FPGA based mobile phone: Creating a truly open and trustable mobile communications device

we were here a moment ago talking about the horrors of firmware security and now perhaps unorthodox methods of trying to reduce that Mackey was talking about the challenge of having to write a bootloader for the Commodore 64 I've done that and we can talk a little bit at that as well but really where I want to begin I mean what Matthew talked about was all of this problem of the this complexity that is opaque it is extremely hard to know you know is your management engine on version 12 and if it is is it really on version 12 or is it saying it's on version 12 you know how many divisions of the NSA are fighting for control over your SMC at the moment you know that's right all of them someone says the key is we can't tell we have point past what I call the point of magic arthur c clarke and his three laws his third law was any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic so on that basis I thought we should actually begin the the talk with admittedly an extremely lame magic trick but nonetheless with one nonetheless we have my laptop here we have my presentation this is all excellent we have a hoop and I can demonstrate that my laptop is not connected in any way shape or form to the HDMI output yes so for my laptop and I'll trust bento to not root keep my firmware will keep my laptop well out of the process so that from here on we know that everything I'm doing is not involving that laptop no x86 CPUs were harmed in the making of the remainder of this talk because in fact the slides are coming from the 8-bit computer we have our own presentation software that we have written so what we have here looks like a Commodore 64 and to all intents and purposes it can be in actual fact what it is is an FPGA reimplementation of the Commodore 65 with a few additional little add-ons so a few of you may know about the Commodore 65 assistive get the occasional you know whether it's a slash dot news piece or the register or someone saying about how a prototype was sold for like twenty thousand euros or eighty thousand euros or something I owned one and I sold it before they're worth quite that much which is a bit sad I had fond memories of it so I decided to make a new one and then we started thinking about some of the these security issues in particular around mobile devices and whether we could do something about it so let me we need to load up presentation software of course well let you make the CPU go fast so that we don't spend forever waiting for it to load comma eight for those who remember okay so we'll load up our presentation software it isn't course Commodore 64 suffers so it would not be complete without a crack screen even if I had to supply the originals myself to the cracking group who provided the crack so we can leave that there for a moment so that we have time to read all the greets and everything as we we go through things and so as I was making this talk it was really there are three different talks that I thought about that had you know this was really trying to do we only have time for one so each of you have to choose which talk you want to listen to and you know pay attention from that perspective so one of them is this whole question of how can we make a computer that we can trust in this modern age and another talk is this whole question of digital sovereignty how can we actually be sovereigns over the hardware we own and of course there's an open source community this is a topic that comes up repeatedly in so many different ways and finally there's one about reducing the resources required to innovate in the mobile telephony space because I mean even even my regular mobile phone is perhaps is arguably one of the best Android phones you can get from an open perspective it's a fair phone to I can take it apart I can take the screen up without any tools I can run whatever I want on it within reason but as Matthew said about in the previous talk about no idea really what's actually going on in there and it's too complex to actually have confidence so that's the three general talks that we want to have and occasionally it does this is an 8-bit computer but that's fine we can reboot it quite quickly it'll take longer for the screen to recapture than it does for the computer to boot what's and then it's the fun joys of experimental hardware on this one if you don't weave all the joystick the keyboard doesn't start working so we can run our 6402 at 40 megahertz in here rather than the usual pedestrian one which is quite other way up right so in the short way Commodore Oh to open we want slides one loading loading loading right f5 of course is presentation mode right this is universal and all things so f5 and I now have my slide clicker so really in here that the five kind of things that I want to cover through in this talk then so I want to talk about why it is so hard in fact to make an open-source smartphone this is you know there's a lot of work required to do it and you know smartphones are dangerously untrustable there's a bunch of topics on this that you know that Matthew has kind of leading in the previous talk again talk about our approach to trying to change this how we think is a viable way to do it and then I'm a great fan of proof by example so we have here this Commodore 64 so already said about some of the interesting features it has what I hadn't previously mentioned but you would have seen if you watched the teaser video I mean so this is a 4g commodore 64 and we'll get to that in due course so those of you who have a local SIM card or are willing to pay international calling rates they call a Commodore 64 you can get ready to do that bear in mind that your phone number will appear on the screen when you call so you boys yes borrow somebody else's phone to do it yes well the way you think someone tried the VoIP yesterday and it wouldn't call okay I'll trust you right so we'll