Bio Hacking Village - Building a New Decentralized Internet With the Nodes
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Titus, Nick
et al.
The internet is broken. It's vulnerable to manipulation, censorship, shutdowns, surveillance, and on top of all that, it costs to access it. What if we could bypass all that? The PirateBox platform with its meshing capability creates this possibility, but somehow has gained little traction. If every WiFi enabled device just became a node on a mesh network, we would have a replacement for the hardware layer of the internet. To show how powerful this platform can be, and take it to the next level, we have created the PegLeg, an implanted cybernetic enhancement that turns the user into an anonymized local area network on which people can chat and share files anonymously, as well as mesh with other nearby networks. The PegLeg differs from a wearable, as it cannot be confiscated, and has no battery. Come learn how you can turn your phone, laptop, raspberry pi, or router into a meshing piratebox, and build a new internet. And if you are really committed, you can build the implant yourself, and be a walking pirate server with a PegLeg.
 I'm going to basically go through and just introduce myself here who's going to introduce this whole crew. So from there I'll let you guys write. Just some background in case you don't know. Sorry guys. Next slide. Next slide is working in mathematics and high energy physics until he's had his background in science. It was probably the right thing to help tackle problems of world health and other social issues. Perpetually disruptive. This flagship project makes it possible for people to manufacture their own medications at home. Open source and made from off the shelf parts, the apothecary micro lab puts many medications within the reach of those who would otherwise not have them. The project would garnered its group the most press was the EpiPencil. An open source version of the EpiPencil which cost only $30 produced in $3.00 a fill. I have used this. My son requires it. And with one source of provider for EpiPens and the cost that it takes to buy that. Thank you for that personally. Thank you so much. Thank you all so much for being here. This is a really, really, really happy moment for me because in my health work which is different than this, several things happen. I come up and I talk about things that I didn't have much of a hand in except for organizing. I'm bragging about great work that other people did and I can't even give them credit because we work in the gray area that's in the darker side of Heather as I call it. So they shouldn't be named. And I've been so welcomed by the biohacking community and I've never felt like I really deserved the label. But today I do. So I'm going to bring up my guys here. The first thing here is that this was a collaborative effort and I want to bring up Nick Titus and as well as Zach Shannon who have been working at the core of this. Fourthies Vinegar is of course my organization, Solitary is Zach's. Myonic is Nick's and of course we could not have done this without Cassex who I think you all know. Who's a champ and made this all possible. So we also would like to do a special thanks to a couple of people specifically left and them and Matthias Strube who helped us a great deal as well as Nebula who I think is here, Bunny who's not an actually hands, galt and control creep and my favorite childhood author. So we've got a problem. We were so excited. I was so excited when the internet was built. It was going to fix everything. We were going to be connected. It was going to be free. It was going to be impossible to censor. It was going to be impossible to surveil and all of that is not the case and we're paying for it and it doesn't work. There's a backbone. We're reliant on infrastructure. Everything you do online is watched all the time by any number of places and it can be shut down at a moment's notice depending on where you are. This is a disaster. We dream of it looking like this. Every device could just be part of our network. Why does it have to have a backbone? It could be better. We want it to be better. We dream of it being better and better. The technology exists for it to be better. This is not our technology and this is why we thank Matthias because he built the pirate box platform. This is an open network that is not connected to anything, local area network. There's a phone app that you can get, you can run it on your laptop and you can build it into routers. All of a sudden you have an anonymized network where you can chat. There are forums, you can trade, upload download files, you can stream and they're super easy to build. This is sort of what it looks like when you pull it up. Here's one that I built. This is a battery powered router. You can see it's fairly small depending on your definition of small which is a critical definition. I brought this to GrindFest. This is the inside. I think Nick is going to talk a little bit about what happened when we were at GrindFest and we're going to go through it. It was about three months ago back in May. We were out in the desert in California in Tahatchipee at GrindFest. GrindFest is a grinder biohacking meetup. Michael had this little board booted up so we could do local file sharing, it had a chat room, all this sort of thing. Left who was in attendance saw that and said, hey, do you think you can implant that in me? Being the environment it was, we figured, maybe, why not? Why not give it a shot? We opened up that little white box and we found this board inside. We depopulated all of the unnecessary parts. We took off ports that we didn't need. We took off a few larger components. Got those all stripped down. We took out the battery because if you know anything about implantables, that is one of the big points of contention right now is putting a battery inside of somebody. We wanted to avoid that. We added in 64 gigabytes of USB storage, soldered onto the board. Then from there, we solved the powering problem using a G charging coil. We came up with this idea that theoretically it could be able to be powered through the skin just by a wireless battery. We had to scrape off and grind off some of these more stubborn, some of the more stubborn ports on there. It was