If Africa is a laboratory of fragmentation, it is also a blueprint, and so is Iran, where the dynamics are similar and where solutions developed under pressure may prove applicable elsewhere. The second half of SplinterCon turned deliberately forward, to the tools and infrastructures that can help communities stay connected within and across splintered networks. As Dmitri Vitaliev framed it, SplinterCon does not treat circumvention alone as the answer. The promise of digital technology is helping people determine their own pathway online: staying connected with each other in whatever network is available, through decentralized protocols, accessible wireless technologies, and rediscovered methods of routing, obfuscation, and content delivery. Several of the projects below are recipients of eQualitie’s Breakout Program, which has awarded around half a million dollars in grants for practical, decentralized resilience work.
Open the skies: the potential and limits of Direct-to-Cell
A fireside chat with Alex Dalessio, Mahsa Alimardani (Witness; Oxford Internet Institute), and Farzaneh Badiei (Digital Medusa) took as its starting point the near-total shutdowns in Iran on January 8 and February 28, 2026, when at one point only some 1.4 percent of the internet was functioning. Badiei described an internet that had never been fully restored after January, nearly three months of shutdown during which none of the usual VPNs and circumvention tools reliably worked, and during which she had been unable to speak with her 87-year-old father. What had emerged in its place she called an “internet apartheid”: a tiered, sectoral system granting expensive access through professional associations to the regime’s supporters while leaving the population disconnected.
Against that backdrop, Alimardani explained the premise of the Direct-to-Cell campaign she helped initiate: satellite internet is internet. During the January blackout, when nothing else worked, a small window of connectivity was enabled through Starlink terminals – a drop in the bucket of perhaps fifty thousand devices, accessible only to those who could afford a thousand to two thousand US dollars to buy a smuggled receiver at great risk. The campaign’s question was how to make that drop scale. Direct-to-Cell, connecting ordinary handsets to satellites without a ground terminal, exists today only in a basic, first-generation form that still depends on cooperation with local carriers and nationally licensed frequencies. The opportunity lies in the second generation, expected within a few years, whose larger satellites work through spectrum ranges not governed at the national level.
The crux, Alimardani stressed, is that the regulations are being written now, in forums such as the International Telecommunications Union, ahead of the World Radiocommunication Conference in Shanghai in 2027. And civil society, the people actually affected by shutdowns, has little seat at that table while states including Iran, China, and Russia are very much present. Badiei made the governance argument: digital sovereignty is invoked by democratic and undemocratic states alike to shield repression, as Iran did when it petitioned the ITU’s Radio Regulations Board to have satellite terminals shut down even as it was killing protesters in the streets.
If we truly believe in free global access, she argued, satellite internet is the one layer of infrastructure over which states should not be able to impose control, and the community needs a global-governance mechanism for it in which civil society can participate. The campaign is careful about scope: not everyone connecting by satellite, but satellite as a vital dimension of a still-terrestrial internet, governed by humanitarian protocols that could be triggered in defined crises — including, the coalition hopes, the crisis of a shutdown. Alimardani’s closing point answered the skeptic who asks why a long-term regulatory fight matters during an active shutdown: because the technology is emerging and the rules are being set regardless, and if civil society treats this as a low priority, others who consider it a high priority will shape it for years to come.
From gourmet tools to building blocks: scaling resilience
Vinicius Fortuna, who leads the Outline project, used his keynote to diagnose a structural weakness in the circumvention ecosystem and propose a remedy. Censors are moving faster and coordinating across borders: censorship is now sold as a product, deployed regionally. And yet the tool-building community keeps reinventing the wheel, producing monolithic “gourmet” tools that share almost nothing with one another. He walked through the lineage: plain proxies blocked by China; Shadowsocks disguising proxy traffic as random bytes; Trojan reskinning the same approach over standard TLS to blend in; V2Ray composing protocols but only within its own non-reusable platform, forcing forks whenever someone wanted to add something new. The names, he argued, hide what actually matters: the property that defeated the censor was usually a single layer (TLS, or WebSocket-over-TLS that lets a service hide behind a CDN) not the branded tool as a whole.
His proposal was a shared taxonomy of capabilities that lets builders decompose tools and recombine them like Lego. On the data plane he defined four: resolve (turning a name into a usable address, defeating DNS-based blocking through encrypted DNS); shape (altering traffic unilaterally from the client, with no server cooperation, to defeat SNI- and content-based blocking by splitting packets or reordering them); carry (the transport that actually moves the bytes — the layer the censor sees); and relay (the proxy itself, which can use a standard protocol such as SOCKS5 while the carry layer underneath is swapped freely). On the control plane he added strategy selection, measurement, and easy integration. The lesson for funders and builders is to stop turning protocol names into requirements and start asking what capability is actually needed.
The payoff is reuse. Fortuna noted that the Outline SDK now has over thirty million users across many apps, and that designing for reusability (documented APIs, permissive licensing, composable, single-responsibility components) shrinks the time from a new idea to real-world impact from years to weeks. He cited the Amnezia team adding support for its censorship-resistant protocol to a Russian news app through an Outline adapter, without any gatekeeping from the Outline team. To anchor the practice, he announced an “Awesome Outline” community registry organized by the new taxonomy. Why it matters for Africa, he closed, is that regional blocking can scale quickly, and a reusable, recomposable toolkit lets defenders adapt to local contexts and cut cost and maintenance by proxying only what truly needs proxying.
