Cryptosquid Unpacks the NEW StartOS

Hello, and welcome back to Freedom Tech Friday, a weekly live and interactive show hosted on the Ungovernable Misfits channels. We go live for one hour every Friday at 9AM eastern and 2PM London, but you can also catch up later on the Ungovernable Misfits podcast feed.

On Freedom Tech Friday, we like to cover the latest news and trends for anything relating to Freedom Technologies. That could be anything from Bitcoin or Monero, encrypted messengers, privacy tools, and everything in between.

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My name is Q and A and I'm head of customer experience at Foundation where we build Bitcoin focused sovereignty tools. And as always, I am driven by my good friends Max, the head honcho of the Ungovernable Empire, and Seth who is COO over at K Wallet.

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Thank you for everybody else's support as well. We we see every boost coming in, so thank you. Without further ado, we do have a guest who I'm gonna introduce very shortly. But Max, Seth, how are doing? Did you have a nice Easter break?

I did. I did. I escaped, turned off the phone for a couple days. It was it was beautiful. Necessary. I saw a a video on x of suited Seth, which was a new one on me. You look good, man. Suited?

I don't remember a suit, but I was In a bunny suit or, like, suit suit? No. He he he was well, I say suit. He was looking very fashiony shirt. Yes. Mhmm. Yeah. People didn't recognize me. The the bad thing, though, that I learned is don't go to an Ethereum conference and look like the boss

because then everyone harasses you because they think that you're the one they need to annoy about an integration or partnership or hiring, etcetera. So, I walked away from a conference with 300 new Telegram DMs, and I had to get a good job. So yep. Don't look the part, basically.

Very good. Max, you well? Good Easter break? Yeah. Very good. I collected lots of Easter eggs. Very happy boy. Little bit of rest. And, yeah, back to it. How about you, mate? Yeah. All good. Nice couple of days away with the family, which was very much needed. So back at it, back to the grind, and working hard as always.

Okay. So today, we are talking about something that's been brewing for quite some time. A number of years in rewrite phase, redesign phase, and rethinking what a personal or sovereign personal server should look like and it has finally landed. Long anticipated this one.

Start OS from the start nineteen version 0.4 is now out. And if you've been in and around the self hosting world or listened to any of the ungovernable shows, you'll have heard of start nine by now. We've covered it at length in terms of up software updates for years now over on the over on the Bitcoin brief.

StartOS is a server that kinda lets you run your own Bitcoin node, Nextcloud messaging server, the lot, basically, all from a single box that you can keep on your desk with a nice web user interface.

They've dropped the biggest release in their history. Lots of new features which we're gonna dive into. And in their word, it's a complete rewrite of StartOS. So lots to dive into. And walking us through it today is a is CryptoSquid,

a member of the StartMind community support team. Crypto Squid, welcome to the two FreedomZet Friday. How's it going? Hi, guys. It's a it's an honor and a pleasure. I'm a long time listener and fan of the channel. So, yeah, I'm here to answer any questions you might have about this new release.

Awesome. Looking forward to diving in. And, yeah, thanks for for giving us an hour of your time on a on a Friday. I know everybody's busy. Before we we get into the to the juicy bits of release, I want everybody

watching or listening back to to kind of understand a little bit more about you, your involvement with the start nine team. Like, how did you end up working there? What does your day to day involvement look like just so that people have got a bit more of a feel for for who they're they're watching and and listening to?

Okay. Well, let me start from the beginning. I actually was part of the community a long time ago. They always accepted people are coming into the forums and what we when we had the telegram channel,

and you could always help out, you know, people who came in without knowing much or who knows, things like that. And then there was a time where the company itself opened up a request. They wanted people to work as community techs.

A lot of people signed up for that, and I was chosen among a whole lot of other people to become part of that program. So, yeah, I'm one of a handful of people around the world who deal with any sort of customer who has support trouble or just has questions, we can guide you really over everything from start to finish the whole deal.

Yeah. So so what does your your day to day look like? Is it just generally helping people work through issues? Yes. Yeah. Awesome. Did did do you guys still offer the the paid support service? Yes. We actually migrated from Telegram over to a matrix server due to the issues with scammers and the whole it was a crazy deal.

There was no way to stop them. They actually copied our our username, our picture, the whole deal, and they tried to key people into DMs. They tried to scam them in many ways. Every time. We just had to cut it off, really. It wasn't that's it. I mean, we ran our own server, and that's it right there.

Yeah. We we had to do a similar thing over at Foundation. We had to close the doors to the Telegram for the for the exact same reasons. It's sadly turned into a a bit of a cesspit of Yes. Bitcoin, unfortunately.

Just got got overboard. Yeah. Which is a shame because a lot of my my early days in Bitcoin was was spent in around some of the vibrant Telegram community. So it's just Oh, yeah. It's sad to see it go the way it did, but ultimately Yeah. We've actually separated it into two different things. There's a community forum

where anybody can come in and ask questions, and they will be responded to quite quickly, not live because it's not actually maintained by someone who's sitting there twenty four seven. But the Matrix server, it's a paid service, but we are we'll always have someone eighteen hours a day,

always on shift, who's there to help you. As soon as you ask a question, an expert is there to hold your hand, take you through everything. Anything that's your problem or your question will be answered really, really quickly.

