FluConf 2025

Zen and the Art of Multicast

An Inquiry Into Values

Zen and the Art of Multicast Brett Sheffield (FluConf 2025)

Huge thanks to Robert Martinez (mray) for preparing the title card for this video, and designing our logo.

Also available as audio-only:

Contents

Prepared for FluConf 2025-02-01 by Brett Sheffield of the Librecast Project.

FluConf 2025: Acknowledgement of Covid

SARS-CoV-2 (© Alexey Solodovnikov, Valeria Arkhipova, CC BY-SA 4.0)

I acknowledge flu and covid variants past, present and emerging. To the many we have and continue to kill and permanently disable in and adjacent to our communities through our actions and inactions, I am sorry. This is dedicated to all those who are excluded from our community by our continuing failure to take precautions, our lack of concern for accessibility and our lack of commitment to enforcing codes of conduct.

Introduction

I’m no Zen master. I know rather more about Xen virtualization than I do Zen Buddhism. The title is derived from a book that I first read a long time ago, and which has strayed into my thoughts from time to time, particularly since the Pandemic began.

In March 2020 I caught Covid, and have never fully recovered. Long Covid, as we now call it, manifests in a number of ways. One of the classic symptoms is often referred to as “brain fog”, because that’s nicer than calling it what it is: brain damage. My brain and body don’t work properly anymore, and after nearly 5 years now, I’m resigned to the likelyhood that I’ll never fully recover. I look like more or less the same person, but I am not. If you knew me before the Pandemic, you knew me as Phaedrus. We have a lot in common, but we are not the same. I’m more tired, more angry, but also more focused. I have to be. I’m one of the lucky ones.

There are a lot of people with Long Covid who are so much worse off than I am, so I feel obliged to speak up for those that use up all their spoons each day just to survive.

There will be a lot of people at FOSDEM this weekend. Unfortunately, as most people there will not wear masks, anyone like me who is immunocompromised can’t go. FOSDEM is an event for people who aren’t yet disabled, and would like to roll the dice one more time. As I’ve already unlocked that achievement, there’s nothing left there for me now. Have your fun, while you still can. I enjoyed playing that level, but I’ve moved onto the next one. I’ll wait for you to catch up.

The rest of this isn’t about Covid. It is about human rights, people helping other people, and a way of thinking about technology so that it serves all of us, better. I believe we can have nice things, and I’ve started building them. It’s the highest Quality thing I know how to do.

The Librecast Project is working to decentralize the Internet with multicast. Many people think that the Librecast Project is about multicast, which is understandable - we do bang on about it quite a lot - but multicast is just a means to an end. Librecast is about human rights. I will talk about multicast, but we’ve got a long way to go to get there. First I want to talk about why multicast, and to do that we need to start by talking about Quality.

Concerning Quality

What does it mean to say that one technology or thing is better than another? How do we know when A is good? How can we say that A is better than B? How can we select the best product or solution from among many?

In Robert M Pirsig’s 1974 book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig, through the character of Phaedrus, concludes that Quality is undefined. We all recognise Quality in the things around us, and are constantly making value judgements such as “A is better than B”, but how can we do that if we cannot define Quality itself?

The Cambridge Dictionary defines Quality as “how good or bad something is” and defines Good as “of a high quality or level”. This is circular. To break out of this loop we need something else.

We cannot measure Quality without first defining our Values.

Two teacups (public domain)

In order to measure an object, we must first choose something about that object to measure. We cannot simply measure, say, a teacup. Are we measuring the height, the circumference, the weight, or perhaps the proportions of material that it is made from? We need to choose some attribute and choose our units of measurement.

Similarly, when assessing the Quality of something, we cannot measure Quality directly, but must indirectly derive the Quality from our Values.

Values

So, what are Values?

The Cambridge Dictionary defines Values as “the beliefs people have, especially about what is right and wrong and what is most important in life, that control their behaviour”.