about a two day process and we were just using all of the parts that we happen to have there in the lab. Then we get it all finished. We got it coated in a biocompatible resin that Jeff did here. From there, the implantation started. The rest is gory. Fair warning. Yes. In a clean room, in a clean facility, we had the first prototype implanted into left's arm. This is the roughest of these photos. This was all done by somebody who's trained. There's the device. It's pretty metal, pretty cyberpunk. That is it. After all sutured up, I think the next photo shows it off a little bit better once all the blood's out of there. There is the device under somebody's skin. This is not a bone sticking out. That is a drainage tube that allows fluid to come out. Once it was in left's arm. This one I had to put in because this is the best compliment any of us have ever gotten. I just want to say thank you. This was a comment given by Technicolor. They said this right at the end of all of Grindfest. This is that implant today or a few weeks ago after it's healed. A pretty gnarly scar there. It's under the skin and everything ended up working on there. Left is the first person to have this first device implanted. It has 64 gigs of local storage. By holding a wireless battery up to it, they can power it on and have that local network just under their skin. That was all built in two or three days with just the parts that we had on hand. After all that ordeal, we decided to take another step. Zach and I worked a lot trying to get these bits and pieces to come together to try and build a new version that was smaller with more data density and the key thing trying to make it so that they would mesh between each other. The thing that makes the magic possible of all of the ideas of building a new internet is if they all talk to each other. We needed to make that happen. This is a picture of us at our best, clearly, visually. When we were on a video call with Matthias, who was such a champ, he came off of vacation with his family and set up a video call with us in the middle of the night between single poor, wherever you live, and Germany, somewhere in the US. You want to say a little bit about the technical side of this and what we ran up against? Yeah, we were trying to figure out the networking and a lot of the documentation was very vague or translated from non-English. Matthias was a great help. He was able to actually sketch out diagrams and walk us through all the steps of what is actually happening and with the topology of everything. That really helped us know what we were supposed to be doing as opposed to what we were supposed to end up with. We were trying to get it to be smaller than version one because that was a little bigger than some people would want to get in their skin. This is really tiny. It's 40 by 40 millimeters. Yeah, this is 40 millimeters square. This is what we started working on. It does have onboard radios, a little bit of onboard storage, of course, with expandable. We were working on this for a while. We were really hoping that we would be able to get this project done before DEF CON, so we could actually show it off and show you guys this stuff. It doesn't have a built-in antenna. I was looking into some options, including using our actual skin as an antenna, which we just spoiler alert, we ultimately did not use. This was a chip antenna that we looked at. It's really tiny. It's really powerful. They have these technical drawings and I figured out a way that it would lie over the corner. I was so excited and then that didn't work. Point being, we put a lot of work into that board before we decided that we should just go with a Raspberry Pi. From there, it took about a week to complete and it was a lot simpler. It's slightly larger. Like 20 percent. We were kind of doing a lot more overthinking than we should have been doing. Don't over-engineer your projects. We'll regret it. So V2 is based on the Raspberry Pi Zero. This is the first time we got it booted and connected to it. Michael was pretty hyped to see the screen. This makes my old school hacker heart glow when you see ASCII text boot up from the thing that you've been working so hard to build. This is our splash page. This looks very much like the Pyrobox page but it has a little extra verbiage and a different logo. The functionality is the same. This SD card came out four days ago. The units we built only have a half terabyte only. And yet, I'm not crying yet. Here's what it looks like coded and powered up. So the additional parts of the hardware to look at here. This is the next one is a little closer. So this is a different unit that's also been coded. You can see that this one is just a Tesla unit that has a 16 gig SD card. On the other side, you'll see a couple of things. There's a second Wi-Fi card. That's the thing that's glowing blue. And that's so that we can make the meshing happen. We had quite a battle trying to figure out ways to get these units to mesh without an external extra Wi-Fi. So yeah, we got a successful network interface up. So two units together, powered together, will be able to communicate. But we spent so much time trying to get that interface up that we actually at the moment don't have any software running on the network. So we'll be asking you all about that later. Do you want to say something else about that? So the other thing to look at here is that you'll see the sort of taupe chunk on the corner there. That's a capacitor. That's a 2200 microfarad tantalum capacitor. Now that's necessary because cheat charging is a protocol that's developed by the wireless charging consortium, not the wireless continuous power consortium, which is an entity which doesn't exist. So when you've got something that's designed to charge, it's going to give power, but dropping it intermittently is not a big deal as long as it can reconnect. So we need something that was going to buffer that power drop in between times so it wasn't just constantly knocking us offline. I first did this with a super cap and I was like, well, this is great, but you don't put electrolytics under your skin because they explode and other things that are not great to have inside your body. So we found this tantalum capacitor thanks to Nebula, wherever he is. Thank you, bro. And it worked