Glad to hear it. Yeah. I've actually heard some good things about the start night support services. So you clearly seems like you're doing a good job with the people I spoke. And sometimes we go even above and beyond what we should maybe.

Like, helping people set up their router or other weird things that are not really related to us, but that affect how you use your server. So yeah. I mean, I've done a lot of different things. It's crazy what you can find in these services.

Nice. Yeah. But but the the support kind of burden runs pretty deep because obviously there's there's quite a lot of different services on available on start nine. So you you I guess you as the the hardware provider become the the de facto fallback to any issues with any of the services.

Yeah. And sometimes we run into the problem that if you help people really quickly, they'll come to you for anything. Like, I have a problem with my phone with my phone. Android is doing this, and then Orbot and the connection with Tor and all this.

It's not really our thing, but we we help you out in a way. So yeah. Nice. Good to hear it. Okay. Well, before we we dive in a little bit further, I wanna get the the elevator pitch. There's gonna be I can already see some OGs in the audience who already will be well acquainted with with Start9 and StartOS.

But for somebody that maybe didn't even run a Bitcoin node, is new to the whole self hosting thing, you know, that they're not even familiar with what what it is or why they should do it, what does Start OS kind of enable them to do? How do they run it? Let let's keep it fairly high level, but, like, give us the the the StartOS pitch.

Okay. The first thing I have to say that I always have to say when these questions come up is that StartOS is not only a Bitcoin node. A lot of people think about it that way. It's a personal server.

It has the possibility to have a Bitcoin node on it, but that's only one of the many services you can have. This will allow you to have your all your files, for example, on Nextcloud. For example, in that way, you can eliminate Google Drive from your life.

You can also have communications servers such as simplex, which will really make you totally sovereign. There's no way anybody can stop you. Your messages go from your phone to your server and then to the other person's phone.

So that's another thing. And a whole host of other things you can do. I mean, it's really, really deep. We can actually go through when I share my screen about all the different services we have. I mean and the number of services is growing every single day.

Yeah. I'm I'm looking forward to seeing the new user interface. I've not clapped eyes on it just yet. Okay. So so it allows people to to self host various different pieces of software, which which we're gonna dive into later. But

Yes. How and where are they gonna be doing that? Do they have to buy hardware from you? Can they run it on their own hardware? What does that look like? Oh, yeah. We actually sell servers. That's a way to finance the operation in a way. But the whole system, this operating system is fully open source, MIT license.

So anybody can just download it from GitHub, install it on their own hardware, and run it. That's a it's free for everyone to use.

Alright. And and what does the kinda user interface like, not not in terms of, like, what does it physically look like, which we're gonna see later, but, like, how does somebody interact with their web with their server? Do they need a specific app?

This is all through a browser. It can be on your phone, on a tablet, on your desktop, laptop, anything. Just on a browser. Alright. Nice. Okay. Well,

yeah. I mean, we we've got the the the setup nailed down. So why don't you why don't you begin the the screen share? And we've got plenty of time to go in in some great detail here also to watch new and take us through some of the applications.

You know, why why should we be getting excited around around 0.4?

Alright. Let's see. Let me show you the all new o four o. Just while the screen share is coming up, if anybody's got any any live questions, don't forget to drop them into into the chat. We'd love to to ask Crypto Squid any questions as we go along, so please do shout out, guys.

Okay. So this is the main services page. It's fully different from the other one. If you guys are familiar with StartOS, I can actually show you the old one. The old one is totally different. So we actually rebuilt the whole thing from scratch. That's why it's been three years.

It's pretty intense. But yes. Actually, the older one is this one here. This is how it used to be. Ah, yeah. That looks familiar. Okay. Anybody who's used this has fully is fully familiar with this. And then this is the new one.

So tell me tell me, Alvaro, what what was the the need internally from the team that

you that you guys thought, well, we need to completely re write this because I didn't think there was much wrong with the old one. Don't get me wrong. I think that the new one seems to have fallen absolutely free. Visually, it's totally different, but the main work has gone into the background. This has all been changed,

like, from the ground up. Actually, a lot of people have been asking for many features, which were not possible before and are now totally possible. With Clearnet access, that's gonna be a very big deal right there. It's gonna let you access things remotely from outside your home

with a standard Internet connection, no use of Tor if you don't want to, which opens up a lot of possibilities, especially when it comes to using a file server, uploading and downloading big files, fast response times. Because Tor is really great for privacy, but it comes to the point where it's not stable. It really is not.