If our Values control our behaviour, it follows that our behaviour becomes the test of our Values. Given a set of circumstances what we do is driven by our Values. We can claim to have certain Values, but it is not until a choice is before us that we find out if we have the courage of our convictions. What price are we prepared to pay to stay true to our Values? Our Values demand a sacrifice.

Without actions, our Values are untested. Without sacrifice, Values are just words.

Or to quote Rachel Dawes in Batman Begins: “It’s not who we are underneath, but what we do that defines us.”

Our Values are part of us, and those Values define who we are.

A table with a selection of apples (© Davide Bolsi, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Even a simple act, such as selecting an apple, says a lot about us. Do we go to the street market or the supermarket, or perhaps grow our own? Do we take our time, and carefully compare and choose, or are we in a hurry and pick the first one we find? Perhaps we choose the apple furthest from the proprietor’s gaze so it is easier to steal? Do we choose the freshness or shiniest? Do we pick something not too ripe so it will last longer? Do we pick the cheapest products when we can, or do we not even look at the price tag? Do we buy organic? Do we care where it was grown? Do we decide which variety of apple to choose based on past experience and the taste? Do we prefer sweet, tart or is crunch more important to us? Perhaps we choose based on colour and how it will look when placed in a bowl with other fruit, where it will sit, uneaten and decorating the apartment we have just put on the market.

So many factors can go into making a choice about even the simplest thing, and by making that choice we are selecting the one that is the best fit for our Values.

Corporations sometimes release code as Open Source, but later, usually once well-established, change the license for new releases to some form of proprietary license. Does this mean their Values have suddenly changed? Or did they never hold those Values in the first place? When tested, they failed that test. Under market pressures, their behaviour has revealed their true Values.

FOSDEM, according to its about page, “is a two-day event organised by volunteers to promote the widespread use of free and open source software”. It was established in 2000, and is one of the largest conferences of its kind in the world. Admission is free, and it attracts thousands of attendees from around the world each year.

FOSDEM has had its controversies around accessibility and inclusivity, its acceptance of sponsorship from GAFAM, the lack of financial and organisational transparency, resistance to adopting a Code of Conduct, and this year for selecting billionaire Jack Dorsey to keynote on a topic for which he has no relevant qualifications or experience beyond the fact his company, Block, is a sponsor of the conference. This led to a call for protest, and FOSDEM quietly dropping the talk from their programme without any explanation.

There are now two other conferences that share the same dates: OFFDEM and FluConf.

There is one and only one reason why these conferences exist: Values.

OFFDEM formed, because of “the co-opting of the free software community by surveillance capitalists, and the failure to reform [FOSDEM] from within”. In short, an objection to the sponsorship and promotion of GAFAM corporations in our Free Software spaces.

FluConf was created “as an alternative, online venue for those in these communities who still care about public health”, in reaction to the ongoing laissez-faire attitude of FOSDEM organisers to the “FOSDEM Flu” and other airborne pathogens in the face of a continuing global Pandemic.

All three conferences focus on Free Software, but each has very different Values and reasons for existing.

FOSDEM Health and Safety slide indicating that the speaker has been sick at more than 50% of FOSDEMs they have attended.

FOSDEM Health and Safety slide. Some of you are sick right now. Some of you with covid. Some of you will fall sick while here. Some of you with covid. Some of you will fall sick at home. Some of you with covid.

Designing for Values

When designing anything, different Values lead us to different designs.

Lets consider an example.

We require some means to connect from one computer to another. Which is a better design, telnet (an unencrypted protocol) or ssh (uses strong encryption)?

Telnet:

  • the telnet protocol is much simpler and easier to understand and implement. There are many more implementations of telnet than ssh.
  • the telnet protocol and many of its implementations are far more mature, having existed for decades longer than ssh.
  • the telnet protocol has been standardised much longer (RFC 854, 1983). The IETF working group for ssh wasn’t formed until 1997, and RFC 4253 wasn’t published until 2006.
  • the main telnet implementations have far fewer lines of code than openssh, and therefore (likely) fewer bugs.
  • there is no complex cryptography in telnet and so the many laws concerning export and use of cryptography do not apply.
  • clear text protocols are easier to debug
  • telnet uses less bandwidth

Surely, based on these facts, we must conclude that telnet is better (has higher Quality) than ssh for our purposes.

