One of the projects I started 30 years ago was a website similar to Reddit, but in Persian.
Of course, it's been blocked in Iran almost from the beginning.
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What can we do for people who are trying to reach to these websites that are blocked?
Can be bypass Internet infrastructure all together.
That's how to show [UNKNOWN]
idea was creative.
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I'm Mehdi Ahyane Jad and I'm the director of Net Freedom Pioneers So we are working on a satellite content delivery technology.
This is a innovative technology that helps people who have limited internet access or they live in countries with Internet censorship, receive content and totally bypass internet infrastructure, use their satellite TV receivers to receive content.
What we did was, we figured out a way to embed files within an MPO stream.
So the images that are sent to the TV actually content files.
So people who record it, they can decode it on their laptop, or we have ways of actually automatically decoding this to their PC, so they can access the files that we sent over satellite.
At home, or at the school in places there, in more recent projects we've done.
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Basically they are just sitting at home, they are watching satellite Tv, and they are flipping through channels and they wonder, what kind of channel is this because this is just [UNKNOWN] And there is no video, there is no nothing This is broadcasting data.
On the left side you see the size of the package that being said that day.
So for example here, the size of the package is 0.3 gigabyte And on the top of that, you could see the duration.
So that shows how long it takes to download that package.
It's a way of sending content in one direction.
Of course, this is not the entire internet, it's just the part of it that we package on a daily basis and we broadcast or satellite We take our flash drive and plug it into the laptop or Android phone to get the content extracted.
There are news items, there are funny videos, there is The fact checking website in Persian it contains music contents PDA files it contains software that was never sent it includes TED Talks and our educational content newsletters and even offline websites.
You can browse this as if they were online.
[BLANK AUDIO] Hey there, welcome back.
You made it this far, that's incredible.
Seriously most people never-
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You have WhatsApp.
We have telegram channel.
We have Email.
So they constantly email us and ask us for new type of content.
For example, sometimes they ask for a new website to be packaged as part of our package.
Sometimes they ask for new type of educational videos and we add those.
We get messages, for example, one message we had from a rural place, the person said, I walked FIfteen kilometers to get to this, like a small town because that's where he had internet access from a cafe to send us a message.
That kinda like just messages motivates us so much.
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The driving motivation behind this for Iran was getting around censorship.
But actually, once we launched the project in Iran we realized that enough people who are using this are not necessarily using it to get around censorship.
They are looking for having the type of content that they don't normally see on Internet.
Or also just a, they were poor, they we didn't have enough money to pay for bandwidth.
So we were helping them by providing a free access to just download large files, large video files.
But as we move to other countries, the focus is mostly actually educational content and The lack of internet access.
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The content station is this computer, which stores and shares the content that we have collected for the kids, all that academic content.
It works together with a KU band antenna and a small Wi-Fi device that allows the kids to connect from their smartphone or tablet.
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I'm hoping that in three years from now, we can bring the technology that we built to
everywhere in the world, I help people to access whatever they need regardless of how much money they have, regardless of where they live and be able to find what they need.
