Brilliant concept! I recently met the fine folks at Beekee who make something rather similar: https://beekee.ch/beekeebox/
It's an apparently simple problem on the surface, but quite hard to get it right...
I once worked on a wireless network deployment for a transit refugee camp, and at least that was built on the assumption that some sort of Internet connection would be available at all times, making remote management possible. And even then it was tough to manage considering all other constraints.
I can only imagine how hard it is to deliver this kind of service reliably when Internet is rarely if ever available.
I bet those kind of boxes work very well when there are less than 30 connections at once. All in all, if it is about accessing useful information, I think this is somehow brilliant (as you wrote).
I saw a local agency demo their use of the pirate box for Wildland firefighting.
They had a GIS team working on mapping updates to fire lines, cut lines, dozer paths, crew assignments, etc. And as required they'd upload everything to the pirate box and the commanders / captains could download the maps to their tablets.
The article is about devices that don't use internet access — they provide a shallow copy of wikipedia, learning sites, and the infrastructure for devices to connect and use these as if they were connected to the full network.
Interesting how the author doubts the integrity of shrinkwrapped floppies. Id expect them to last for ages, it's like a tape backup, just in a circle instead of a ribbon
That's missing the point. Full Internet access is just too broad. Going to wikipedia and aimlessly browsing about is fun, but a more educative approach can narrow the focus for students and especially for younger learners.
How to market it in developed countries is going to be a tough nut to crack though.
Well there is nothing stopping any school in the developed world from loading this on to a pi or something and having everyone use it too. It's free and open source (from what I can tell).
It's aimed at places with little to no, or unreliable, internet. So if you have normal internet speed there is nothing you can't get that's on the box. Also it seems that its not even a curated Wikipedia, it's just a full clone of it (assuming for whatever language your downloading)
Plenty of schools have network control over the devices that are used in schools, meaning that you can indeed narrow the focus by only allowing a few websites to be accessed.
My kid's school uses a software called GoGuardian, which allows individual teachers to whitelist specific websites for the students in their class during their class period.
I remember encountering this project: https://piratebox.cc/faq , I even still have a compatible hardware at home.
I wonder if allowing it to have instant messaging (including offline asynchronous messaging) would change how people in a small community communicate each other. I wonder if, for one, it would induce Internet trolling.
I have one of these, not in operation but could deploy by just plugging into power and attaching it to a higher gain antenna. It does have a message-baord type function included, but it's anonymous and there's no sign-in so there's also no way to administer it or edit / delete your own messages (piratebox is a product of a more innocent age, maybe). It's also possible to upload files to it, anonymously.
Both of these things make me worry about liability in the event of the type of jerks where the term "jerk" is possibly the nicest way to describe the person.
(I have it on a GL.Inet Mango device and it took me a lot of digging to find the install binaries and instructions, and I don't even know if said binaries and instructions specific to the Mango exist anymore - I don't have the time / energy / motivation to try to dig it up again, I remember there were lots of trails that led to almost the right information)
What would they be plugging these USB flash drives into? Underdeveloped countries / regions have very low penetration with traditional laptops / desktop computers. But nearly everyone has a smartphone of some kind, which has WiFi. That's the reason the form factor of these are mobile hotspots.
Isn't the idea that you only need a minimal device with a browser to access stuff on the portable hotspot? Handing out USB drives would be easy, but people who had only phones might not find them as practical (and they'd tend to get wiped / sold / lost / etc.)
At the least you need storage for the content ($10-20), and a physical device to read it off of ($20-40). If your community has lots of computers with no wireless antennas (old servers), USB keys that can be passed around make sense. If you have lots of mobile devices with wireless (phones or tablets), a hotspot like this makes sense and can be used by dozens of people at once.
In practice USB keys run a slightly higher risk of being wiped and repurposed for personal storage. Some IIAB users glue the SD card into their socket for that reason, making it take a lot longer to swap out.
These books sparked a lifelong curiosity in learning, I would sit for hours and hours and read them in my room. I hope that internet in a box inspires another generation of me's out there, who, like me, wouldn't otherwise have had access to this info.
The answer to ubiquitous Internet in an area is going to look like 5G and mobiles, not highly valuable terminals you now saddle them with having to guard.
> PrepperDisk is similar to a DIY, open-source project that started in 2012 called Internet in a Box and which has become popular in rural areas in developing countries where internet access is sparse. The idea is basically that you can carry around an external hard drive-sized, mini version of the internet with you that creates a local network your phone or laptop can access.