However, as soon as we apply Values of security and privacy to our measure of Quality, that conclusion is reversed. ssh is not simply better than telnet, but telnet no longer even meets our basic criteria for a program design of this type. Telnet does not meet our Quality standards any more than an implementation stripped of all socket code. If we value security then /bin/false is as much a candidate for a secure communications program as telnetd. Telnet must therefore be discarded as not solving the problem we set out solve.

When our Values change, our assessment of what constitutes an adequate solution changes, and many previously reasonable designs must now be discarded.

Photo of poodle dog. © Tim Wilson, CC BY 2.0

In the security field, this happens more readily than in many other technology arenas. When a viable attack against one form of encryption is discovered, we retire that protocol and move to something stronger.

At least, we do when it suits us. Sometimes other Values override our choice of security. Despite Snowden confirming what we already suspected, that various certificate authorities cooperate with or are compromised by state actors, we continue to act as though that is not the case. Worse, we deliberately allow man in the middle (MITM) attacks on our secure communications by putting websites, including banking and other sensitive sites, behind services such as Cloudflare which we know to be subject to US government (and likely other) surveillance. In these cases we trade security for convenience.

Wikipedia says:

“As a consequence of choosing X.509 certificates, certificate authorities and a public key infrastructure are necessary to verify the relation between a certificate and its owner, as well as to generate, sign, and administer the validity of certificates. While this can be more convenient than verifying the identities via a web of trust, the 2013 mass surveillance disclosures made it more widely known that certificate authorities are a weak point from a security standpoint, allowing man-in-the-middle attacks (MITM) if the certificate authority cooperates (or is compromised).”

Human Values vs Shareholder Values

many corporate tech logos

Most corporations are set up (and often required by law) to maximise shareholder value, which in the majority of cases means maximising profits takes precedence over other Values. User Values are rarely given much weight, and as a product matures, the product is often made deliberately worse for end users in order to maximize profits for shareholders.

Putting human values rather than shareholder value at the heart of our system requirements leads us to fundamentally different designs, bringing benefits for users of our software, our networks and our society.

We cannot simply copy the designs of proprietary systems and add either an Open Source license or, say, federation with ActivityPub, as some kind of magic fairy dust we can sprinkle on to make it ethical. We need to look at the design in terms of human rights Values and build something new that aligns with those Values.

Unfortunately there is a small wrinkle in this that complicates things: people.

A black hole.(Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), CC BY 4.0)

As the designer and developer of a system, we build using our Values. If we value privacy, we build that into our system. We may at this point think we’ve done our job, but the challenge we still face is to get people to care enough to choose our solution. If the people who would use our systems do not value privacy, they may be seduced by shiny features or be drawn into the gravitational sinkhole that forms when another system becomes popular. The network effect draws people in and once past the event horizon, does not let them go.

People don’t always know or do what’s best for them, having had poor habits trained into them by Big Tech corporations. As well as building rights-respecting systems, we need to teach people how to respect their rights and themselves.

Many people claim to support the Values of human rights, but when confronted with a choice to give up using a rights-infringing technology like Facebook, are unwilling to make the sacrifice needed.

Any Road Will Take You

If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.

Whether we are designing, building, or procuring technology we need to be clear about our Values before we start. By requiring concepts like privacy, accessibility and consent from the outset we can discard many common antipatterns, protocols and approaches, leading us to novel solutions that better support our needs.

If, however, we don’t take time to consider our Values then we risk getting carried off to who knows where.

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

From the smallest software project to the largest corporation, organisations have a memory. It is far easier to build in our Values from the start than it is to try to change course once we have multiple contributors and users involved. Elephants dont really make great dance partners.