go through the demo and then really know of course open source project so if anyone is interested in being involved in this whole space not necessarily about making a mobile Commodore 64 we're happy to do that but really about making the framework to make it very easy for people to innovate in this mobile space but without further ado so why on earth are mobile phones so hard to make on an open-source basis the first point is of course actually the need for NDA is to get access to the documentation for the modern chip says that it is practically impossible I would say and I'm happy to hear from if there are any mobile chipset vendors here who are happy to provide chipsets with complete documentation so that we can make something completely open from the ground up with no binary blobs I would be delighted to hear from you I am however much more likely to get run over by a unicorn running through from that door to that door at precisely 453 this afternoon yes that's right and won't be covered for us exactly and so this is the first problem and that they she didn't feed into the second problem even if you had the documentation it's a huge effort to actually pull this stuff up from the ground and if you don't have the documentation then you get to have that whole wonderful you know whodunit kind of game which is called reverse engineering to try and work out how on earth you can actually do this the next point is that miniaturization of course is also just really expensive to do and then you end up being obsolete before you begin and then you know doing large production runs of hardware is expensive and so we can sort of dive into those in a little more detail this one I think would probably actually already covered except for the comment here about you know we often get stuck with obsolete chips that we have got the documentation through some horrible accident that involved the vendor some time ago before they realized arthrosis 9k being a great example of this in the Wi-Fi space right you know the civil mesh extenders that we make we're using the Arthur Ross 9k despite it being 2004 vintage chipset something like that I reckon they are positively ancient but you can do ad hoc Wi-Fi on them and so we keep using them the reverse engineering we said is is hard and then like with the earth 9k chips I'm terrified in one sense for the day when they stop being available fortunately they're so obnoxiously cheap that everyone keeps using them and they remain in production but I would love and Athlon Kay with two serial ports instead of one but there's no hope of that because no one's going to read you the silicon because then we won't get the documentation so as we said you get the chipset you go yay let's now try and adapt a reference hardware designed as the minimum effort path to having a open source mobile phone and the fair phone is actually probably a pretty good example of that and if you talk to those guys they're fantastic but they are flat out trying to maintain the you know the port of Android to the phone and to have the open source more open source version than the the googly one and both are important and it's just you know this is insane that it's impossible to kind of you know for someone to decide that they just want to make a custom phone to meet a particular need I mean how many were here for the keynote this morning yep heaps of you so this whole idea of doing open source medical device innovation what if you wanted to make an open-source mobile phone that you know in that particular case might implement the open pancreas thing so you gotta kind of duel there's hardware integrations and then you only got one device and sever two that would be great but it's too much work for someone to do and we'll talk about this a little bit more down the track what about if you had someone who had you know who wanted a Braille screen on a phone or who had cerebral palsy and of course you know Sarah will pulls you in a number of other of these conditions manifest in different ways for different people you know some people might actually be able to use a joystick like this really well so I like a phone with a joystick or the arcade buttons can be quite Cordura they might need something that is you know quite different tactile interaction means and at the moment it's just it's impossible to actually try and make these things and then we've got this issue of you know even if we managed one project to work in this space we can't have the simultaneous exploration of different ideas and different concepts and different hardware because it's simply too much effort and we can't get enough people to do it yes little box big price in one sense it's actually not that much to say here the smaller you want to make something the higher your you know your non-returnable engineering costs will be the higher a unit costs will be it's just expensive to make teeny tiny things and so again we're talking about a small community project it's just not feasible to make mobile phone sized mobile phones because we just don't have the cash to do it even if we had the time and effort for the most part and then of course you know whatever chips that you've chosen and managed to integrate and make small and make cheap assuming that you could overcome all of these things you won't have to do it every 12 months in all likelihood to keep up to date and so you know we need to preserve we're running through every day at 4:53 in the afternoon to have any chance of keeping up with it it's just not going to happen and then of course you have to remain tain everything that you had before you and so again if you manage to solve all those issues you know an individual unit if you make one will cost a fortune and the only other option is to make a pile to bring the price per unit down but then you're still left needing a huge mountain of cash to do anything and so this is some of the problems that we try to solve so let's then talk about how