like a charm. The other thing that you can see is that, so the board's been depopulated, all the ports are gone. You'll see the four purple jumper wires going from the USB interface, the USB key, and then you'll see a little red wire and then a little gray wire coming off the power USB. This runs to the capacitor in parallel and then over to the G coil on the back. So this is, again, you can connect to this using whatever device. So this is what the splash page looks like on a phone. And then once these were built, finally, we mailed them to Casux and he coded them and then we decided to put them in. Everybody ready? This is Casux who is made of steel and just grabbed the bite stick and said, I'll do the first one. And this was amazing to witness. You can't see it in this picture, but I'm standing there as first assist. Absolutely awestruck. And this is how you get under the surface of the skin to make a pocket so that you can get the thing in there. And then when you get the thing in there, you kind of got to shove it a little bit. I love it in there. And this is my favorite picture in the entire show. What's happening here is Zach has just connected. So you see how Cas' hand has his battery to his leg. He had just finished suturing himself up and we're spinning the thing up in real time. Nick has just uploaded video of the procedure to his leg which is now being streamed off of my laptop here. But this is the most amazing thing. It was less than an hour that it took for him to do this by himself. I mean, I was there, but I brought him stuff. It wasn't like I was super useful. And then after it was ready, it was I'm next. So that's my leg that he's building that same pocket in. And I am not made of steel. So it was a little rougher for me, but here you can see the unit going in and in and in and here you can see my little moment of, hey Zach, can you remind me why we're doing this? I'm a little confused. It's like a Renaissance baby. Yeah, because the next thing I did was faint. He's passed out here and I was checking his pulse. And I was only out for a few seconds. I remember coming to hearing what he's got a pulse when he's fine. Just hold his shoulder so he doesn't fall out of the chair. And I was like, whose shoulder do I have to hold? And then I promptly threw up. But happily ever after, everything worked out. We had it going. And as you can see, I look a little better than in the previous photos. Now here's the thing that always comes up. When you've got an implant, people ask this question that can either be very interesting or very divisive, which is what does your implant do that a wearable couldn't? And it's a really valid question. It's important because if we're actually going to the trouble of cutting ourselves open and sticking things in, we should have a reason. Even if that reason is this is my form of self-expression and I want to be a cyborg and that's important. And that's part of it. There are arguments that can be made for people who are maybe working in political activism, people who are maybe working with sensitive data. This is a way that you can discreetly transfer that sort of data, bring that out into the world, cross maybe enemy lines and not have it detected. So left first, got her implant and then traveled back to the UK. They made it through security without any sort of hiccups. There was nothing through going through the scanners that caused any problems. So there's an argument to be made there. It's a little bit flimsy. The real reason is self-expression and being a cyborg and that sort of thing. However, there are a number of things that this does from a technical standpoint that haven't been done before. First off, it has more storage than anything that's ever been implanted before by a large margin. Making both Michael and Jeff the highest digital capacity humans on the earth. Additionally, with the exception of version one, this is the first thing to take wireless power as its only power source. And this seems very promising because as Annie Grinder will tell you, designing an implant, your biggest problem is where does the power come from? And being able to have a battery, like being able to have no battery so that there's no battery to run out or fail or blow is a huge jump. This we believe could be the first step towards a sort of network of implants that could all be powered just using a centralized battery and wires going to each implant with just a charging coil instead of having to worry about those batteries under the skin. And additionally, the key, key, key thing is that they talk to each other. And ultimately, this is the thing that we're dreaming of because if we all are just nodes, if you imagine where you live and you imagine every computer, every router and every phone being a node on a mesh network, then at least your local infrastructure can go away. I mean, how many times, this is great. Just an hour ago, we were upstairs and we're like, well, I need to send you that big image. Oh, what's that? God, I can't connect to the Wi-Fi because I don't actually have a room number. How do we, and then suddenly we were like, wait, we just solved this problem. I spin up the peg leg. And that's how we traded every picture you just saw in this entire thing. And we did it an hour ago. So we're looking at what to do next. Zach, you want to jump in? So yeah, so here's some of our ideas going forward. First of all, actually utilize the, the machine network that we worked so hard to integrate, whether that be just, you know, file sync between nodes or actual like real-time communication between users like instant messaging, VoIP even. And that's just on the current hardware. So go in for future hardware is, you know, try to eliminate additional radios because theoretically we don't actually need that second Wi-Fi radio to do what we're trying to do. Oh, however, I should just mention the other thing is that our, our peg leg units will mesh with pirate boxes that are mesh enabled as well. So if you have one of those, we can chat. And then going forward, yeah, we're, you know, we've been discussing ideas the past few days with a few people that we've ran into about how small can we get this and how dope can we get this to be. There's a lot of ideas and we think that this kind of platform has a lot of potential