It's actually being attacked by government agencies, different things. I mean, it's it's really it's really good for what it is as a privacy layer. But to use it as your connection to your home server is for some services, you can do it. But if it requires a lot of bandwidth and you wanna depend on uptime,

it really can be a pain in the rear. Just to to break that down for the viewers and the listeners. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but previously when you went onto the the App Store and and installed all of the various different services that are available, You could either

access them via, you know, something dot local if you're on your home network, or each service had its own dot onion service, correct, where they could open up a Tor browser and then be able to to access those remotely.

And that was the only way that you could do it unless you're really advanced and You had two options, really. I mean, without doing anything in the background, which was for more advanced users, you could only access via your local network while you were home Mhmm. Or via tor with a dot onion address for each service.

Yeah. Which for me, I I I personally found a bit frustrating because you ended up having, you know, load the different TOR service to bookmark a day somewhere to be able to access. Not only the main issue. The main issue was that TOR sometimes out of nowhere, it has what we sometimes call TOR weather.

So yeah. I mean, it it just crashes. But, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of countries which are actually actively fighting against the Tor network, Russia, China. The whole deal. I mean, it's really Probably The UK. Nation states. I mean, you're fighting against something which has a lot of power and can actually block a lot of things,

do DDoS attacks, whole deal. I mean, it's it gets really into the weeds, but yeah. So so what's let's spell out from the connectivity perspective. Let's spell out what's new with 0.4. So Tor, is that still an option for those that like You can. Yes. If you wanna use Tor, it's not active as standard. You have to download the Tor service,

which I have right here. It's just another service. Just install it, turn it on, and then you can add interfaces to it. Okay. So you would come into here once TOR is running and say, okay. I want to be able to access my next cloud from Tor, and that will kind of connect to would go to Nextcloud, for example, here, and just add different

WebUI access. You would turn it on. You would say, okay. I wanna have a public on different things. I wanna have using it on Tor. I don't have it set up on Tor yet because really next cut over Tor is a bad idea. But Yeah. I'd expect you want to. Yeah. So yeah.

So so that's Tor. What what's the default way then for somebody who who doesn't, you know, like to bring themselves make themselves go insane. The default way? O four o, there's actually three ways to access. You can use just your home IP colon and port number, which for each service.

Or you can actually set up something we called start tunnel, which is a whole new different thing we've set up. It's like a virtual router that you set up on a VPS, which is a virtual private server that you have to purchase month for month somewhere else.

You set it up there. You can see it here. I mean, it's not really very big. There's not much we can show here except for

Yeah. I wanna do some I'll I've got on my list a little bit later to do a bit more of a deep dive into start tunnel. So we've got tunnel, we've got the local IP address and the port. And you said that there are each service now has its its own port, and that's that's changed from the old version. Right? Yes. That's correct.

Now it's IP dot port colon port. Like, for example, Bitcoin Core here, you can see wait. Let me check something. One other one. For example, Chrome Ghost. If I wanna go to Ghost, for example, I can go either local, which is here.

Local IP, colon, and then you can see here the the port number for this service. Yep. Each has its own port number, or you can actually use start tunnel, which we can see here. This is hosted somewhere else, and it actually has its own IP address.

Or you can actually set it up to work with a domain. So you don't have to remember this. You can set up a domain on start tunnel and just go there. I mean, whatever the cryptosquid.com as I have my own for some of the services, and you access through there, through any browser anywhere in the world using standard clearing it. So yeah.

Awesome. Yeah. I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna dive into that in a second. We got a question from Observer on on Nosta who's questioning around the defaults with Bitcoin and Lightning node. You mentioned that Tory is off by default. Is that still true for the Lightning and Bitcoin nodes?

Yes. Okay. Interesting. Nice. You can set it up. You can turn it on. I mean, this is free for anyone to do whatever they want with it. I mean, we don't force anyone to install anything. There was a big debate online that we actually force people to use either knots or core.

We don't really care. I mean, use your server for whatever you want. If you wanted it to use as a paperweight or you wanna install only Nextcloud, I mean, that's up to you. That's the whole thing.

Yeah. Absolutely. Okay. Start tunnel. Let's just let's I know you've quick quickly showed it, but let's go really high level. It is people to to Yes. What start tunnel is and what enables them to do. Just on a high level? Yeah. StartTunnel is a router, which you host

on another server away from your house. Why would you wanna do this? The whole reason for this is for you to obfuscate the IP of your home. You don't wanna share that over the Internet. That's the whole thing.

And then, of course, you can actually set it up in a way for you to access remotely, and it's a very privacy focused system. It helps you a lot.

So it's not like a a service that you would install on Start nine. It's something that you would install. On a VPS. Totally different. You have to actually pay month for month. There's actually very cheap ones around.

Just choose the the one that has the less KYC, but it allows for payments without a bank. You know how it goes. So yeah. Alright. And so you would install that on a VPS, and then presumably,

there's something within the within StarOS that enables you to kind of connect your tunnel wherever you've installed it on a Lunar node or something like that. That's correct. Yes. You actually turn it on, and then you go to settings, gateways, and you would set it up to start tunnel. You have to add it here.