dangerously untrustable smartphones are and why we actually still think that this needs to happen in some kind of way so there have been plenty of backdoors you know or at least scares of backdoors for phones and remember we're in the era of magic we can't tell necessarily whether any particular threat is actually kind of real like you know we listen to Matthew and you know this folks asking him questions about are the better vendors or worse vendors which is actually saying really in between the lines is I have no idea whether my computer is safe and I have no idea to tell whether a particular computer from a particular vendor is safe and the Galaxy S to backdoor scare was a good example of that in retrospect now nearly 10 years later it probably wasn't that bad it could do some stuff but probably not everything but it took years for a few different teams of researchers to actually piece that together in - you know change that whole you know 15,000 word summary - mostly harmless and we just don't have the resources to do that and so this really you know we generalized that out how can you verify anything about your modern system and I see no go back so you know we look at modern CPUs with billions of transistors and operating systems and everything with no billions of lines of COBOL time you factor in all the main applications you're running what chance do we have of actually verifying that and if we think about milk down inspector so AMD and Intel CPUs were both vulnerable to this for approximately twenty years before the problems were really picked up you know in the last 12 to 18 months think about how many hardware design verification engineers until an AMD must have how many you know verification engineer millennia went into those chips and still let these things through now might actually be that they kind of raised flags and the marketing people who stopped them from stopping it but that actually also speaks to the problem right that these things are going to continue to happen even if we could verify them and so you know it's just not possible to verify modern devices and then we have the joy that is binary blobs oh how I love the binary blob once for all never updated you know the bugs Mike Dean so they can be discovered by archaeologists in you know 4000 years time in the future and generally undermining the sovereignty over our own devices do you own the device that you think well you're in the device that you paid for let's put it that way right you've paid for it you have physical custody of it but do you actually own the device well how many other people are in the device even if you might cohabit the device with them we just be nice to intercept if you could backups for us and so this really is the central theme and I have an extra-inning there don't I okay I can use a joystick too and now you get to see there's a fun bug in this it'll like mush up a couple of letters when I go back up we have seams found and fixed the bug so I should actually say that this this presentation software was written by myself and a student in a semester radically simpler than trying to you know to make modern complicated software again I think it will come back to it so how do we get back to being sovereign over our own devices and then we have this whole problem of over integration where and I love this the microphone on a mobile phone is directly connected to the cellular modem chip which is directly connected to the lawful intercept module of a cellular network or the unlawful intercept module or the nearest stingray this is shall we say unhelpful and then just to add to the fun it's not just that it could be listening into your microphone it typically will have complete DMA access over the main memory because this is actually a cheaper way to make a mobile chipset right you have multiple cores sharing a bus and some memory and you say to the cellular modem ok good little cellular modem I only use that memory over there and this DMA transfer area that we have agreed will exchange high-speed to cellular data so we can get really fast internet on our device without having to have two chips marvelous idea if security is not what you're trying to do and so you might be thinking hold on a moment this is a crazy man giving a presentation from an 8-bit computer holding a joystick the size of a small planet why should I trust anything that he has to say about modern computing and my response to that simply is proved to me beyond reasonable doubt that would hold up in a court of law that this is untrue and you can't write and this is again the heart of problem things are now so complex and so impossible to dive into an examine that we cannot tell what is going on and hence my resorting to blinking red text at the end hardware support for blinking text by the way on the AP computer hence my perhaps unwise use of it but you have you know if you think that you can actually do encrypted calls and text on a phone today and that it is actually secure against any reasonable attacker I would argue that that is a delusion that needs to be dispelled because in all probability or in all possibility at least the cellular network can remotely tell your cellular modem firmware to update to a new special upgrade supplied courtesy of wherever that will change the behavior of the phone and you know again the microphone is on the cellular modem remember not on the application processor it the application process has to ask the cellular modem nicely to have access to the microphone sure I'll just let mr. Putin hold the you know the lead to the microphone while I'm you know talking to someone about something that I don't want em to hear unwise shall we say and we've talked a little bit about this already but this combination of over integration and the potential for unlawful intercept whether that's through stingrays or oppressive regime here as a whole it's just yeah it is bad bad bad and again when you think about the DMA