We are actually IIAB partners, we attribute to all the various OOS projects (Kiwix, IIAB)in our credits and comply with all the licensing. Our goal was just to make those packages polished as a consumer product and add newer content (some licensed and some commissioned ).
Curious why you went with a 512GB SD card for the Prepperdisk, instead of a usb drive? I guess it might make the enclosure bigger, but every RPi thing I have built has been undone by SD card corruption (unless I used the overlay filesystem).
Good question. Cost and ease of use were the primary drivers. It’s a read-heavy / write-light which means we came expect more life than some use cases. Alternatively we went with nvme on the 1TB/LLM model due to its heavier write profile. Making a backup of the SD card is wise though as a backup.
Good feedback. Most of our customers are shopping for a turnkey device and we try not to include prominent details that can confuse that use cases. But we are going to elevate the content for folks that would be interested (today).
I'm not really sure I understand how a "Prepper Box" is different from an external hard drive. Unlike the devices in TFA, which are meant for many students in a classroom using at once, this seems to be more of a single-person-looking-up-things concept.
I've seen many such projects - while the problem is real, these solutions in actual practice/deployment are gimmicky and questionably useful at best. I'd like to hear from the actual people using this on a day to day basis - if any exist.
With the crazy news we have those past months, I actually started to wonder what would happen if internet went offline "for real" (let's say, several weeks) here in developed countries. I know we can easily download Wikipedia and Openstreetmap. But what else? And how to share it? I can do a hotspot home, but would my neighbors understand it? I would need some kind of captive portal to tell them when they connect to me. And then, could they repeat the hotspot, to build a mesh? I know there are projects to do that, but what do they accomplish exactly? I remember 10 years ago, in Ubutu, Empathy was allowing me to chat with people connected to the same network than me. No account, no registration. That would be very useful. Does the Pirate box do all of that? How extensible is it?
I wonder if it is possible to have some kind of P2P protocol similar to BitTorrent where one can seed incremental snapshots of subsets of the internet.
Something like the internet archive, but fully decentralized.
I started in the ISP business and did Wisp stuff for a while so doing this wouldn't be too difficult for me. Hardest thing would be scaling it with the average equipment and user would have.
I would add an LLM like QwQ-32B to the mix--that has a ton of compressed knowledge embedded in it.
I would also store it in a steel Oscar the Grouch style trash can for a cheap faraday cage, which gets you protection from solar flares, and EMP blasts.
LLMs are a bad deal when you look at how much power you need to run that inference. A device that could barely run one instance of QwQ-32B at glacial speeds will be able to serve multiple concurrent users of Kiwix.
But--if you don't think of asking Hacker News every single thing you need to know beforehand, I think you still want the LLM to answer questions and help you bootstrap it.
Learning things from scratch is really hard too, just a copy of wikipedia gets one absolutely nowhere if you don't know what to search for.
Having something that you can plainly ask how to start that will point you in the right direction and explain the base concepts is worth a lot more, it turns raw data into genuine information. Yes it can be wrong sometimes, but so can human teachers and you can always verify, which is a good skill to practice in general.
See the Wired article on the rewright of German history. And The George Galloway article. The enshitification has not only begun, it's in rising force.
No, and not even close. The bottle neck is the network, so unless he is running a database in the background, it is not going to improve speed in the least. 14TB drives are not that fast. Video 4gb, or 8gb, and as little ram as possible. Not much processing is needed either. That is why NASs are built in celerons. In 6 years, when he knows something, he will see the extreme error of his ways.
My NAS has 2x2Tn striped and a video 1Tb. It streams 4k to multiple sources. If I needed faster, I'd throw it on the install server. 4x1TB striped, and 8Gb of ram. 2xGbit net. Did it tell you this cost all of $60?
Too little bandwidth and too few nodes to do this in the sense I think you mean.
You can build a hotspot and try setting up meshes with any of the available hardware or software packages out there, but you're going to end up being the gatekeeper to the service. HAM radio ends up working out the same way, as I understand. It's just too technical for people to have this spring up collectively without a single person or team doing everything.
Lack of tech experience to even know how to build a mesh let alone prioritize its limited bandwidth is why the general public isn't going to assist.
>And then, could they repeat the hotspot, to build a mesh? I know there are projects to do that, but what do they accomplish exactly?
Yes, pretty much. The problem is poor definition of the problem, though.
What are we trying to solve? A way to send trickles of comms out, like "Mom and Dad, we're alive?" or "We have life-threatening casualties at x',y'?" Emergency kiosk to send emails one at a time? Doable if you have an Internet source like a Starlink, or any other uplink that's still up somehow.