And what does that that setup process look like? You may not be able to show us right now, but kind of walk us through as much as you can. Easy. Just add it. Give it a name, and then add the connection details. This is given to you by start tunnel itself. You have to actually install it on the VPS and then access over SSH,

which is pretty sounds intense if you've never done it, but it's really well explained in our documentation step by step. And if you have any issues, we can always guide you through it. And then you just copy, paste it here, bam, and that's it. Just save and it's done. I mean, anybody can do it.

So this is is pretty powerful for people that wanna kind of host their own clear net BTC pay server or ghost blog. Exactly. A bot That's insane. A lot of people have been asking for this for years, and it was a it was a pain point. So, yeah, we we got it working. We've been testing it for a long time. We actually did

many alpha versions, and now we're in beta. Actually, beta three came out yesterday. So, yeah, it's still beta, and we encourage people to to use it, to test it, to let us know if they actually find anything wrong. Let us know. I mean, we're actually working every single day to make it better.

And then, yeah, a lot of people have been asking if we're gonna set it up in a way that you can actually switch from o three five one to o four o with a simple button, and that will come when we actually get out of beta.

We actually want people to have, like, a a bit of friction to install it first because it actually requires you to do a bit of work. Not too much. We have it explained here. Like, for example, in our documentation, it's

pretty easy if you follow every single step. Please, please follow every single step. Don't jump around and do weird things. Do a backup. That's the first thing. Yes. Always. Always. Do a backup.

And stop every single service and then go through the process of updating from o three five one to overall. And nothing will go wrong. It might take a while. It could take up to five hours. Just don't turn it off. Don't pull the plug. Just let it work. Be patient.

Okay. And to be clear, what you're you've just spoken about, that's only for people that wanna install it while it's in beta. Right? Yes. Once it comes out of beta, you will have a button right here on all three five one. You would go to system, and it would show you here under updates that you have an update for overall.

And that right there will do everything for you. Nice. Okay. So it's just it will be and end state is it's just a traditional updates that takes a little bit longer for for the end users. Awesome.

Alright. Well, you you've kind of hopped around a a few of the screens. Maybe just go through all of the new screens and just really showcase the the user interface because what I've seen so far looks great. Well, this right here, the services we've already seen, this is the marketplace,

and this will have everything that's been there's two marketplaces, really, the star nine registry, which is all the services which are packaged and maintained by the star nine team. There's a whole bunch of things. You can see it here.

And before anybody says it, there's no preference of how things are set up in order. This is really how it how they're being uploaded once they're done. So yeah. I mean, JellyFin was the last one that was packaged, so that's the way it is.

And then there's a whole bunch of things you can see here.

See, there's TOR right there. You install it as a service, really. This is a pretty fun one, start OS registry. This allows you to have your own registry. Having your own services packaged by you, this is for people who just love to package services or developers.

They can have their own. And then publish the link to that, and then somebody could actually switch to it here in the switch button. So, yeah, there's a whole bunch of things. Very cool. Is that a new feature? I've not seen that before.

That is a new feature. Yes. Awesome. And then apart from the start end registry, there's the community registry, which would give you all the packages which are packaged and maintained by people within the community.

This is not really us, but we help them package it, help them maintain it, help them do the updates, the whole deal. So so what's the the difference between the community registry and the official one? Is it that the the community one hasn't you mentioned that you you do assist community registry participants,

but is it the like, where where does the the line get drawn between Oh, yeah. Anything on the start end registry is fully supported by us, fully vetted the whole deal. We actually package a lot of them ourselves.

The ones in the community registry, if there's a big issue or something like that, we actually depend on the package developer. They're the responsible person. We actually go over everything that gets in the registry, make sure there's no big bugs or security flaws, anything like that.

But if there's a big suddenly a problem or they there's an update from the upstream service that has to come in, they have to come in and update it. It's their service. Mhmm. That makes sense. Okay. Yes. We we've had another question from the north of chat that's it's from Observer, and he's asking how much space

do you need for a backup when you're gonna do this upgrade? And he's he's mentioned that it it should include a full Bitcoin node, LND node, and Lectrum. How much base do you need to do? Thing for the backups is how much data you have on your server.

Actually, the Bitcoin node is not backed up. That is always something you have to download after. That's with all backups because that's something that's available always. The main thing that that's backed up is the state of your Lightning channels and

also all the files you have on Nextcloud. So if you have a lot of videos and stuff on Netcloud, that's gonna be a lot of data. But, yeah, I mean, you should be doing backups constantly. I can I'm gonna drill this into anybody that's listening to do backups all the time. Not only with StartOS, with every single

computer, phone, anything. I mean, you never know. Something can go wrong. Your phone get gets stolen. There could be a fire, a flood. Who knows? I mean, just have backups and have redundant backups in different locations.

It's not being paranoid. It's being ready. Yeah. Is it like a an automatic backup service as part of this that makes that something for users to have a counseling being talked about. It's actually a feature that's being done for the next updates.

