Geek Night Hyderabad
Flashback
46th edition
46th edition
6:30 pm - 7:30 pm
FreedomBox & Community Wi-Fi networks
The internet was originally created to be a peer-to-peer network. The client-server model introduced by the early internet corporations created a power imbalance that eventually led to many social evils. This talk starts by looking into some of the problems caused by this divide, including some recent events posing a threat to security, privacy and freedom of people. A self-hosted personal server running freedom-respecting software is proposed as one of the solutions. In addition, the speaker will also share his personal collection of a full suite of privacy-respecting applications collected over the years with the audience. The Telugu villages of Gangadevipalli and Surappagudem have free community Wi-Fi and locally-hosted digital services available to all. The network is neutral, privacy-respecting, inclusive and self-funded by the villagers. It's cheap, quick to deploy and costs very little to maintain. This is not a multi-crore government project or a data-harvesting corporate program. The network was built by volunteers using off-the-shelf hardware and is powered by freedom-respecting software running on the FreedomBox platform. In this talk, we present an inspiring story of how a group of volunteer hackers using technologies from various engineering disciplines helped create a solution to bring rural India online through local self-reliance instead of depending on governments or corporations.
7:30 pm - 7:45 pm
Break & Networking
7:45 pm - 8:30 pm
Continued...
Geek Night is a monthly event to promote sharing of technical knowledge and increase collaboration between geeks in Hyderabad. It is organized by a passionate group of programmers and sponsored by ThoughtWorks.
It happens on the First Wednesday of every month, unless that's a public holiday or any other unavoidable cause, like an Alien invasion.
Geek Night Volunteers