It is often easier to start again than it is to take some bloated, inefficiently designed program and try to make it light, fast and efficient. In the same way, it is easier to start a project with Values of, say, accessibility and privacy than it is to try to bolt on these attributes later, after we’re already committed to architectures, frameworks and protocols that may not support our Values.

Likewise, putting in place a Code of Conduct is much easier to do before you think you need it. By the time problems have started it is too late. A good Code of Conduct sets out the kinds of behaviour expected by all members of the community. Those that aren’t in alignment with your Values are less likely to get involved, and it is much easier to tap the sign later if you actually have one.

Tech is Political

Tech is political. Of course it is. Making a sandwich is political.

Let’s take software development as an example.

When you write (or choose not to write) a piece of software, this is a political act. The choice of whether and what to write, how you make it, where you publish it, if you publish it, under which license you release it, who you collaborate with, the types of users you target etc. are all political considerations. Perhaps you don’t consider it political, as the developer. You were just scratching a personal itch, but the consequences of your choices can have wide-ranging impacts, whether you choose to consider them or not.

Choosing not to play the game is also a move. You cannot escape politics.

Does your new project have a Code of Conduct? Will you speak about it at conferences with no Health Policy? What actions will you take to protect your users? How will governance work in your project? By default, as the founder, you have the role of BDFL. Will you retain that role, or take steps to involve the community in your project’s governance? Politics prevades all facets of our technical spaces.

Digital Sovereignty

Democratic nations outside the USA have an increasing problem stemming from their over-reliance on US corporations in their technical supply-chain. The US Government and its security services have wide-ranging powers to compel US companies to hand over data under their control. The Snowden revelations showed clearly that, even when US or international law explicitly forbids it, US agencies will intercept communications when it suits them, not just for “security reasons”, but also political and commercial ends.

Governments around the world, and key NGOs such as RIPE, who are responsible for Internet addressing in Europe, put their data into the hands of US corporations. The International Criminal Court, who store most of their evidence on Microsoft’s Azure cloud services, are presently scrambling to deal with the fallout of possible sanctions from the Trump administration in response to them doing their job by issuing arrest warrants for Israeli officials over their role in the Palestinian genocide in Gaza. Sanctions may lead to the loss of evidence, causing the collapse of not just the case in Gaza, but could halt progress in any number of cases the ICC is currently pursuing.

This is why digital sovereignty is important. In our modern world, centralized US control of our digital supply chain is distasterous. The abuse of executive power by one man in the White House could have far-reaching consequences. Only days into Trump’s second administration we are starting to see just how serious this can be.

In the Netherlands, the Dutch .nl domain registry has decided to move many of their services onto US cloud providers (AWS), landing another blow for digital sovereignty in the EU. When objections were raised, Dutch Parliament commissioned an independant review which concluded “No Dutch or European cloud service provider is currently able to fully satisfy our technical and functional criteria or meet our legal and organisational requirements”.

It’s an astonishing conclusion, but when the technical requirements are written such that they require features only provided by one vendor, then any detailed assessment will conclude that this vendor is the best option and that other services cannot compete.

Governments everywhere have long used this technique for tendering. It’s how corruption can exist in the face of a “fair” tendering process.

For SIDN to conclude that there is no hosting in the EU that can meet their requirements says that their requirements are wrong.

Again, it comes down to Values. It is clear that SIDN does not value digital sovereignty in this analysis. If they did, then just as with the comparison of telnet and ssh, SIDN would have to conclude that US cloud services are not a valid solution.

Good People, Doing Nothing

When good people do nothing, evil triumphs.

After more than two decades together my wife and I have more-or-less developed our own dialect. It’s our own eclectic mix of Scots, Doric, Australian/Yorkshire English, French and whole bunch of made-up words and idioms all our own.

I have no idea if other couples do this.

One of our idioms used to be “to sit on the wall”, but these days has evolved into “to eat a blueberry”. We use this when we see good people doing nothing in the face of evil.

The origin of our phrase is this image from the Höcker collection:

SS Officer Karl Höcker eating blueberries with female auxiliary members as a man plays an accordion in the background.