But, yeah, I mean, there's gonna be possibilities to do backups between different servers also. That's gonna be also a very interesting one. People who have servers in a trusted location, for example, you have one and your cousin has one in a different state or country,

you can actually back up to each other's server. That's gonna be something that's gonna be available in the next version.

Nice. Yeah. I know that's that's one of the hard things with backups is if they are manual, it is easy to, like, do them well at first. And then Oh, yeah. When everything's running smoothly, you just kinda forget about them. So it'll be great to see that.

I know Nextcloud shipped something like that where you could basically, like, you could connect to another trusted Nextcloud server, and it would do automatic backups between those. So I think that'd be a fantastic fit. That that type of thing for for start OS.

Mhmm. Nice. Oh, I think another page. I mean, it's yeah. That right there is the metrics page. We made it so it's pretty visual. Nice. Just shows you all the data you might need. A lot of people actually ran into trouble

sometimes when they purchase a server and they say, oh, I want to keep this as safe as possible, and they just plug it in and stick it inside a closet or something. And suddenly, their temperature spikes,

and they come in to the service. It's like, oh my god. Yeah. It's like, where is your server? I mean, is it actually in a well ventilated space? So, yeah, don't don't keep it inside of drawer or something as with any computer, really.

Bam. And there's a whole bunch of things. You have all the logs, OS, kernel logs. It's all made, so it's pretty simple, self explanatory. You can have here's all the data. For example, right now, this is running o four o beta three.

So, yeah, I mean, it's pretty self explanatory. I mean, I can answer any questions you guys might have, but really There's there's there's a steady stream coming through, and I've got plenty of stuff to talk about. We've got one from the YouTube audience. We I'm gonna put up on screen. It's from BTC Wrestle.

And he's going back to the connectivity thing. He says, so if you currently have all of your services running through Tor, like l and d, for instance Yes. The connection to his l and change after the update, and he's gonna have, like, go through the setup process again with that.

If you have it connected to a to a wallet, for example, you're saying? I think that's what he means. Yeah. Let's say he's using TOR in Zeus to connect to his LND node. Oh, yeah. I mean, you you just redo the connection. I mean, it's a pretty

two step deal. I mean, just follow the instructions, just click click, go ahead. I mean, it's not a very big deal. So would it be fair to say that he'd, in that scenario, install o four, turn on Tor,

then enable Tor with his LND node, and then that would give him a new onion service that he'd then go and have to go and do the connection process with. Right? Yep.

Also, lot of people would wanna have their LND or CLN node over Clearnet, which would allow them to route a lot more, things like that. A lot of people wanna do that, and this allows them to do that. So yeah.

Alright. When you were going through some of the the more kind of back end pages there with settings and stuff, I I saw a couple of things which I think are also part of o four. First one being SMTP.

Walk us through that. That's a new feature. What what does that name? This right here will allow you to have

start a west send you emails. This is more for different services that actually require this for different things such as vault warding,

Nextcloud for setting up new users, things like that. It's not really it's not gonna be spamming you. It's not gonna be sending things all over the place. It just it's an extra way for services to contact you, especially when you're trying to set up on in Vault Warden for setting up new users, different things like that.

You it it'd ask you for an email, and it's never been possible until now. So, actually, it's gonna be working pretty well. So could that also be kind of extrapolated out to be used for things like notifying you if your lightning channel goes down or the Bitcoin node is failing

or your storage is full or something like that. Oh, yeah. That is not set up at the moment, but it could be set up. There's actually another service being packaged right now, which is Notify, n t n f t y, n f NTFY, I think it is. Yep. And that is gonna be for notifications that you will get on your phone the whole deal.

If something's wrong, I will tell you about whatever. I mean, your LND is not working or who knows. Just makes it a lot easier to maintain if you're away from home. You're not watching the screen like a madman.

Okay. That makes sense. If you could just head back into that settings page again where the SMTP was. Yeah. Can you just walk us through the the gateways part? Is is that new, or is there new features within there?

Gateways? That's a different thing. It's not a it's not an SMTP.

Gateways is the the way you connect to your server, really.

One thing I like to use with some of my self hosted stuff is to use services like WireGuard or Tailscale. Is that something that's possible with with the new version? Oh, yeah. We actually have Tailscale as a service as well.

Where is it? I'm pretty sure it was here at some point.

Wholesale. Sorry. Yeah. There it is. And this right there will allow you to connect any service anywhere, really.

So that basically, you'd have the wholesale app on your phone and the one on your start nine, and then you kind of activate that tunnel and then be able to access it in that we can see on screen, essentially? Yes. But you don't actually need to. This is an extra step for people who wanna maybe share it with someone.

You would actually use it with StartTunnel. It's a lot smoother. Yes. I see. But with StartTunnel, obviously, they need to configure, you know, configure and pay for that VPS. Yes. I mean, it's not a crazy amount of money per month.