Or is to restore the "Internet" as generally known, which might as well be synonymous with YouTube and Netflix and web browsing for people. You and your system would be overwhelmed as soon as your mesh comes up.
You might be able to define this particular problem using negatives instead of positives. Everything except stuff like YouTube, Netflix, etc. If you cut out images, audio, video, and other intensive data streams text based communication in natural language is extremely lightweight. Particularly if the protocol is carefully designed with the intended deployment conditions in mind.
I guess a requirement for that is a sufficiently generalized protocol with a matching hardware stack.
AREDN can give you a mesh running standard internet protocols on fairly cheap hardware - they have firmware that can be flashed on small USB-powered GL-iNet devices such as Beryl:
What would be lovely, is a giant repo of "every tool, firmware file, and documentation you might need, to reflash any random consumer router you might come across", completely offline and packaged up.
Because inevitably, you find a bunch of them after you've lost access.
If the internet would go offline "for real" even for days, all hell would break lose. It would not be as bad as electricity going offline, but it's in the same category now. No credit card payments payments (food, gas), no logistics. Prepper stuff.
The real scenario long-term is that quality content like Wikipedia could either be taken offline, be poisoned by AI or taken over or censored by authoritarians or corporations or interest groups. Like social media and parts of the normal internet already.
So archiving is good anyways.
To your actual question - quality non-fiction e-books would be valuable. Wikipedia is a superficial skimming of human knowledge, lots of the real stuff is in books (think medicine, agriculture, algorithms, engineering etc.).
Practically, a home WIFI has a very limited range, so just handing out sheets with instructions to your neighbors would work. And for a wider mesh network, you'd need to make do with whatever evolves in that scenario.
Yeah who knows whats the real cause. Maybe some fire, maybe a cyberattack or could even be someone messed up greatly in their pc because government security is disastrous so who knows
And Protigal, as well as Peurto rico. I wonder how Canada would react by being treated like that... But the anywhere with oil... Which puts Greenland as a false flag....
I think this identifies a real problem in western society; there's a crisis situation of sorts, but instead of people talking to each other, this comment worries about whether people can figure it out on their own.
I believe that if there were to be a crisis situation like that, long-term power outage or whatever, people would find each other again instead of the individualism we have right now.
Yes. Was at a bus stop with someone telling me to pay your front, and not your back and move forward, while a guy brrings a worldmap to the library lays it on the table in front of him..."Where you from?"
"Congo."
I personally have not known shame for decades. I was ashamed.
Isn't OSM like 2TB to host if you include all tile scales? I guess you could skip the last few where most of the size explosion lies but that doesn't give you much precision.
Theoretically yes.
But no person ever is going to look at all the tiles (on the highest zoom levels) in the sea, so they are not rendered by default, and only on demand.
IMO: this type of prepper offline Internet apps should support Android/Windows and have .apk/.zip download links on front pages so that it can reproduce itself. It should run on something like a random cracked phone charging from USB port on a Wi-Fi router.
Vaguely interesting, but I am far more interested in actual connective technology.
The Commotion "Internet in a Suitcase" project (~2012) was much more up my alley. Is much more the sort of thing I wish that, for example the State Department would still fund.
> Commotion relies on several open source projects: OLSR, OpenWrt, OpenBTS, and Serval project.
So, mesh, wifi, cellular, and voice technologies, packaged onto semi affordable hardware... That's the real stuff! That's what democratic values should look like, that'a what we could build that would embody our (USA's) founding principles, would fight tyrant info-control.
I think that giving the poor(er) people access to just the information that’s accessible on the internet, like Wikipedia, like Khan academy to learn programming. Is so much more helpful than handing them access to “the internet” as in what the internet is for people in the rich parts of the western world.
Sure, we can hand them access to all of the internet and have them scrolling social media till they’re hollow people and earn money by doing anything cause they have seen the way you can live in luxury and start idolizing that.
Or you give them just the useful parts of the internet.
I saw many projects while working in Cambodia, including One-Laptop-Per-Child, projects designed to share market information with farmers, etc and none made an impact like mobile phones.
One project that was semi-successful were USAID sponsored internet cafes that were supposed to enable access to political information just before an election. The USAID staff were annoyed to find most Cambodians used them for international VoIP calls.
Never assume you know better than the end users what they want from the internet. Now mobile companies move in so fast to conflict countries (from my experience in Afghanistan and Iraq), internet access is up there with electricity on the list of requirements.
Nail on the head! Glad to hear this in between the technical tangents here in the comments. Also, what is the OLPC XO image doing on that page? Is this project related?
> Or you give them just the useful parts of the internet.