The photo was taken at Solahütte, a subcamp of Auschwitz, built as a holiday resort for the SS officers and auxiliaries such as the volunteer typists and clerks in the picture who worked at the nearby extermination camp.

They were just typists and clerks. They were just enjoying a few well-earned blueberries after helping the Nazi regime keep meticulous records of… their activities. Typing and totting up lists of things. Jolly good. Have a blueberry.

Wikipedia says of the Nazi Holocaust:

An estimated 200,000 to 250,000 Germans were directly involved in killing Jews, and if one includes all those involved in the organization of extermination, the number rises to 500,000. Genocide required the active and tacit consent of millions of Germans and non-Germans.

If we all sit on the wall eating blueberries very bad things can happen.

For most of us, it is difficult to imagine anyone we know participating directly in genocide. We all like to think we’d resist. If we even had the faintest whiff of that sort of thing, we’d spring into action no matter the cost.

So, will you close your Facebook account?

If you’re not yet convinced Facebook is a blight on the face of our digital world, have a read of Meta in Myanmar by Erin Kissane. Their complicity in genocide and manipulation of democratic processes around the world might be enough, I hope, to convince you. Zuckerberg isn’t just eating your blueberries, he’s raking in billions of dollars and standing by Trump’s side as he destroys your world.

Facebook, a company that shares your cat pictures, is one of only 12 corporations in the world to be valued at over a trillion US dollars. It is the 7th highest valued company in the world. Why is that? I’m sure your cat is lovely, but come on. What is their product, exactly?

Their product is you.

When you recognise that Facebook is profiling all of us and our connections, selling that information on to security services, insurers and advertisers, and can influence the outcome of democratic elections, we can start to see where that trillion dollar valuation comes from.

Yes, giving up Facebook may cost you. You might have to give up some groups you find helpful, or lose touch with some friends and family. That is the price. Help them to understand why you are leaving and encourage them to come with you, but in the end remember: Our Values demand a sacrifice.

The chairman of the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar stated that Facebook played a “determining role” in the Rohingya genocide.

We may not think we know anyone capable of torturing an inmate at, say, Guantánamo Bay, or helping ICE to round up people to deport, but I think we all of know someone who would fix the plumbing, or perhaps take pride in making sure the wifi worked properly at one of these detention centres. Be sure to give them a blueberry for me.

Prisoners at Guantánamo Bay © 2002 Shane McCoy/Greg Mathieson/Mai/Getty Images

If you want to stop helping ICE, Give Up GitHub, and while you’re at it move your code onto the IPv6 Internet by moving to a FOSS-friendly forge like SourceHut or Codeberg.

ICE officer detaining a suspect (public domain)

In the Free/Libre/Open Source tech community, many of us continue to attend conferences despite the absence of any meaningful Covid precautions, and refuse to mask up, thus putting lives at risk. We rationalise this in all sorts of ways, often minimizing the risk, but the fact is Covid isn’t over, and this behaviour is killing and permanently disabling people, as well as excluding those who do care about public health from participating.

Sign the Public Health Pledge and support events that have taken steps to make events more safe and inclusive.

Take action. Help other people. Make the sacrifices needed to stand up for your Values. There is always something you can do - you have more power than you realise.

Human Rights and Technology

Eleanor Roosevelt holding the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights

The place where human rights and technology overlap is a big one, but first lets consider what we mean by human rights.

With over 8 billion people on the planet, from many diverse cultures and backgrounds, we don’t all agree on what constitutes a human right, or even if such a thing exists. Again, our personal Values come into play and these are shaped by our nature and environment. In the end, we must all stay true to our own Values, regardless of what any document says.

Having said that, there are several documents that try to outline what our “universal” human rights are. These are political documents, and may not align perfectly with your own personal Values, but they’re a useful starting point for discussion.

Lets take a look at two such documents: The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. The rights in these documents have been fought over, agreed upon, and given the weight of law by many nations, so they are an important tool we can use.