There's really you don't need a powerful VPS. The cheapest one works. Is there a reason why you'll have it focused more on just kind of the the simple port forwarding let's encrypt approach? Do like the this WireGuard approach as simpler or just mainly you like the

the privacy that it provides where you don't have to use your whole ID? For us is privacy and sovereignty. So that's very high on the list when we actually choose to do something. So, yeah, actually, also how it's implemented, how easy it is for users to to click a couple buttons and then be ready to go. I mean, that right there is

is money. For sure. For sure. I guess I'm I'm just kind of a little concerned that it's overcomplicated for the the normal use case, which is not necessarily that I wanna, like, publish these websites to

my Twitter followers or something, but rather that I just wanna share it with friends and family who I had built. I'm not concerned about them having the home IP. Is is that something that case, you don't need to start tunnel. Yeah. You just share the home IP and then the colon colon service port, and you're done.

Yeah. I guess that has the the opposite problem, though, than that, like, the start tunnel is nice because it gives you a or I guess it can give you a domain. I guess maybe that's something we haven't clarified as if it always Oh, yeah. You would add the domain there. Yeah. Yeah.

Is that something we can also do with the the actual just direct WAN IP? Can we use Let's Encrypt with the domain and Yes. And have a proper domain? Oh, okay. Sweet. Okay. So people could do that. Can see I have it set up here with the cryptosku.com, for example.

Just and that will take you to my server login page. Okay. But if I wanted to do without StarTunnel, the public option there under wired connection, I could set up with Let's Encrypt. Would that be possible too?

Yes. Okay. Sweet. Okay. That that was the the main question because I think that that probably fits most people's use case a little bit more than the Yeah. For example, you can see here, people

can only log in here if they have the root CA to my server. Mhmm. There's a ticket authority. But you can actually set it up in a way that we use let's encrypt instead of this.

Okay. Nice. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I have it set up in I think it's Nextcloud. Yeah. For example, here you can see let's encrypt is set up here because I actually share it with other people. Mhmm.

So yeah. Okay. Awesome. Yeah. That that makes a lot of sense. Mhmm. There's a quick follow-up from the question we had earlier from BTC Wrestle when he was asking about the the lightning connectivity.

I think I can probably answer this one, but tell me if I'm wrong, Crypto Squids. He said, so I'll have to close the channels and then create new LND connections in Zeus and then open the new channels. No. No. Absolutely. No. No. It's just There's no closing of channels if you do everything step by step by following the guide. Please

please follow the guide. And if you have questions, ask before you just click buttons randomly. That's always the best approach for anything.

Yeah. Basically, you'd essentially just be if you still wanna use toy, you'd just be connected to a new onion address. But underneath it was always same node ID and channels and things like that. Yes.

Nice. Okay. We couple of Nostad chats have come through. Another one from Observer is referring back to, I think, when we were talking about the SMTP stuff, and he's wondering if you guys are exploring any other notification channels, maybe Simplex or Signal or Matrix

or anything like that, which obviously is is very on brand for for what you guys do. I mean, doing it with Simplex could be possible. It's not on the books right now, but, actually, you have there is a service for Simplex, so which is a Simplex server.

This would be pretty easy to implement. It would have to be a change within OS also and the service. It could be done. I mean, I'll just tell the team about it. So, yeah, it's something that could be done. Yes. Nice. Okay. Cool. Am I correct in saying that as part of this new release, there's also a new

package form for people to package services? Well, the package format itself is called the s n s nine p k. And that right there, the whole thing that has changed is how you package. Right now, we made it a lot easier.

And, actually, with AI tools, almost anybody can package a service for star nine. It's pretty easy. Right now, if a service it's open source and has a GitHub, just go there. Just and then, of course, you would have to go to our guide, which is pretty easy.

For example, here if you go to docs.star9.com,

there's a whole host of things you can do here. For example, all the docs package service packaging. And this will guide you step by step. For example, here you can see AI assisted development with Cloud Code. That's pretty, pretty easy. I mean, I did it just for fun, packaged a couple services on my own.

I'm I'm no developer by any stretch of the imagination, and and it worked. So that's pretty impressive. Everyone's a developer nowadays with Cloud. Exactly. I mean, that's gonna be of course, it'll have a lot of problems. You have to then submit it to us. We would review it and then patch any issues.

But, yeah, if you have no idea what you're doing, you can follow these steps and just pop out an s n s nine p k and actually sideload it onto your server. Just press here onto sideload. Just upload it. Boom. And you're done. You have a new service just for you, for your friends?

Or if you want, you can submit it to to Star nine, and they will review it. And if it's good enough and a lot of people want it, it'll be uploaded to the community registry. So yeah.

Vibrant is is asking, do Windows users need Bonjour? I haven't used Windows in years, so I don't know whether he's actually trolling or whether that question. Oh, yeah. I mean, Bonjour has been a big pain in the rear for anybody using Windows for a very long time because it actually always failed. It had problems.

We actually had people to have to reinstall it two or three times just for it to work. It was a it was a pain. It shouldn't be a problem with the new version. That's something we've gone away from due to the fact that it's now over IP colon port number instead of how it was before.

