conference logo

Playlist "sigint12"

ECONNREFUSED

Clemens Cap

Communication technologies are everywhere but on many occasions we cannot communicate. My laptop cannot read my smart meter, my tablet in the canteen cannot broadcast for a lift to town and my iPhone cannot distribute pictures via Bluetooth – I must use eMail, Facebook or Twitter.
Various motivations impede free communication: Expensive services should be used, ads should be viewed, contents, connections and locations are monitored; often communication is prevented completely. In an open society only a single reason seems acceptable to prevent communication: The users of the devices do not want to communicate.
This principle of recipient-freedom requires different communication architectures: Our current Internet, contrary to its reputation, still allows monitoring and censoring.
The talk describes adaptions to be made in the overall communication architecture, especially to the concepts of identity and adressing. It sketches a virtual network layer on top of traditional PHY and MAC abstractions.