Before we get into specific rights, there are two ways of looking at rights:

  • a right is something that we strive to provide equally to all
  • a right is something that society owes me, personally

The latter view crops up quite a lot in online discussions, often by those asserting their “right” to free speech. These people feel that their rights are something they can impose on others. I think the former advances our civilization more than the latter.

Lets take a look at some of the articles of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I’m going to highlight specific articles that I think need more attention in the technology space.

Picture of King Charles III of England wearing a crown and holding a sceptre.

Article 1:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

When building systems, make sure your users are similarly free and equal in dignity and rights. When you build something that is inaccessible to someone, you take away their dignity.

Article 2:

Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

The UN says you have these rights, even if the country you live in does not. Encourage diversity in your projects, both developers and users.

Article 5:

No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Consider how moderation will work from the outset. Give your users control over their data, and think about how to protect them from doxxing and abuse.

Article 12:

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Privacy and security are human rights requirements, not options.

Article 14:

  1. Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.

Nothing to do with digital rights really, but the UN says drowning refugees in the sea isn’t cool.

Article 19:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Article 20:

  1. Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
  1. No one may be compelled to belong to an association.

Article 21:

  1. Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.

Article 27:

  1. Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

How does the UK’s Online Safety Act, which has already led to the shutdown of many websites, including discussion forums on cycling, the environment and technology, fit with Article 27’s right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community and Article 12’s right to privacy? Might this be subject to challenge?

Article 28:

Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.

Fight for these rights, and help others to know and realise their rights. Build systems to support this endeavour.

Article 29:

  1. Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.

Trans rights are human rights.

  1. In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.

The more modern Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union has a few articles that are directly relevant to technology:

Article 1: Human dignity

Human dignity is inviolable. It must be respected and protected.

Consider this when next putting a CAPTCHA on your website. If a blind or partially sighted person cannot prove they are human to a computer, how do you think that might feel? When the apparent solution to your problem involves violating others’ rights, it is not a valid solution. Find another.

Article 7: Respect for private and family life

Everyone has the right to respect for his or her private and family life, home and communications.

The EU’s proposed Chat Control legislation, which mandates the blanket scanning of all private messages, seems incompatible with Article 7. Resist.

Article 8: Protection of personal data

  1. Everyone has the right to the protection of personal data concerning him or her.
  1. Such data must be processed fairly for specified purposes and on the basis of the consent of the person concerned or some other legitimate basis laid down by law. Everyone has the right of access to data which has been collected concerning him or her, and the right to have it rectified.

Even without the GDPR, Article 8 has got your data covered.

Article 11: Freedom of expression and information

  1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.
  1. The freedom and pluralism of the media shall be respected.

Article 12: Freedom of assembly and of association

  1. Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and to freedom of association at all levels, in particular in political, trade union and civic matters, which implies the right of everyone to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his or her interests.

Article 13: Freedom of the arts and sciences

The arts and scientific research shall be free of constraint. Academic freedom shall be respected.

Article 26: Integration of persons with disabilities

The Union recognises and respects the right of persons with disabilities to benefit from measures designed to ensure their independence, social and occupational integration and participation in the life of the community.

Cover your facehole. Wear a mask.

Ensure your websites and software are accessible.

Article 36: Access to services of general economic interest

The Union recognises and respects access to services of general economic interest as provided for in national laws and practices, in accordance with the Treaties, in order to promote the social and territorial cohesion of the Union.

The Internet is a service of general economic interest. So is a technology conference.

Article 41: Right to good administration

2(c). This right includes: the obligation of the administration to give reasons for its decisions.

This may need some consideration before handing decisions over to some AI system about whose decision-making it is difficult to reason.

The Internet as Tool for Human Rights

The Internet is the greatest human rights tool we’ve ever built. It allows us to share information, inform ourselves about the world, to keep in touch, to organise (a protest, or just to meet up with our mates), to sign petitions, for whistleblowers to disseminate information and for journalists and their sources to communicate over great distances. For us, as citizens, to gain access to a wide variety of news sources, to check our representatives’ voting records etc. Never before in history have so many people had so much access to information.