access to all of memory that means that they even if a lawful intercept says that they're allowed to get your metadata your phone calls your text messages because it's probably actually what the law provides for without special provision in reality HT they can get to access all the data everything that's on your SD card and everything that's in your phone because you can own the application processor so again this is quite bad and again a theme that we've touched on already and we'll keep coming back to the incomprehensible complexity of modern devices means it is impossible to make any sensible statements in support of the security of modern devices so we argue in fact then that the only way to fix this is that we need to cut the complexity of device if you want to have a secure device we simply must reduce the complexity we need to take out all that which is unnecessary and we don't need to trim just one or two orders of magnitude off because a billion lines of code even if we chop you know as you're off the end it still 100 million lines of code to look at it's gonna take me quite a while even if we chop another zero off and say ok now it's only ten million lines of code this is really not feasible it needs to be probably no more than tens of thousands of lines of code I would argue for a single person or a small team to have a fighting chance and not even a certain possibility with a fighting chance of verifying what is going on in their hardware but of course we need that architecture still needs to be useful in some way right because otherwise again as Mathew is saying right here this Platonic ideal of a computer that you go yes it is a computer it is secure but it does no computation for you so how we then trying to attack this so again we'll go through these in a bit more detail but a bit of Road mapping the key is to deal with the complexity first we know that this approach and low if it is never going to keep pace with the march of technology so let's simply embrace obsolescence and where it you know with pride and let's embrace macro fication it's possibly a word that I made up and I wrote this slide rather than trying to make everything smaller at least she just embrace what is a reasonable size that is still portable and usable as a mobile device but it's actually not going to greatly increase the cost of what we're trying to do and then of course all the naughty untrusted bits in particular cellular modem we should quarantine and having a naughty little sandpit corner as best as we can and then on the basis that we don't own any chip fabs which is a bit sad well I think this it someone was telling me there's an open-source fab now that's got five micron which is actually the same as what was made for the Commodore 64 was four and five micron so we we should in fact be at the point where we could actually make an 8-bit class machine with fully open fab there is hope but at the end of all of this it has to be fun otherwise no one will do it so let's have a look at them to reducing the complexity let's just carve all of the cellular modem complexity out and say too hard for us to do we were simply treated as a completely untrustable naughty component we will give it power when we want it to do things we will deprive it of power the rest of the time and we will not give it any kind of access to the main application processor fortunately there are these mini PCIe form factor modules so they like the vending machines outside for the drinks have probably got one in turn the industry standard it's been a standard for nearly a decade and will hopefully continue to be a standard for time to come you can really get them 4G 5g will come out at some point so we can just do a socket upgrade of any device that we make and go look haha its 5g now and the interfaces are super simple we have normal you are one one five two hundred bits per second 80 commands and so we can do a TD T and a phone number and it will dial and this is much easier interface to secure and much harder for the cellular network to try and give us malformed responses to 80 commands to try and route keep the phone right I'm not going to say that it would be impossible but you're gonna have a much much harder job doing that and again just modularizing means that we can swap components out as we go along to really reduce the effort required to do things right so what do I mean by embracing obsolescence we know that an android like operating system is so insanely complicated that just keeping it up to date has actually become practically impossible so let's unashamedly choose something which is already obsolete perhaps like this item I have here with me we can reduce the code size and the CPU complexity to the point where meaning it you can look at documentation for the Commodore 64 and you know small children learnt how to program on this the hardware interface is so simple that can be fully documented in a book that you can read in a bathtub over a few hours what you could do that of course is much more interesting but it is simple enough that you can verify and understand it in practice and if you need to verify your machine on a regular basis this is the only way to do it because even if you said Intel with all the king's horses and all the king's men could fully verify the cpu and someone could fully verify an operating system once off which is kind of what the military do and then get surprised when things get hacked down the track you need to be able to do on-demand verification so that you can have full digital sovereignty because I think that actually is what full digital sovereignty is the trade off and again clearly I was typing slides too late at night the trade of the trade off is somewhat reduced capabilities so the question is can we make something which is still going to be useful enough which we'll come back to so macro fication by this really I mean no naughty BGA's nowhere for thin PCBs it has to be stuff that you