Understanding the censor to defeat it: Geneva on Deflect
Jeremy presented a new partnership between eQualitie’s Deflect service and Geneva, the genetic-evasion tool developed by Professor Dave Levin’s group at the University of Maryland. Deflect is a DDoS-protection and web-security service founded in 2011 that now protects roughly a thousand websites, sees on the order of fifty million daily HTTP hits, and — critically — finds that twenty to twenty-five percent of the sites it protects face censorship, mostly with their domains blocked in Russia and, in some recently discovered cases, their IPs outright blocked.
The idea is to shift the burden of evading censorship from the user to the website. Rather than asking every reader to install a VPN, the server side — or the CDN acting as middleman — takes on part of the work.
Geneva (“genetic evasion,” not the city) uses a genetic algorithm to evolve strategies against a given censor: series of instructions that manipulate the packet stream on the server side to confuse the censor’s middlebox. It works because middleboxes, facing enormous traffic volumes with finite resources, take shortcuts when they inspect packets — and those shortcuts are bugs Geneva can exploit. The four manipulations it uses on TCP traffic are duplicate, fragment, tamper, and drop. In one example Jeremy walked through, when the server is about to send a SYN-ACK, Geneva replaces it with two tampered packets — an RST followed by a SYN — so that the censor’s middlebox believes the connection has been reset and a new one started, desynchronizing its per-connection state from the client’s real state, while the genuine client TCP stack handles the malformed sequence without trouble. The censorship fails; the connection goes through.
The work, Jeremy noted, is still at proof-of-concept stage and not yet in production. The roadmap for 2026 into 2027 involves making the Geneva engine production-ready for large traffic volumes — refactoring the Python proof-of-concept and possibly replacing iptables NFQUEUE with eBPF for efficiency — training strategies inside Russia, since censorship shifts and a strategy that works today may fail tomorrow, and adding IPv6 support, which can yield surprising results because censors often focus on IPv4.
Off the grid: responses to shutdowns and emergencies
The final cluster of projects addressed the hardest case: keeping people connected, at least locally, when there is no internet at all. Two were recipients of the current Breakout Program round.
Shortmesh — messaging bridges as infrastructure
Wisdom Nji, founder and lead engineer at Afnerd, presented Shortmesh, an open-source API built to integrate with Matrix bridges, which connect the Matrix protocol to platforms such as Signal, WhatsApp, and Slack. Shortmesh comprises a Matrix client, an interface API exposing those bridges over REST so developers can integrate quickly, and Shortmesh OT, a one-time-password generator that delivers codes through any bridged platform. It was built to solve a concrete problem for free and open-source projects: the cost of phone-number verification through commercial services such as Twilio. The tool offers a self-hostable alternative, a “sign in with Signal/WhatsApp” widget, and bidirectional communication that the team is folding into its own SMS Without Borders project to reduce SMS bandwidth and, ultimately, bring encrypted bidirectional communication over SMS to online platforms.
CommunityNet — an alert that reached eleven thousand households without the internet
Bobby (presenting by avatar for security reasons) described a multi-layer early-warning system built for a community living under a total communication blackout and repeated airstrikes — by his account, targeted 150 times in a single year — in a civil-conflict setting with no single authority to rely on. Traditional alerts such as bells, shouting, and drums do not scale. The system builds on an existing local fiber backbone as an intranet rather than an internet, and works because the community is a mobile-first generation with phones in hand. Two deliberately simple changes — packaging existing open-source tools together, and incentivizing users to log in weekly — let a single dashboard push an early warning to thousands of households at the click of a button.
The Breakout grant let the team cut app-installation time and, more importantly, raise notification delivery from about twenty percent of registered phones to sixty percent of active users — a roughly three-hundred-percent improvement — by solving the problem of cheap Android phones killing the app. A hardware layer adds sirens and LEDs driven by a local coordinator application on the existing solar-powered network. Because a fiber backbone is vulnerable to fire, wind, or landslide, the next stage is a wireless system using LoRa or HaLow connectivity, alongside efforts to make the community app useful day-to-day with weather and news so that people are familiar with it before a disaster strikes.
Raspberry Pi gateways — resilient access under ISP interference
Providence Baraka, founder and program associate at the Binwa Civic Tech Lab in the Democratic Republic of Congo, presented an approach to internet freedom under ISP-level interference, set against the 2025 shutdown in Goma ordered amid war. Where connectivity is predominantly mobile 3G and 4G, censorship is implemented at the ISP level through DNS manipulation, throttling, and deep packet inspection — and even standard WireGuard handshakes have detectable patterns that let an ISP block the server’s IP. Commercial VPNs, he warned, are also black boxes that may sell data or comply with warrants.
His answer pairs minimalist hardware with a carefully considered software stack: a Raspberry Pi, battery- or power-bank-powered, creates a local access point and connects WireGuard clients to an external VPS for encryption, shipped with scripts so that non-specialists can bring more users online. Key design considerations include per-user keys that can be revoked from the VPS if a device is seized, minimizing stored data to reduce forensic risk during inspections, DNS-over-TLS via Unbound to prevent ISP-level DNS poisoning, and unattended security upgrades. Recognizing that circumvention is not enough, he closed by pointing to offline, censorship-resistant peer-to-peer messaging — such as Briar, which connects over Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or Tor — so that communities can keep communicating even when there is nothing to circumvent to.