In a global civilization, we need global communication tools to keep in touch and keep informed. Information is vital to democracy and to monitoring and maintaining our human rights. Climate change is a global threat. Genocides are an affront to us all, wherever they occur. The Internet is no longer optional in our globalized world.

Protests in Tahrir Square against Mubarak (Jonathan Rashad, CC BY 2.0)

According to Wikipedia, during the multi-national Arab Spring protests in 2011,

Social media played a significant role in facilitating communication and interaction among participants of political protests. Protesters utilized social media, to organize demonstrations … , disseminate information about their activities, and raise local and global awareness of ongoing events. Research from the Project on Information Technology and Political Islam, found that online revolutionary styled motivations often preceded mass protests on the ground, and that social media played a central role in shaping political debates in the Arab Spring.

The Internet remains a critical tool available to help us organise our actions in the physical world. Unfortunately our Internet is under threat.

Governments around the world frequently disrupt telecommunications in reponse to perceived threats. This ranges from targeted cell tower shutdowns near physical protests, to full-scale Internet cuts affecting entire countries or regions. Netblocks is an organisation which reports on Internet disruptions and their causes.

Confirmed: Metrics show an ongoing disruption to connectivity at the Goma internet exchange in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo; the incident comes amidst a major military escalation with neighboring Rwanda as authorities present measures to “counter Rwandan propaganda” (source: Netblocks)

In the 15 months to January 2025, there were at least 11 cuts to submarine cables affecting Internet services. Russian sabotage is suspected behind some of these cuts in retaliation for “European nations helping Ukraine defend itself against the full-scale invasion that Moscow has been pursuing since 2022”.

The nature of a corporation or other organisation is formed mostly by its business model. If a corporation works by monitizing your data, privacy breaches aren’t an accident. They’re an innevitability.

The problem is twofold. We need to fix the technology, yes. More importantly, we need to start caring about our rights. We need to talk about them. We need to fight for them. It doesn’t matter how good Tor is if you’re not using it.

If you’re lucky enough to be in the privileged position of not caring about your privacy or security, great. Not everyone is as lucky as you. Human rights and democracy are not something we fight for only when we need them. If we stand idly by while others are under threat, who will stand for us and our freedoms when we are next?

We need to care about and fight for our rights and freedoms now. People around the world are having their rights trampled on. Journalists and activists are being imprisoned and killed. Fixing this not just necessary, but urgent, and becoming more so every day.

CIVICUS Monitor publishes an annual report which “tracks the state of freedom of association, peaceful assembly and expression in 198 countries and territories”. Their 2024 report states:

Only 40 out of 198 countries and territories have an open civic space rating, indicating widespread respect for civic freedoms. In comparison, 81 countries and territories are rated in the worst two categories of having restricted and closed civic space, indicating widespread and routine repression of fundamental freedoms. Some 72.4 percent of the global population lives under these repressive conditions. Almost 30 percent lives in countries where civic space is completely closed.

Both our physical and online spaces are threatened and we need to act now.

Next Generation Internet (NGI)

In 2018, the European Commission launched the Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative.

The Next Generation Internet (NGI) is a European Commission (EC) initiative that aims to shape the development and evolution of the Internet into an Internet of Trust. An Internet that responds to people’s fundamental needs, including trust, security, and inclusion, while reflecting the values and the norms all citizens enjoy in Europe.

NGI innovations consider people’s privacy concerns first and foremost, for an Internet we can trust, laying the groundwork for a Europe fit for the Digital Age.

NGI fosters diversity and decentralisation and grows the potential for a sustainably open environment for our cultures and economies, celebrating our values, promoting creativity and respecting the environment.

The Librecast Project has received funding from NGI through the NLnet Foundation. If your Values are aligned with NGI, you may wish to consider applying for funding for your project.

Beyond the stated aims of the EC, Librecast aims to support a truly rights-enabled Internet for everyone built on multicast principles.

Multicast Networking

Multicast is group communication. More specifically, multicast is many-to-many communication where the participants are self-selecting. Multicast is decentralised, scalable and participants are anonymous by default.