can just go right okay I'm going to you know use a typical online service get a four layer board made put an FPGA module in a socket so that someone else's dealt with the whole BGA thing cheap to iterate you can pull your FPGA board out replace the mainboard put more components on do whatever you want so suddenly you can now put the craziest Hardware in your phone whether that be a joystick port or otherwise and you can do this cheaply and easily this starts to get really interesting we've already for the most part talked about isolating the the naughty cellular modem why not having noise directly connected so this of course actually does allow you to have fully encrypted conversation if you do a data over gsm voice and they're a bunch of codecs around there some open source work on that as well you can't get enough bandwidth to run David Rose codec to so you could actually have a full voice codec over an analog yes I am a digital GSM voice circuit narrowband but actually be fully encrypted end-to-end in the phone that we make I'm going to put a hardware one-time pad so if you want to get really paranoid you can assure you have a one-time pad protected encrypted conversation over the cellular network and no one there in theory short of having physical access to other devices should have any decent chance of getting access to that and then we're also providing a paranoid mode which I can give a mild demonstration of here if I do this key combination this is what we called the matrix mode and so now I have full access to the CPU I can stop the CPU I can inspect memory I can do whatever I want and there is nothing the CPU running behind that can do to stop it the CPU is get you running behind we can do it a dimmer with a game or something and we can modify as we go along so we can add facilities that are somewhat unthinkable with an existing kind of device we could in fact actually add a high performance x86 arm or you know risk v or whatever processor to that and the trick is all of the things like the input and output devices you want on the 8-bit computer that you can trust and then when you say oh well I'm happy to do something untrustworthy like use the web you can do that in a nice ARM processor or whatever as you wish and get that balance of usability and security I'm pretty much covered all of this really I think so you know we can implement all the kind of funny interfaces that you need on a phone so we've got somewhere in the bag the 800 by 480 LCD screens we're going to use on the the prototype phone that's gonna be about the size of a 3ds XL and we got the touch interface we can do all of that funky stuff we can touch dial with the phone on that and so we're moving everything to hardware it's much harder to buffer overrun VHDL than it is see partly because it's much harder to write VHDL in the first place but such is life take the good with the bad and of course we can change it as we go along again we want permissionless easy barrier free innovation to mobile phones in a way that at the moment is otherwise impossible so let's get on to the fun bits then so the Mega 65 phone is our kind of proof by example that this kind of insanity is possible to do even if misguided so we're going to make as I say something about the size of a 3dsxl it'll be about 210 meters wide about 110 millimeters high and about three three and a half centimeters thick backward compatible with the Commodore 64 and Commodore 65 actually very important because you don't want to have a stillborn platform to which there is no software you want something to do when you're stuck on the train with the phone right so if you can't play impossible mission then you know where are you secure audio path we've talked about crazy hardware additions and again that bug is obviously hit miss let's write in a slide so we if we can make it but will it be practical will it be usable can it do anything useful whatsoever and now we have to load part two of the slides when it comes up hello I have to get out of presentation mode first before I get my cursor back open slide two for the course we only have limited memory to hold a certain number of slides in memory right back into presentation mode okay so five cool so we already have everything working on the bench as I say we can get it down to this kind of you know roughly the size of a Nintendo 3ds but a little bit thicker the PCB layout is very excitingly happening back at Flinders University as I speak we had enough student projects working on it that we've got enough engineering workshop time allocated to the project that we could ask them very nicely to make up the PCBs for this year's batch of students work on it and because you probably to demonstrate the the ease of innovation we're adding all manner of bizarre Hardware to it that suits my particular tastes but you can make hardware that suits your particular taste so in my case I you know my big fat heavy laptop is because I kind of go chomping in the jungles event allowed to doing disaster communications work so I want to phone it has a solar panel on it so that the phone will never go flat because as you know thanks to macro fication we can get two watts of high-performance solar cell courtesy of the Flinders University solar race vehicle supplies interesting the panel Tony about ten bucks so you can put that just book on the back we wanted to sound good when we are playing games or annoying people with Sid tunes on the train so we found a supplier of four centimeter to watts three millimeters thick speakers so this will sound really good I hate noise when I want to call so we're gonna put four microphones and do active noise cancellation in hardware so that it should actually be really good at rejecting background noise out from calls and I hate TVs on in cafes and things and you're trying to talk with people and you can't hear them and all you can see is strange things happening on in the background so we found a supplier of