of enabling like persistent storage within the body that you can't lose or forget to grab or get stolen. And then of course, like communication, if you could have a decentralized communication platform that exists within you as opposed to relying on an internet connection, then that would be, that would be good. One important thing about this V2, it's about an eighth of the size of the first one. It's about half as thick a quarter of the footprint, much, much smaller, but at the same time, it's still a multi-purpose computer board. It has GPI on it. It has all these things that are still superfluous and unnecessary. So with V3, there's theoretically you could get this down much, much smaller. For that, we're thinking postage stamp size and something much thinner that could slide under the skin with a less gnarly procedure. We're getting easier and easier, and we hope that that trend will continue. And additionally, the reason that I thank William Gibson at the beginning is that if you remember the idea of an encrypted data courier, it's real now because what can happen is I can spin up my network in my leg and you can put an encrypted file on it because it's an open network. And then if we make a deal and you give me a couple of bitcoins, I can fly to, oh, say mainland China or Hong Kong, and the person that needs your data can get it because I just walk in and I spin up my network. And because it's encrypted with your system, I don't have access to it. And if we all remember our favorite little short story that William Gibson wrote for Omni Magazine in 1981, and now it's real. So we're raising dolphins currently. We're trying to train them without giving them heroin. We're trying to do more positive reinforcement because we believe in animal rights. We give them lots of hugs and cuddles and fish. And we don't enclose them. We try and lure them in from the wild to work with us voluntarily because, you know, consent is important. So we're going to pull the video out of my computer for just a second. So bear with us for the blue screen. So while this presentation has been going on and while we're in the back of the room there, don't know what that is. Oh, that's... No, I know. Why is... Bear with us for a moment. Somebody's desktop background. It's a new laptop. We're doing the AV check now. But when I was back in the room earlier, we filmed the introduction to this, and then we transferred that to a peg leg and then download... I transferred it, uploaded it from my phone, and then we downloaded it on this laptop. So now we can watch that. This was just carried over that system. Yeah. Here's the actual unit, still warm in my hand from the stream, and we'll have a couple of these and you can come take a look at them. So this is the big deal. Pyrebox is about to be shut down. Matthias said he's not going to do any more work because he doesn't have any help and he doesn't have any time. Now, I know there are developers in this room. I know that everyone in this room knows a developer or three or 10 or 500. Please, please go help this man build this platform. It is so important. It is so important. It's the reason that I let a dear friend stab me and put electronics under my skin. This is important. So we have these two QR codes. Oh, we need a... Sorry, I thought I had my screen out, but I didn't hear. So I have these two QR codes which should come up in a moment. The one on the left is the one for connecting to the Pyrebox development page. You can go there and you can ask Matthias and say, how can I help? If you have any skills that are pertinent, help this man because he's doing it solo and he's going to stop if he doesn't get any help. Go help him. He's on Twitter too. Okay. Go find him. If you want to see our little page that has a modicum of documentation, it's on the other QR code. That has some more information about the project. It has some people that we thank and it also has that documentation. Remember we built this using all off the shelf parts. It's something that anybody can build that's a big purpose of this whole thing. And that's the thing. If you don't want to put this under your skin, it becomes significantly easier. You literally can flash an SD card, stick it in a Raspberry Pi. Zero W, attach a second Wi-Fi card and it will spin up. I mean, it's a 15 minute build. It's incredible. So the, yeah. Let's go make it better. Thank you all so much. And when I recover emotionally here, we'll take a few questions. I'll let Nick start. Go. Yes. So in the testing that we've done, the coding that it has helps to kind of disperse that heat. It's not just the one chip that's in contact with your body. That sort of helps to diffuse the heat. And so far we haven't had any issues. And we stress tested that a lot before deciding to put it in because of course you don't want something burning a hole in your leg or in my leg. Yeah. So I think that is mainly governed right now by the SD card. So writing that many, many times, reading that many, many times, that can have wear on it. And so what we've done is, what we've done is set it up so that it's doing that a minimum amount of times. And it's every five minutes that it rewrites in a single batch. That way you have minimal wear. But at the same time, it's not that complex to get them back out of your body and replace that sort of thing. So we've got about five minutes. We can take maybe one or two more. Yeah. If you go to the airport, it's a full level detector. Interfer with it. Oh. Interfer. Like if it were running when you went through a metal detector, if you only went through a metal detector, it should be fine. If you went through a backscatter machine, I assume that you're going to have some pretty bad interference problems and you probably won't be able to hold a connection. But your power will probably not disconnect. So you could have it running continuously. And then once that thing is done scanning, then anything that's linked to it could probably reconnect. But again, that's one of the things is the power is all passive. So only if you put a battery up to it is it running. So yeah, if it's off and I'm just walking around, then no big deal. Yeah. So there was one more over here. Yes, Monsieur. Great. Here. Sorry, say again. That'd be fine. Capture the flag competition for the peg legs. Let's talk. Maybe we can set that up. I think we maybe wanted to any other questions. Are we all done? Do we have one more over here? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Thank you all so much. We are so happy about what we've done and we're going to celebrate. I think we're going to go have drinks and you're all invited. So thank you all so much for coming.