A sender cannot tell how many members a group has, only that a group has more than zero members. If there are no members of a group, no data will be forwarded, but if there is at least one member, data will be forwarded to all members.

These are the fundamental properties of multicast that are required for it to function in alignment with our Values.

There are many forms of network protocol in use that use the term “multicast” that do not meet this definition, such as Single-Source Multicast (SSM) and other protocols such as Automatic Multicast Tunnelling (AMT) that are unidirectional and therefore are not true multicast according to our definition.

Why is this?

Once again, it comes down to Values. In building true inter-domain many-to-many multicast we are faced with a number of challenges. These challenges are not insurmountable. However, much of the research and development in multicast is funded and driven by large corporations who have no interest in many-to-many communication and no interest in human rights. The primary focus of most of these corporations is in building one-to-many systems that reduce their costs for providing live-streaming of sponsored events. Multicast, to them, is an advertising delivery system. This more accurately resembles broadcast than multicast. The design of these one-to-many broadcast systems is centralised rather than decentralised, and profit-driven, rather than rights-driven.

We must discard these systems as they do not meet our requirements and are not aligned with our Values. They are non-solutions to the problems we are committed to solving.

Properties of Multicast:

  • pull, not push
  • all addresses (group) are mobile by default
  • anonymous
  • keyed ownership and membership
  • federation with 0 lines of code

Multicast group addressing transforms all addresses into mobile addresses, removing one of the limitations of unicast.

In the Librecast Project we are exploring what universal communication might look like if all communications were multicast. There is no need for separate unicast and broadcast networking.

Multicast Design

When you look at something using a different lens you see things differently. In looking at multicast with a human rights lens it becomes clear that there is more to multicast than you might see if simply looking at it with a view to delivering streams of packet data.

One of the first things that comes into focus is that multicast is networking with consent.

Participants in a multicast group are self-selecting and can join and leave the group at any time. Joining a group is a declaration of consent to receive data from the group. That consent can be revoked at any time by leaving the group.

Furthermore, group members are anonymous by default. Unless a user chooses to identify themselves their identity remains private.

When sending to a multicast group we do not know how many members that group has, only that a group has greater than zero members. If a group has no members, data is not forwarded.

The properties of multicast allow us to more easily build systems that put the receiver in control.

  • receiver-driven
  • sender provide data in many forms, no data sent if noone listens

There is no censorship, but without the consenting listeners we are soon shouting into the void.

Librecast

The Librecast Project is working at the intersection of Human Rights and Technology. We believe that our fundamental rights depend on universal group communication without borders, censorship or netblocks, and we are working to build the Next Generation Internet to support that vision.

Using multicast principles, we are building decentralized group communication to allow humans to collaborate without upsetting the polar bears.

polar bear

Librecast Studio

Librecast Studio is something we are working towards in the Librecast Project. Our aim is to build a multipurpose collaboration environment based on Human Rights Values and using multicast design principles.

Librecast Studio is building on our multicast and network coding libraries to build an accessible, efficient, offline-first and user-centric group collaboration platform.

As we’ve discussed, human rights depend on effective human communication. Multicast is not just a network technology but also a design methodology where the recipient is in control of the data they receive and the medium in which they receive it. Multicast design is based on consent, and that consent can be revoked.

Librecast Studio uses multicast to deliver a multimedia collaboration platform enabling groups to work and play without compromising user autonomy.

Have you ever sat in a lecture or presentation (or watched the video afterwards) where you couldn’t read the presenter’s slides? Everyone’s eyes and tastes differ. By delivering the raw data and allowing the user to choose how that data is presented we allow presenters to deliver a media-rich presentation that is accessible to everyone. The recipient chooses which inputs to subscribe to, in which language, and how those inputs are rendered, choosing colours, fonts, sizes or using a screenreader, whether they are sitting in the lecture hall or watching the livestream or video.

Librecast Studio is under construction. Join us to help make this vision a reality!