I think they're two hundred milli watt infrared LEDs so a TV in the far back of the theater should be totally doable and probably you could sit in one cafe and turn off a TV in a cafe on the other side of the street I'm looking forward to finding out the limits of range on that and finally any real value real volume knobs one for in call audio one for speakerphone audio and one for media so if anyone remember xkcd 1884 with the perils of setting the media volume output level on mobile phones that won't be a problem for us it all have a separate knob for it and it'll be great and the full prototyping costs well this is actually not counting the engineering time of the PCB layout but the the hardware is we're talking substantially under $1000 if PG a board the whole lot we're in 3d printer case and all that kind of funky stuff and we'll actually have something which is basically a working mobile phone that will you know do feature phone kind of things with no I think we've probably put about four person years in and of course a lot of that is actually making a Commodore 64 compatible so we can play all the games that we want to so it's suddenly within the reach again it's in the keynote when they're talking about making the you know that the artificial the open artificial pancreas it was possible because the amount of effort required to do something useful and interesting had been reduced down to that which was possible by a hobby project and so we're trying to do that here okay so why on earth do we want to make something Commodore 64 and Commodore 65 compatible pressing we begin at the bottom of the list and work our way up from there it is of course just plain fun to have the world's fastest Commodore 64 in a portable form factor that can take and make phone calls but also as I said the fact that there are thousands of game titles and actually productivity software that was used seriously like in Germany in particular people were still running G us on Commodore 64's in the late 90s I know because I was selling them software to connect them to old pcs to use the hard drive in the PC to power their gos based Commodore 64's and that was preferable to them rather than actually running a PC and there's lots of people who know how to write software and everything for that and people know how to get good performance out of this simple machine so to my mind it kind of has all the right ingredients in there but also helped that because we're working on making the desktop version of the Mega 65 computer we've got a bunch of crazy guys who are helping us to to do a whole part of the work as well so it's just kind of there's a bunch of factors in there oh yes so the audio isolation so again because we can hmmm how shall I do the audio path so I implemented any FPGA fabric the the audio path to the cellular modem button okay that's all well and good but how do we kind of choose whether you're in call profile and all that kind of simpler Oh stuff it I'll make a sixteen input eight output full crossbar audio mixer in hardware this is quite cheap to do in an FPGA so we can do really weird things if you want to have a private conversation with someone you could plug in your headset and have a conversation with someone on the phone while simultaneously playing completely different audio you could be playing impossible mission or some other we support whatever you like actually playing a game while you're having a discrete conversation with someone and of course that's going to make it harder for anyone who is actually trying to listen in to you to pick it out because it's background noise that they can hear that you can't hear and all that kind of fun stuff anyway it sounded like a fun idea so we did it because we could which is the whole point right whereas at the moment with the traditional approach that's just not a possibility and as we say you know a few person years and not that much cost of hardware so can it be useful and he really is kind of this question of well define useful what do you want your device to do traditionally of course we're stuck with the devices that we can buy on the open market and they can do a lot of stuff because they want to sell to a lot of people but it might actually be that you know if what you mostly want to do is to play games on the train this would be a fantastic device and not have to carry a phone separately or if you're highly paranoid about the security of communications but again I still think that the really the the killer use for this other than for you know people that are under unfriendly environments really is the ability to customise mobile phones cheaply enough that those amongst us who are not you know able to use a traditional mobile phone easily and that could be as simple as you know your grandmother who wants a phone just as one big red button that is you know call the daughter you know if you want to do that suddenly this becomes a whole lot easier to do and so you know there's a bunch of things that we can do will it be able to do everything we run PowerPoint on it probably not can we you know run a browser an email probably get some in there there are browsers for the Commodore 64 be a selection of browsers for the Commodore 64 which it becomes perhaps as a mild surprise and likewise we should be able to make it a decently functional email client as well right so really it depends on where you want to define useful what problem you're trying to solve in lots of cases this won't be the right device but there are cases at the moment where the existing devices I would argue are definitely not the right device and so it's about having that choice so let's get to the fun part of things then any questions before we move on to demos yes a question at the back how am i doing the variable with font rendering an excellent question so it's all in hardware so those who are familiar with the old 8-bit kind of space so eight by eight characters within a one bit per