 I'm going to basically go through and just introduce myself here who's going to introduce  this whole crew. So from there I'll let you guys write. Just some background in case you  don't know. Sorry guys.  Next slide. Next slide is working in mathematics and high energy physics until he's had his  background in science. It was probably the right thing to help tackle problems of world  health and other social issues. Perpetually disruptive. This flagship project makes it  possible for people to manufacture their own medications at home. Open source and made  from off the shelf parts, the apothecary micro lab puts many medications within the reach  of those who would otherwise not have them. The project would garnered its group the most  press was the EpiPencil. An open source version of the EpiPencil which cost only $30 produced  in $3.00 a fill. I have used this. My son requires it. And with one source of provider  for EpiPens and the cost that it takes to buy that. Thank you for that personally.  Thank you so much. Thank you all so much for being here. This is a really, really, really  happy moment for me because in my health work which is different than this, several things  happen. I come up and I talk about things that I didn't have much of a hand in except  for organizing. I'm bragging about great work that other people did and I can't even give  them credit because we work in the gray area that's in the darker side of Heather as I  call it. So they shouldn't be named. And I've been so welcomed by the biohacking community  and I've never felt like I really deserved the label. But today I do. So I'm going to  bring up my guys here. The first thing here is that this was a collaborative effort and  I want to bring up Nick Titus and as well as Zach Shannon who have been working at the  core of this. Fourthies Vinegar is of course my organization, Solitary is Zach's. Myonic  is Nick's and of course we could not have done this without Cassex who I think you all  know. Who's a champ and made this all possible. So we also would like to do a special thanks  to a couple of people specifically left and them and Matthias Strube who helped us a great  deal as well as Nebula who I think is here, Bunny who's not an actually hands, galt and  control creep and my favorite childhood author. So we've got a problem. We were so excited.  I was so excited when the internet was built. It was going to fix everything. We were going  to be connected. It was going to be free. It was going to be impossible to censor. It  was going to be impossible to surveil and all of that is not the case and we're paying  for it and it doesn't work. There's a backbone. We're reliant on infrastructure. Everything  you do online is watched all the time by any number of places and it can be shut down at  a moment's notice depending on where you are. This is a disaster. We dream of it looking  like this. Every device could just be part of our network. Why does it have to have a  backbone? It could be better. We want it to be better. We dream of it being better and  better. The technology exists for it to be better. This is not our technology and this  is why we thank Matthias because he built the pirate box platform. This is an open  network that is not connected to anything, local area network. There's a phone app that  you can get, you can run it on your laptop and you can build it into routers. All of a  sudden you have an anonymized network where you can chat. There are forums, you can trade,  upload download files, you can stream and they're super easy to build. This is sort of what  it looks like when you pull it up. Here's one that I built. This is a battery powered  router. You can see it's fairly small depending on your definition of small which is a critical  definition. I brought this to GrindFest. This is the inside. I think Nick is going to talk  a little bit about what happened when we were at GrindFest and we're going to go through  it. It was about three months ago back in May. We were out in the desert in California  in Tahatchipee at GrindFest. GrindFest is a grinder biohacking meetup. Michael had this  little board booted up so we could do local file sharing, it had a chat room, all this  sort of thing. Left who was in attendance saw that and said, hey, do you think you can  implant that in me? Being the environment it was, we figured, maybe, why not? Why not  give it a shot? We opened up that little white box and we found this board inside. We depopulated  all of the unnecessary parts. We took off ports that we didn't need. We took off a few  larger components. Got those all stripped down. We took out the battery because if you  know anything about implantables, that is one of the big points of contention right  now is putting a battery inside of somebody. We wanted to avoid that. We added in 64 gigabytes  of USB storage, soldered onto the board. Then from there, we solved the powering problem  using a G charging coil. We came up with this idea that theoretically it could be able to  be powered through the skin just by a wireless battery. We had to scrape off and grind off  some of these more stubborn, some of the more stubborn ports on there. It was about a two  day process and we were just using all of the parts that we happen to have there in the  lab. Then we get it all finished. We got it coated in a biocompatible resin that Jeff  did here. From there, the implantation started. The rest is gory. Fair warning. Yes. In a  clean room, in a clean facility, we had the first prototype implanted into left's arm.  