NGI0: Next Generation Internet

LibreQoS greatly improves the quality of experience of internet connections. It was born out of necessity during the COVID pandemic when massively increased internet usage resulted in intermittent package loss. Robert Chacón, CEO of LibreQoS and operator of a small ISP that provides internet to under-served communities, noticed how it affected his customers’ ability to work from home and do online learning. In response, LibreQoS was created to fight bufferbloat and latency issues by prioritizing interactive sessions like video calls over, say, downloading large files.

In this episode we speak to Robert, Herbert Wolverson (Chief Product Officer), and Frantisek Borsik (Chief Operating Officer). They talk about how they open sourced LibreQoS in the hopes of helping other small ISPs who bring internet to the under-served, and their surprise at the rapid rise in popularity with deployments in 58 countries. They provide insight in the world of ISPs, and how stable internet connections aren’t just about good gaming experiences but can actually save lives.

In loving memory of Dave Täht
Sadly, Dave Täht passed away days after the recording of this episode. Dave was Chief Science Officer at LibreQoS and made fundamental contributions to FQ-CoDel, CAKE, and LibreQoS to improve the internet for everyone. He worked to make real-time communication available everywhere and insisted his code be free and open source so it would truly benefit everyone. He is remembered by many for who he was and the lives he touched with his work on his memorial page.

Links
LibreQoS
LibreQoS website
LibreQoS source code
LibreQoS documentation

NGI Zero projects
LibreQoS
LibreQoS 2.1

Learn more about LibreQoS:
Great explanation of how LibreQoS works by Herbert Wolverson at an APNIC webinar.
Interview with Robert Chacón including a demo of LibreQoS’s dashboard by The BrothersWISP at WISPAPALOOZA 2024.

Other projects and topics mentioned
CTN an ISP in Malawi
OpenWRT a Linux distribution for routers and embedded devices.
FQ-CoDel: a hybrid packet scheduler and Active Queue Management algorithm.
Cake a comprehensive queue management system the bufferbloat project has been working on since 2013.
MikroTik
Alta Labs
Toke Høiland-Jørgensen
Karlstad University

“The consumer electronics industry works differently than people actually think”, says Armijn Hemel creator of DeviceCode. Behind the different brands and casings is often the same hardware, created by a single Original Design Manufacturer. But the disclosure of security vulnerabilities is mostly focused on single devices. So when a CVE is published for device A from vendor X it conceals that the security flaw may also exist in a similar device of a different vendor. DeviceCode collects structured technical information about consumer devices to reveal these hidden patterns of the industry in order to improve security.

Demystifying the electronics industry can also be a step toward increasing the local production of electronics. Reasons to opt for local manufacturing are the vulnerability of global supply chains, environmental impact, worker rights, software security and preventing backdoors. A better understanding of the industry could inspire a bottom up approach to a more diversified electronics industry.

Links
DeviceCode repositories:
Code
Data

NGI Zero projects
DeviceCode
And also mentioned: VulnerableCode

If you are interested in Armijn’s knowledge about Open Source Software supply chain management (briefly mentioned at the end of the podcast) watch the NGI Zero webinar with Armijn: Open Source in (Consumer) Electronics Supply Chains (Episode 1 of a 4-part series The Ins and Outs of Open Software Supply Chain)

Other projects and talks mentioned
The Open Wrt hardware device: OpenWrt One

Talks on the hardware supply chain by Andrew “bunnie” Huang
Supply Chain Security: “If I were a Nation State…” at BlueHat IL, 2019.
An Alternative to the American way of Innovation at TEDxPickeringStreet.
NGI Zero webinar about IRIS: (Infra-Red, In-Situ) inspection of silicon.

“This project was fueled by the idea that we should be less dependent on proprietary software. We don’t have control over software managed by companies that can access, analyze and sell our private data. It was a journey to own our software again”, says Julien Malka. He and Camille Mondon have implemented Clevis in NixOS to make it possible to remotely reboot servers with full disk encryption. The project was extended to port the Proxmox Hypervisor on NixOS. In this podcast episode they explain their project and talk about self-hosting as an antidote to the centralization of the internet.

Links:
NixOS/Clevis repo
NixOS
NixOS/Clevis NGI Zero project page

“There would be no room for conflict if everyone in the world could exchange ideas without being watched”, says Kirill Zholnay founder of SelfPrivacy. SelfPrivacy aims to make self-hosting accessible to non-technical users. Born out of a dream to enable every person on the internet to live free of Big Tech surveillance, it provides a simple solution to set up and manage your own server. We spoke to Kirill Zholnay and lead full-stack engineer Inex Code about the need for user autonomy, their crush on Deltachat, NixOS, the joy of receiving positive feedback and how SelfPrivacy is financed.