pixel on the Mega 65 we can have eight bits per pixel so we can have 256 colors you can set a different mode that makes those alpha values between foreground and background so that's how we get the nice anti aliased text and then there is some extra bits that you can specify on the characters that sets the kerning trim on the right of the character so this is you know if we changed where the character sit was getting fetched from we'd actually see that it's all you know blocked around where the the text is cool excellent are you looking at this as potentially server replacement hardware sorry say again are you looking at this as potentially serval replacement hardware for your okay because of my serval mesh background there is naturally converging so well I didn't talk about that and it's going to be in this hardware is we're putting a pair of Laura radios in this as well in the ones that we were making in the lab so these will be Commodore 64 that you'll be able to play two player games over 10 kilometres in an urban area without indecently the network so the work can go to pot and you can still be no plane could stop two or something with a friend right but more seriously again you know the solar panel and all of these things and we're putting a 32 watt hour battery this will be a fantastic big phone for off-grid use and again if we think about you know journalists under oppressive regimes and all of this kind of thing a phone which is energy independent and communications independent as much as possible actually has real value for those kind of contexts do another question or demo permission later sure I had my yeah yeah luck in Germany yeah you know as I said we tried it yesterday and it didn't work there's because I haven't run the dial a software yet but it so want to give you enough time for a few of you to note down the number yep check okay one question what while you turn away if someone has physical access to your phone still still has false feeling of trust to your phone correct that's right and so we can't solve all of the problems all in one go and that's a really hard problem to solve if you're dealing with state level actors I would actually argue that that's a unsolvable problem so we just have to keep things as much as we can so let's go back into the freeze menu so yeah what about all open BTS project who are it it seems like community worked out how to do GSM in SDR so ready yeah and that's great I'm glad they're doing it we'd love to get their implementation in a mini pcie form factor and then book put it straight in right so we decouple all of these parts so we're always said we need telephone whoops when I get down there rot let's go fast CPU zoom so this is the next kind of fun bid the dialer sorry excellent excellent well done sir the dialer like the entire like the mobile phone UI thing we've written in a slight extension to Commodore 64 basic so you are now watching that's the entire dialer software that you've just seen go past again think verification you know and you know sovereignty and all of these sorts of things you know if you want to change things so it's 28 kilobytes of untie kanai's S key text someone's trying to ring me will answer come on hello and we need to turn out the audio again hey who was beeping so the bottom of Scylla scope line that's me the microphone in here and the top one is the cellular network yes and no that's not the Silla network we can tell because it's on the top half of the the display so let's hang that call up go back to the thing [Music] hello oh we are I know no no it's cool waiting someone else's trap who is the wise guy that's trying to call at the same time you see one they stop that see what that call open have we was okay right so let's do the course they've all the 80 responses from the modem so here's another thing that your phone probably can't do if I press T so the dollar doesn't support the feature you can do it yourself are ye sure yeah it'll say ring yeah and then this will be confused because the user interface doesn't know what's going on oh hello but the audio part isn't hardly remember now what gets really fun how do audio poles turn the gain down a little bit here oh okay hello a vhq hello deep breathing from a vhq yeah we need to do some sign unsigned audio things in the mixer we need to sort out but yeah so what gets really fun is that we can what while they're still on the line right we can reset the call is the call is still in progress so below AV can you say something so for the people listening on YouTube later on there was a v HQ that's listening in a completely different room trying to Indesit so would you prefer impossible mission or would you prefer whizz ball okay you've been outvoted by everyone here they want Wes ball we have a few display glitches with Wes ball but that's fine I did I picked the disk didn't I already yeah so let's go load oh and you can hear me talking because the microphone is picking up avy can you say something do we had to hear over the lime Devils aren't well balanced not yet but again and we spare them listen to endless music indeed so yeah they're still there hey you're welcome to stand the line or you can know the note we're officially out of time we're now into the break I'm happy for us to keep having fun as long as people would like to have fun but don't feel obliged to stay so yeah I should say this before but feel free to stay and we'll have fun but on behalf of everyone here thank you very much as a small token of our appreciation that was awesome thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: linux.conf.au

Views: 17,377

Rating: 4.9201598 out of 5

Keywords: lca, lca2019, #linux.conf.au#linux#foss#opensource, PaulGardner-Stephen

Id: KuNB4ocZDXA

Length: 46min 11sec (2771 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 23 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/r_retrohacking_mod2]

MEGA65 website

[u/lionsarmor]

I just want this now lol