This is the roughest of these photos. This was all done by somebody who's trained. There's  the device. It's pretty metal, pretty cyberpunk. That is it. After all sutured up, I think the  next photo shows it off a little bit better once all the blood's out of there. There is  the device under somebody's skin. This is not a bone sticking out. That is a drainage  tube that allows fluid to come out. Once it was in left's arm. This one I had to put in  because this is the best compliment any of us have ever gotten. I just want to say thank  you. This was a comment given by Technicolor. They said this right at the end of all of  Grindfest. This is that implant today or a few weeks ago after it's healed. A pretty  gnarly scar there. It's under the skin and everything ended up working on there. Left  is the first person to have this first device implanted. It has 64 gigs of local storage.  By holding a wireless battery up to it, they can power it on and have that local network  just under their skin. That was all built in two or three days with just the parts that  we had on hand. After all that ordeal, we decided to take another step.  Zach and I worked a lot trying to get these bits and pieces to come together to try and  build a new version that was smaller with more data density and the key thing trying  to make it so that they would mesh between each other. The thing that makes the magic  possible of all of the ideas of building a new internet is if they all talk to each other.  We needed to make that happen. This is a picture of us at our best, clearly, visually. When  we were on a video call with Matthias, who was such a champ, he came off of vacation  with his family and set up a video call with us in the middle of the night between single  poor, wherever you live, and Germany, somewhere in the US. You want to say a little bit about  the technical side of this and what we ran up against?  Yeah, we were trying to figure out the networking and a lot of the documentation was very vague  or translated from non-English. Matthias was a great help. He was able to actually sketch  out diagrams and walk us through all the steps of what is actually happening and with the  topology of everything. That really helped us know what we were supposed to be doing  as opposed to what we were supposed to end up with. We were trying to get it to be smaller  than version one because that was a little bigger than some people would want to get  in their skin.  This is really tiny. It's 40 by 40 millimeters.  Yeah, this is 40 millimeters square. This is what we started working on. It does have  onboard radios, a little bit of onboard storage, of course, with expandable. We were working  on this for a while. We were really hoping that we would be able to get this project  done before DEF CON, so we could actually show it off and show you guys this stuff.  It doesn't have a built-in antenna. I was looking into some options, including using  our actual skin as an antenna, which we just spoiler alert, we ultimately did not use.  This was a chip antenna that we looked at. It's really tiny. It's really powerful. They  have these technical drawings and I figured out a way that it would lie over the corner.  I was so excited and then that didn't work.  Point being, we put a lot of work into that board before we decided that we should just  go with a Raspberry Pi. From there, it took about a week to complete and it was a lot  simpler. It's slightly larger.  Like 20 percent.  We were kind of doing a lot more overthinking than we should have been doing.  Don't over-engineer your projects. We'll regret it.  So V2 is based on the Raspberry Pi Zero. This is the first time we got it booted and connected  to it. Michael was pretty hyped to see the screen.  This makes my old school hacker heart glow when you see ASCII text boot up from the thing  that you've been working so hard to build.  This is our splash page. This looks very much like the Pyrobox page but it has a little  extra verbiage and a different logo.  The functionality is the same.  This SD card came out four days ago.  The units we built only have a half terabyte only.  And yet, I'm not crying yet.  Here's what it looks like coded and powered up.  So the additional parts of the hardware to look at here.  This is the next one is a little closer.  So this is a different unit that's also been coded.  You can see that this one is just a Tesla unit that has a 16 gig SD card.  On the other side, you'll see a couple of things. There's a second Wi-Fi card.  That's the thing that's glowing blue.  And that's so that we can make the meshing happen.  We had quite a battle trying to figure out ways to get these units to mesh without an  external extra Wi-Fi.  So yeah, we got a successful network interface up.  So two units together, powered together, will be able to communicate.  But we spent so much time trying to get that interface up that we actually at the moment  don't have any software running on the network.  So we'll be asking you all about that later.  Do you want to say something else about that?  So the other thing to look at here is that you'll see the sort of taupe chunk on the  corner there.  That's a capacitor.  That's a 2200 microfarad tantalum capacitor.  Now that's necessary because cheat charging is a protocol that's developed by the wireless  charging consortium, not the wireless continuous power consortium, which is an entity which  doesn't exist.  So when you've got something that's designed to charge, it's going to give power, but dropping  it intermittently is not a big deal as long as it can reconnect.  So we need something that was going to buffer that power drop in between times so it wasn't  just constantly knocking us offline.  I first did this with a super cap and I was like, well, this is great, but you don't put  electrolytics under your skin because they explode and other things that are not great  to have inside your body.  So we found this tantalum capacitor thanks to Nebula, wherever he is.  Thank you, bro.  And it worked like a charm.  The other thing that you can see is that, so the board's been depopulated, all the ports  are gone.  You'll see the four purple jumper wires going from the USB interface, the USB key, and then  you'll see a little red wire and then a little gray wire coming off the power USB.  This runs to the capacitor in parallel and then over to the G coil on the back.  So this is, again, you can connect to this using whatever device.  So this is what the splash page looks like on a phone.  And then once these were built, finally, we mailed them to Casux and he coded them and  then we decided to put them in.  Everybody ready?  