bitcoin. On one side, governments and big corporations still seek to impose control on cryptocurrencies. On the other, privacy advocates look for increasingly sophisticated ways to hide transactions from undesired third parties. We will further delve into this long-lasting struggle around privacy and money in our upcoming documentary about the history of cryptography. So stay tuned for more Cointelegraph content.