Implying you (or anyone) knows better what is most useful to someone else isn’t fair to them. What if the sites that are most useful aren’t included in the backup because of blind spots or license/copyright issues?
Saving a single page to view offline is simple enough for me, but many non-technical folks would struggle. A whole site? That is a bit harder. Most people could not do this outside manually crawling the site.
Web archiving tools that are easy to use and allow offline use also have a role to play that other tools can’t fill due to many issues that are outside developers’ ability to change, and putting archiving capabilities in the hands of users directly allows users’ fair use rights to be used to good effect.
We were winning for a while with ad-blockers but it seems like we're on the short end of the stick - the briefing on firmware - 4 Sequential ads. And I am sure there are worse.
I played with gemma-3-4b-it-qat recently using a mid-tier graphics card and a few things stood out to me:
1. It was very fast, between 35 and 70 tokens per second, with initial response in under 200ms. That kind of speed is a feature.
2. It was very useful. I had a brainstorming session with it that was both fluid and fruitful
3. I can't wrap my head around so much knowledge being contained in about 3GB of data. It seems to know something about everything. Imperfect, but very useful.
I feel like this could be useful in an incarcerated environment, where they offer computer classes but can't grant access to the Internet for security reasons.
I don't know how many more times this needs to be proven.
You do not understand data, you do not understand the reality around you, you do not understand 80:20 style engineering rules, you can't look at previous implementations of the Internet in a Box and see it didn't work.
Worse, you now live in a Starlink era where you can give them a real "Internet in a Box" and there is no solution people can just roll out. Talking a proper Linux setup, real hacker and nerd stuff, but because it's not Data Hording 101 no one will tackle it.
Internet in a Box is a great example of why Western foreign aid is failing and China is moving in. The West no longer builds infrastructure for the poor (like a Linux build) and feeds them wishy washy stuff. Facebook does more for the poor in this area.
Why does it not work? An idea to think about, physical encyclopedias and university textbooks have been around forever and accessible.
I've worked in schools with 1000's on one ADSL trying to use proxies to cache. I've volunteered for a few years in country on mobile apps for use in very low PPI villages without internet. I'm not coming at this with zero experience.
It's impossible to discuss these things on HN, there is neither the technical or process knowledge here, I could be totally wrong but I have looked hard to disprove myself.
The solution I propose Starlink -> box with billing / access control + terabytes of offline vids/books + fun online games, that an idiot with determination can manage and make a profit or run free and works well in a country where the MPAA doesn't exist.
I've spent the past 8 years focused on this theme, more or less, because my conclusion after finding things like internet on a box (and various similar projects) was that they offer too much information (and also present it in a useless manner).
I've lived in many deeply impoverished communities, and they don't need a full version of Wikipedia, or a medical encyclopedia. They need to know how to easily and cheaply implement basic sanitation and hygiene, basic first aid and nutrition, efficient sustainable cooking and agricultural practices etc... Plenty of effort was spent on that stuff in the Appropriate Technology movement, but all I ever see from it all is wiki articles or 70 page pdfs (which many can't even read, even even if they were in their native language). No one is learning anything from those resources.
I brought this up with some orgs similar to IIAB, and they were just bewildered. So, I made it my life's work to address this in a genuinely useful, accessible, practical way. Hopefully I'll be able to share something in the next year or two...
This, of course, is not to say that they don't have the current or future potential to learn these things, let alone that such info should be withheld. But it's just a matter of practicality of time, resources, efficacy etc. If they can get out of extreme poverty - which many basic things can very much help with - maybe they'll have more time, health and money to pursue academic education, etc
The proof of this, of course, is that we have access to all of humanity's knowledge, and have self-evidently done very little with it.
What I'm getting at is that even wikipedia is not useful for communities who completely lack education (and perhaps even reading ability), technology, and economic stability. They need, more than anything, to get sanitation, clean air, nutrition, larger crop yields from healthier soil and better practices, etc... Wikipedia doesn't have any of that info. Even Appropedia doesn't really - its too superficial (and not translated) to be actionable, especially for these groups of people.
Once those issues are sorted out via more appropriate teaching and logistical methods, solidarity, etc... they'll have health, time, and money with which academics and anything else can be pursued.
Its just basic Maslow's hierarchy of needs...
All of the people who are working on these sorts of offline education projects are completely out of touch.