This is Casux who is made of steel and just grabbed the bite stick and said, I'll do the  first one.  And this was amazing to witness.  You can't see it in this picture, but I'm standing there as first assist.  Absolutely awestruck.  And this is how you get under the surface of the skin to make a pocket so that you can  get the thing in there.  And then when you get the thing in there, you kind of got to shove it a little bit.  I love it in there.  And this is my favorite picture in the entire show.  What's happening here is Zach has just connected.  So you see how Cas' hand has his battery to his leg.  He had just finished suturing himself up and we're spinning the thing up in real time.  Nick has just uploaded video of the procedure to his leg which is now being streamed off  of my laptop here.  But this is the most amazing thing.  It was less than an hour that it took for him to do this by himself.  I mean, I was there, but I brought him stuff.  It wasn't like I was super useful.  And then after it was ready, it was I'm next.  So that's my leg that he's building that same pocket in.  And I am not made of steel.  So it was a little rougher for me, but here you can see the unit going in and in and in  and here you can see my little moment of, hey Zach, can you remind me why we're doing  this?  I'm a little confused.  It's like a Renaissance baby.  Yeah, because the next thing I did was faint.  He's passed out here and I was checking his pulse.  And I was only out for a few seconds.  I remember coming to hearing what he's got a pulse when he's fine.  Just hold his shoulder so he doesn't fall out of the chair.  And I was like, whose shoulder do I have to hold?  And then I promptly threw up.  But happily ever after, everything worked out.  We had it going.  And as you can see, I look a little better than in the previous photos.  Now here's the thing that always comes up.  When you've got an implant, people ask this question that can either be very interesting  or very divisive, which is what does your implant do that a wearable couldn't?  And it's a really valid question.  It's important because if we're actually going to the trouble of cutting ourselves open and  sticking things in, we should have a reason.  Even if that reason is this is my form of self-expression and I want to be a cyborg and  that's important.  And that's part of it.  There are arguments that can be made for people who are maybe working in political activism,  people who are maybe working with sensitive data.  This is a way that you can discreetly transfer that sort of data, bring that out into the  world, cross maybe enemy lines and not have it detected.  So left first, got her implant and then traveled back to the UK.  They made it through security without any sort of hiccups.  There was nothing through going through the scanners that caused any problems.  So there's an argument to be made there.  It's a little bit flimsy.  The real reason is self-expression and being a cyborg and that sort of thing.  However, there are a number of things that this does from a technical standpoint that  haven't been done before.  First off, it has more storage than anything that's ever been implanted before by a large  margin.  Making both Michael and Jeff the highest digital capacity humans on the earth.  Additionally, with the exception of version one, this is the first thing to take wireless  power as its only power source.  And this seems very promising because as Annie Grinder will tell you, designing an implant,  your biggest problem is where does the power come from?  And being able to have a battery, like being able to have no battery so that there's no  battery to run out or fail or blow is a huge jump.  This we believe could be the first step towards a sort of network of implants that could all  be powered just using a centralized battery and wires going to each implant with just  a charging coil instead of having to worry about those batteries under the skin.  And additionally, the key, key, key thing is that they talk to each other.  And ultimately, this is the thing that we're dreaming of because if we all are just nodes,  if you imagine where you live and you imagine every computer, every router and every phone  being a node on a mesh network, then at least your local infrastructure can go away.  I mean, how many times, this is great.  Just an hour ago, we were upstairs and we're like, well, I need to send you that big image.  Oh, what's that?  God, I can't connect to the Wi-Fi because I don't actually have a room number.  How do we, and then suddenly we were like, wait, we just solved this problem.  I spin up the peg leg.  And that's how we traded every picture you just saw in this entire thing.  And we did it an hour ago.  So we're looking at what to do next.  Zach, you want to jump in?  So yeah, so here's some of our ideas going forward.  First of all, actually utilize the, the machine network that we worked so hard to integrate,  whether that be just, you know, file sync between nodes or actual like real-time communication  between users like instant messaging, VoIP even.  And that's just on the current hardware.  So go in for future hardware is, you know, try to eliminate additional radios because  theoretically we don't actually need that second Wi-Fi radio to do what we're trying  to do.  Oh, however, I should just mention the other thing is that our, our peg leg units will  mesh with pirate boxes that are mesh enabled as well.  So if you have one of those, we can chat.  And then going forward, yeah, we're, you know, we've been discussing ideas the past few days  with a few people that we've ran into about how small can we get this and how dope can  we get this to be.  There's a lot of ideas and we think that this kind of platform has a lot of potential of  enabling like persistent storage within the body that you can't lose or forget to grab  or get stolen.  And then of course, like communication, if you could have a decentralized communication  platform that exists within you as opposed to relying on an internet connection, then  that would be, that would be good.  One important thing about this V2, it's about an eighth of the size of the first one.  It's about half as thick a quarter of the footprint, much, much smaller, but at the  same time, it's still a multi-purpose computer board.  