Okay. That makes sense. Yes. I I wanna quickly switch back to the update process. Is it other than, you know, if if you're not comfortable with kind of sideloading the

the the update via s b and you wanna wait for the main release, is there anything those types of views need to do other than just waiting for the main release? Like, do they need to make sure

obviously, you mentioned around having a a backup of the server, but do they need to make sure all of their services are up today or will that That is correct. Yes. Before doing the update, make sure all your services are up to date.

Then the same thing I said before, do a backup. Stop every single service one by one. That's also important. And then once that is done, you can do the update and just let it do its thing. Just be patient. Let it work.

It's converting everything, so it's it's pretty involved. It just does it on its own. People are getting patient, and they say, oh, it's taking too long, and they pull the plug. Please don't do that.

Just let it work, please.

That makes sense. What do you or what can you tell us about the the new StartNine router that has been announced, which is, again, pretty exciting. It's something that's been really for quite some time. That right there is gonna be the best router in the world.

I'm pretty biased, but that is a a true fact. It's gonna be fully open source running on risk five architecture. And we've actually taken open WRT, taken it apart, and designed it to be start WRT.

So, yeah, that's a that's a whole different project, and it's gonna allow you to do a lot more. It can actually work hand with hand with your server and allow you to do many things and separate the things on your network, allow you to see a lot of the different things that you can do for being a lot more private and secure.

So yeah. And is that available for for purchase right now? It's gonna be available pretty soon. Actually, the hardware is coming in. So, yeah, it should not be very long until that is available.

It was actually announced quite a while ago, and it turned into,

like, funding. People could prepay and get us a router eventually when it came in, But now it's the start WRT is done. It's in active testing, and the hardware is coming. So yeah. I mean, if everything goes to plan, it should be here pretty, pretty soon.

And and is that something that somebody with an existing open source router can install onto their existing hardware or they have to Yes. Do Yes. It's actually you can use it on any hardware. There's versions for everything being prepared.

If you can install open WRT on the hardware, you can install start WRT. It's not something you're gonna install on the router that comes from your Internet service provider, But, actually, that hardware right there is something you should actually toss out the window, in my opinion.

It's really not good. It has backdoors and the whole deal I mean, we could talk about this some other day if if we wanna talk about privacy and cybersecurity.

But, yes, I mean, a router that you can control everything that goes on, you can control what comes in, what comes out, the whole deal. That's that's the next level if you wanna have full sovereignty in this space.

Nice. Max, are you there? I know you wanna chime in. No. It's it's a moment's gone now. It was a little bit earlier. I had a question. I guess the only other question I'd have is, as a as a less technical person, how would this new router be different for someone like me compared to running like a Flint two or something like that?

I remember two years ago, Matt Hill was on with me, and he was talking about

the fact that you were gonna do a router. And and now, obviously, it's actually happened. It's so long ago, I can't remember the differences. Like, is it so good that someone like me would be like, I need to get rid of my Flint two and upgrade, or is it just if you were gonna buy the two, you choose that instead?

And If you already have a router that can install OpenWRT, you're fine. Just install the new OS, and you're done.

Ah, so you could you could use the same hardware, and you could just you could just put this onto it. Oh, yeah. What does what does the new start WRT, I think you called it, what would that enable over and above for somebody like like Darcy's already got

something like a Flint router? Is is there any juicy additional features or stuff like that that would interest that type of user? Well, if you have Flint, for example, and you've installed an open source router OS, for example, start w OpenWRT, pfSense, any of those, you actually it has a lot of setup time. It's not easy.

And, really, for someone who's never done it and has no idea what they're doing, it gets to be quite difficult. And, also, you can actually destroy your Internet connection, and then you have no idea what's going on.

So, yeah, we've made it pretty easy. Point and click, same visual aspect as StartOS. And it does we try to make things accessible for the standard user because you can always be a person who's an engineer who sets up things and he has his own services running on a server and he maintains everything. He doesn't need these things.

This is designed for the standard everyday user that has no idea how things work. He just wants to plug something in, turn it on, and just forget about it. That's the whole deal. Make things easy and accessible for the masses.

Awesome. Love to hear it. Looking forward to getting that on my on my router.

Alright. I'm gonna we're we're down to the last eight or nine minutes before we have a hard stop at the top of the hour. I'm gonna run through some pre submitted listener questions. Sure. If you are listening live, guys, your final chance to to ask Crypto Squid any questions about StartOS,

please drop them in the chat and then I'll get to as many of them as I can. But for now, first one comes in from Rivian Stokes on Nosta. It says, do you recommend having BTC and non BTC things on the same server? As every service is dockerized?

There shouldn't be any problem. Right?

Yeah. You can do it. A lot of people actually run a whole bunch of things altogether. Some extremely paranoid users just have a server for Bitcoin and Lightning. There's no problem. I mean, you can have eight servers if you want in your home. I mean, you can have one for each different thing.