Links:
SelfPrivacy
SelfPrivacy NGI0 project page
NGI Zero support services

“The only thing that’s going to solve the mental health crisis in software engineering is more compassion, more collaboration, more attention to the people that you spend time with”, says Daniel Thompson-Yvetot, co-founder of Tauri Apps and CEO of CrabNebula. He also speaks about how the Cyber Resilience Act can be a watershed moment for open source. And how today’s internet is designed for autocrats and corporations and that the projects he works on like Tauri, Verso and Servo, all aim to help us regain our digital autonomy.

Links:
Tauri Apps
CrabNebula
Servo
Verso
Projects funded by NGI Zero:
Tauri Apps
Servo improvements for Tauri
Webview library with Verso for Tauri
Servo Webview for Tauri
Other organizations mentioned: Commons Conservancy

Adrian Georgescu was part of the Voice over IP revolution and in this episode you’ll learn much about that history and the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). With his company AG Projects, Adrian created Blink, a SIP client developed in parallel with the creation of SIP by the IETF. After Blink and SIP hit their limits, he created Sylk Suite which combines SIP with WebRTC to enable multi-party video conferencing.
He also talks about what it’s like to run a FOSS company and having to compete with Big Tech offering services for free and much more.

It is important to be able to communicate freely, says Jérôme Poisson a.k.a. Goffi. He is the main developer of Libervia, a communication ecosystem based on XMPP. XMPP is mostly associated with chat but Libervia offers many more features such as blogs, fora, calendars and file & photo sharing. It has gateways to other open protocols like ActivityPub and email.

Jérôme identifies multiple problems in digital communications such as Big Tech monopolies and public debates taking place on proprietary platforms. Libervia can’t address all of these problems, because many of them are societal. But it does address some of them with a platform that is decentralized, based on Free Software and open standards. The project has strong ethics in its DNA, written down in a social contract.

Erratum: The security audit for Libervia was done by NGI Zero partner Radically Open Security not by NLnet.

Links:
Libervia website
repos
Libervia explainer video’s
Libervia chat channel
Libervia project at the NLnet website
XMPP software foundation
Podcast mentioned by Jérôme with Lwenn from NLnet

ActiviyPub:
@[email protected]
@[email protected]
@[email protected]
@[email protected]

“Can you really speak of a program being free software if you cannot bootstrap it?”, says our guest Janneke. He is the founder of GNU Mes, a project addressing the security concerns that arise from bootstrapping an operating system using large, unauditable binary blobs.
GNU Mes helped to reduce the number and size of binary seeds that were used in the bootstrap of GNU Guix 1.0 by a factor ten from ~250 to ~25 MiB.
Janneke talks about working on GNU Mes, its community, NGI Zero funding and calls for a fifth freedom: Freedom Four. The freedom to build a program totally from source.
Links:
GNU Mes website
GNU Mes NGI Zero project page
GNU Mes RISC-V NGI Zero project page
GNU Lilypond

Four freedoms of Free Software
Ken Thompson: Reflections on Trusting Trust
DOE040 the democratic school in Eindhoven

Other projects mentioned:
Stage0
Guix
Gash
live bootstrap with lfs

Blog posts on GNU Mes:
Janneke and Ludovic Courtès - April 26, 2023 The Full-Source Bootstrap: Building from source all the way down
Janneke — June 15, 2020 Guix Further Reduces Bootstrap Seed to 25%
Janneke - October 8, 2019 Guix Reduces Bootstrap Seed by 50%

One of the issues with today’s internet is that a lot of data is siloed. Consequently, users are locked into Big Tech ecosystems and its hard to reuse data. Joep Meindertsma, CEO of Ontola.io, talks about how his project Atomic Data addresses this problem with LinkedData. The free and open source project is a modular specification for sharing, modifying and modeling data. It uses links to connect pieces of data which makes it easier to connect datasets - even when these datasets exist on separate machines.

Inspired by Tim Berners-Lee, Joep works on an iteration of the semantic web that enforces JSON compatibility and type safety.

He also talks about the effect of NGI Zero funding on Atomic Tables and has some advice for people who are considering to apply for an NGI Zero grant.

Links mentioned in the episode:

• Atomic Data
• Ontola.io
• W3C Atomic Data Community Group
• Solid Search (NGI0 link)
• Atomic Data (NGI0 link)
• AtomicTables (NGI0 link)
• NGI Zero support services