It has GPI on it.  It has all these things that are still superfluous and unnecessary.  So with V3, there's theoretically you could get this down much, much smaller.  For that, we're thinking postage stamp size and something much thinner that could slide  under the skin with a less gnarly procedure.  We're getting easier and easier, and we hope that that trend will continue.  And additionally, the reason that I thank William Gibson at the beginning is that if  you remember the idea of an encrypted data courier, it's real now because what can happen  is I can spin up my network in my leg and you can put an encrypted file on it because  it's an open network.  And then if we make a deal and you give me a couple of bitcoins, I can fly to, oh, say  mainland China or Hong Kong, and the person that needs your data can get it because I  just walk in and I spin up my network.  And because it's encrypted with your system, I don't have access to it.  And if we all remember our favorite little short story that William Gibson wrote for  Omni Magazine in 1981, and now it's real.  So we're raising dolphins currently.  We're trying to train them without giving them heroin.  We're trying to do more positive reinforcement because we believe in animal rights.  We give them lots of hugs and cuddles and fish.  And we don't enclose them.  We try and lure them in from the wild to work with us voluntarily because, you know, consent  is important.  So we're going to pull the video out of my computer for just a second.  So bear with us for the blue screen.  So while this presentation has been going on and while we're in the back of the room  there, don't know what that is.  Oh, that's...  No, I know.  Why is...  Bear with us for a moment.  Somebody's desktop background.  It's a new laptop.  We're doing the AV check now.  But when I was back in the room earlier, we filmed the introduction to this, and then  we transferred that to a peg leg and then download...  I transferred it, uploaded it from my phone, and then we downloaded it on this laptop.  So now we can watch that.  This was just carried over that system.  Yeah.  Here's the actual unit, still warm in my hand from the stream, and we'll have a couple of  these and you can come take a look at them.  So this is the big deal.  Pyrebox is about to be shut down.  Matthias said he's not going to do any more work because he doesn't have any help and  he doesn't have any time.  Now, I know there are developers in this room.  I know that everyone in this room knows a developer or three or 10 or 500.  Please, please go help this man build this platform.  It is so important.  It is so important.  It's the reason that I let a dear friend stab me and put electronics under my skin.  This is important.  So we have these two QR codes.  Oh, we need a...  Sorry, I thought I had my screen out, but I didn't hear.  So I have these two QR codes which should come up in a moment.  The one on the left is the one for connecting to the Pyrebox development page.  You can go there and you can ask Matthias and say, how can I help?  If you have any skills that are pertinent, help this man because he's doing it solo and  he's going to stop if he doesn't get any help.  Go help him.  He's on Twitter too.  Okay.  Go find him.  If you want to see our little page that has a modicum of documentation, it's on the other  QR code.  That has some more information about the project.  It has some people that we thank and it also has that documentation.  Remember we built this using all off the shelf parts.  It's something that anybody can build that's a big purpose of this whole thing.  And that's the thing.  If you don't want to put this under your skin, it becomes significantly easier.  You literally can flash an SD card, stick it in a Raspberry Pi.  Zero W, attach a second Wi-Fi card and it will spin up.  I mean, it's a 15 minute build.  It's incredible.  So the, yeah.  Let's go make it better.  Thank you all so much.  And when I recover emotionally here, we'll take a few questions.  I'll let Nick start.  Go.  Yes.  So in the testing that we've done, the coding that it has helps to kind of disperse that  heat.  It's not just the one chip that's in contact with your body.  That sort of helps to diffuse the heat.  And so far we haven't had any issues.  And we stress tested that a lot before deciding to put it in because of course you don't want  something burning a hole in your leg or in my leg.  Yeah.  So I think that is mainly governed right now by the SD card.  So writing that many, many times, reading that many, many times, that can have wear  on it.  And so what we've done is, what we've done is set it up so that it's doing that a minimum  amount of times.  And it's every five minutes that it rewrites in a single batch.  That way you have minimal wear.  But at the same time, it's not that complex to get them back out of your body and replace  that sort of thing.  So we've got about five minutes.  We can take maybe one or two more.  Yeah.  If you go to the airport, it's a full level detector.  Interfer with it.  Oh.  Interfer.  Like if it were running when you went through a metal detector, if you only went through  a metal detector, it should be fine.  If you went through a backscatter machine, I assume that you're going to have some pretty  bad interference problems and you probably won't be able to hold a connection.  But your power will probably not disconnect.  So you could have it running continuously.  And then once that thing is done scanning, then anything that's linked to it could probably  reconnect.  But again, that's one of the things is the power is all passive.  So only if you put a battery up to it is it running.  So yeah, if it's off and I'm just walking around, then no big deal.  Yeah.  So there was one more over here.  Yes, Monsieur.  Great.  Here.  Sorry, say again.  That'd be fine.  Capture the flag competition for the peg legs.  Let's talk.  Maybe we can set that up.  I think we maybe wanted to any other questions.  Are we all done?  Do we have one more over here?  Yeah.  Yeah.  Okay.  Okay.  Thank you all so much.  We are so happy about what we've done and we're going to celebrate.  I think we're going to go have drinks and you're all invited.  So thank you all so much for coming.
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