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Captain's log, stardate <- 1564110000.042 ->

0G successfully launched from the surveillance blackhole on Tuesday at DebConf19, and interesting suggestions and conversations took place in the #0G IRC channel on FreeNode. I'm taking note at least until we settle on a home in cyberspace and set up an archived mailing list.

WOM was mentioned as a project with similar goals. A recording of a speech can be downloaded with youtube-dl. An interview about JMP, WOM and other Soprani.ca projects. Huge overlap indeed!

Using an 8-bit MCU could make for a device with battery lifetime measured in weeks or months rather, than hours or days; it could make and receive calls over WiFi or some other kind of radio, and have real buttons and audio feedback, rather than a screen. It might be tricky to enter Onion addresses on that, but if someone makes them, there's no reason to rule them out.

Lower-frequency radios with longer ranges could be something nice to build into our devices, in addition to or instead of WiFi, more so considering the difficulties of regulation and of finding FaiF-compatible WiFi these days. WiFi has the advantage of being widespread, and being available in many existing handsets, whereas WOM is peer-to-peer XMPP over chibiArduino (thin messaging on IEEE 802.15.4), operates at 900MHz, and reaches dozens of km with direct line of sight. Still, being radios, both would require going through radio licensing, even if using a publicly-available spectrum.

Other efforts to mesh WiFi were mentioned: the earlier Serval Project and some recent project by Facebook whose name was not mentioned.

GNU jami (formerly GNU Ring) was mentioned for decentralized phoning. It would take some changes to avoid disclosing a user's location/IP address so as to not enable tracking, and to use Onion addresses to initiate calls and whatnot (protocol changes to go from UDP to TCP would likely be needed as well), but it's definitely in the radar. Getting opendht to use TCP would be a first step.

Using street light mesh nodes was brought up.

Likely difficulties of sourcing ath9k_htc/carl9170 masks for use in SoC designs were discussed.

Using GNUnet as an alternate network layer was suggested. It can route and mesh over various physical layers (radio-modems at various frequencies were mentioned), and there are even phone call infrastructure built into its higher layers! Wikipedia has somewhat more accessible information about various aspects of GNUnet, including transport.

Caninos Loucos, a project by John Maddog Hal and prof Marcelo Zufo at University of São Paulo, is likely to build OpenMoko Freerunner-like devices in the very near future, maybe we could use them. GPU could be a problem: they've reverse engineered the PowerVR and implemented new drivers, but they're looking into whether they can publish them as Free Software, according to an unscheduled (and not recorded) BoF at DebConf19. WiFi/Bluetooth is probably an issue too.

JMP.chat is certainly interested in expanding to other countries, as long as carriers support the required feature set (text messages, picture messages, short codes and incoming calls) through a usable API (REST, XMPP). So far only US and Canada are known to meet these standards, but if we find about others, we should let them know.

This hopefully covers all highlights in the channel up to yesterday. After some pondering, the IRC logs are not going to be published, so please let me know if you'd like to be identified as the source of any suggestion/information.

So blong...