The main thing is gonna be always when I speak about cybersecurity encryption, things like that, it's always your attack surface. Who are you? What kind of attacker is going after you? So, yeah, if you're a nobody and there's nothing really

except for cat pictures in your server, I mean, nobody really is gonna be going after you. That's the main thing. Also, when it comes to well, this is gonna be a bit more high level, but it comes to people when they install on a computer without the IME, which is a Intel management engine,

a lot of people are very high on that. They they love it. It's pretty against the the system, whatever you wanna say. But if you're not being attacked by a nation state, it really is not a big deal.

Just you have to think about who you are and your issues. But, yeah, running things on the same server, we've designed it so it's safe. But if you don't trust us, just run one for each thing. Just don't trust and verify. That's the whole deal.

Yeah. Makes sense. Next question comes from Valder Dahmer on Noster who says, when ecash mint solution on start OS? I believe that's already possible, isn't it? Yeah. There's been work with Fetimint and other services, really. I mean, the whole deal with start OS for now is gonna be that if you want a service to run on StartOS,

just contact the developer of that service and then just tell them. I mean, we want this on StartOS. Please contact star Start nine. If they come into our developer chat on matrix, it's pretty easy. I mean, we'll we'll guide them. We'll give them all the instructions and data they need. If it's a real developer, they'll do this in a day,

and you'll have a service. I mean, just talk about it online. Just be let them know that you want this, and not only you, anybody that wants it. I mean, as long as people ask about it and say they they want it, it'll happen.

Nice. Another question from the Nosdashat live chat. Observer is asking, did zero point four bring about the dump of Podman and Docker on the back end? Yes. Now it's LXC containers. Okay. That sounds a little bit above my head, but what what was the change there?

Just as a fully, like, 10,000 foot view. This is the native Linux container system. Just a different way to package things. It makes it a lot better for how we envision the operating system to work. It makes it smoother, a lot less issues.

So yeah. Awesome. Next one comes from yet another Anon on Noster who says, our remote backups, for example, to Proton drive on so on the somewhat near road map. Yeah. That is gonna be available in either the next version or the next. It's something that's been really talked about a long time.

Remote backups either to one of those or to another server, as I mentioned somewhere before. So, yeah, that's gonna happen. Very cool. Another one from Cruz on who's asking, is storage expandable externally?

So can you plug in an additional drive? That is also something that's been worked on. Yeah. As at this point, it's all on one drive, but eventually, we'll we'll make it so you can use more because a lot of people wanna have a lot more data on their server, especially if they have a lot of video or files.

That's especially the main thing. People who have a lot of, like, really heavy data use want more than what we can offer, which is a four terabyte SSD. So, yeah, I mean, that's a lot that can be done.

Awesome. Look forward to it. Alright. I'm gonna make this the last one before we close out. It comes from the Nostalgia again from a u nine nine one three. And they said, high level question, what is the vibe of the Start Nine team regarding Nosta?

For example, the sport comes around matrix, but there's a lot of power just to the NPUB and sec usage in this tool. For example, to another Start Nine user, we've really cool to their users via Noster.

Obviously, I know you can't, you know, speak for the whole team, but I guess what's what's the vibe? Oh, yeah. Noster is a pretty big deal. Especially, like, here, I can actually show you Noster Relay. This is something I really like because this is important. You can actually not depend on other relays to keep your messages forever

or actually not block you if they think you're you're speaking about something they they don't like. You can actually have your own really for you and and your group of friends or whatever.

The whole thing. I mean, Nostril is a pretty awesome technology, and it's gonna bring along, like, freedom of speech to everyone, in my opinion, of course. So yeah.

Beautiful. Well, this has been great, Crypto Squid. I am very much looking forward to to getting this running on my server. Again, my my start line server is kinda just one of those tools that

I don't interact with a whole lot, and that's not because it's a bad thing. It's just because it just sits there on my desk and kind of Exactly. I mean, it's when you have a server, you don't wanna be every single day logging in and doing things and fixing things. You just want it to run.

Exactly. Yeah. No. And and it certainly does that. It's been super stable, and it's just always there whenever I need

So I'm looking forward to exploring the the new tools. There's definitely some additional packages I've seen. We've been doing your showcase today. That's And there's a lot more coming in. I mean, this is only the beginning.

Awesome. Well, really looking forward to it. Critics Grid, this has been this has been great. Thank you for for showcasing us. Thank you for offering the community support. I've I haven't done it myself for for many years. I I know how important it is. So thank you for doing what you do. Thank you for supporting open source.

And thank you to thank you to everybody that stopped by. Lots of activity. People are excited about this one. Lots of boost coming in over on the NOSTA live chat as well and loads of questions. So thank you very much everybody for getting involved.

We will be back with more of the same goodness at the exact same time next week, and I hope you all have a fantastic weekend. Thank you for listening to Freedom Tech Friday. To everyone who boosted, asked questions, and participated in the show, we appreciate you all.

Make sure to join us next week on Friday at 9AM EST and 2PM London. Thanks to Seth, Max, and Q for keeping it ungovernable. And thank you to Cake Wallet Foundation and my Nim Box for keeping the Ungovernable Misfits going.

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