Just read the follow up study. A local affiliate of Rachelplus was the one who I mentioned in my other comment as being bewildered and worthless. It's just some clueless and not particularly invested bureaucrats running it, and they are evidently incentivized to just get devices in schools, with little regard for how effective it ends up being (or if the devices even end up working at all)
The guy running it was bewildered and even offended when i said a huge medical encyclopedia was worthless - there's like 10 conditions that affect the majority of people here (smoke, parasites, diabetes, dental issues, obesity, malnourishment, sleep deprivation, emotional/psychological trauma, etc), all of which are simple to treat and also to fix/prevent with basic technologies and living practices. As with people who have access to all information, they don't actually need it - just live well. If they need real medical knowledge, they'll need to find their way to a doctor anyway. The same applies to the rest of the knowledge - they'd learn more effectively anyway through practical, effective projects.
I also tried to talk to/work with the people in charge of rachelplus technology in improve it in many ways, but they were enormously disinterested as well. Such are the ways of the majority of non-profit orgs in the social/economic development world (and probably in most other realms as well)
It is the opposite of Internet in a box. This exemplifies how, in our day and age, "The Internet" is mostly a one-sided experience where a few large organizations offer a bunch of content, which they control, for your perusal.
It would have been more "Internet in a box" if it would have helped people set up their own services and pages; and if it were extensible using other radio-capable devices.
They do talk about using FileZilla or Nextcloud to upload files, and mention using CMSes like WordPress, so maybe it's quite possible, just not a big focus.
I agree that making it easy for teachers, students, and anyone in the community making their own discoverable webpages would be a great aspect to this.
Teachers / organizers being able to share their own content is a top-requested feature indeed. A few years ago, we implemented functionality similar to LibraryBox, to mount "teacher content" from USB sticks / drives and make it instantaneously available for students. More recently, after a teacher in the Yucatan requested it in November, we implemented functionality to enable students to be able to submit homework privately to their teacher OR share their summer photos (or any other content) akin to a traditional community bulletin board with their peers, i.e., Upload2USB. There's much more to be done, but the ability to share your own content and create community exchanges of information and ideas is central to Internet-in-a-Box's (IIAB)'s ethos.
This is the limited offline version of the Internet for the rural communities but what we need is the local-first version of the Internet for the rural community [1].
Fun facts, about one third or 2.6 Billions of the world's population has no or very limited Internet connectivity [2]. The main root cause is most probably power not the infrastructure.
Most of the people in authority probably don't realize that this rural connectivity does not need a fast high speed network as long as it has connectivity. It can be slow as kbps bandwidth, a kind of "sipping" Bittorent based download, but a download nonetheless.
The main problem of the Internet connectivity it's not really the infrastructure itself but the overall power budget requirements for the connectivity infrastructure.
We need to bring back the very efficient wireles modulation for the remote and rural Internet as exemplify by the DMR with its very efficient 4-FSK [3],[4]. This type of wireless modulation employed constant envelope modulation that is far more efficient (8 to 15 times more efficient) than the alternative TETRA with comparable bandwith [5]. It's reported that DMR operates on 1 kWh per day while TETRA is on 15 kWh per day thus the former can be sustained by only solar panels but not the latter.
Please note that TETRA itself is not a very efficient modulation with π⁄4 differential quadrature phase-shift keying (π⁄4-DPSK) since it requires linear amplifiers due to its non-constant envelope wireles modulation. It's even worst for typical OFDM based system (e.g Wi-Fi HaLoW, LTE, 5G, etc) [6]. This is because a similar power budget setup to DMR would have required probably around 100 times more power or more than 100 kWh per day including the air-conditioning systems for the linear power amplifier systems [7].
Thus these remote and rural base stations can be potentially powered by merely solar panels and the infrastructure does not need to be expensive since the base station structure can be made from bamboo [8].
[1] Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud:
Every such provider likes to play games with who they give good rates to or who they exclude altogether from their network. People said the same about cellular access and it's still far too expensive for most people in most rural areas.
Which countries are you referring to? I know from personal experience everyone in Cambodia and Afghanistan owns a mobile phone with internet access. They might not have a computer or reliable power, but they have Facebook accounts. Rest of ASEAN has excellent coverage as well, and I've heard Africa is similar
I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see <https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git>) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it.
A feature that would be good to have is if a "Internet in a Box" could also store the update files for serving to other "internet in Box" machines.
( However having worked as a technical software tester in similar systems for over 20 years , its probably to complex to implement reliably, being able to handle all the edge cases. Is my GUESS )
For small pieces of content, doable through the IIAB implementation of usb_lib and upload2usb. Content is also easily available to client machines that are connecting to the IIAB.
For less ephemeral learning bouquets (i.e., curated content), an implementor can customize their IIAB their specific content and then image/clone as needed.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 223 ms ] thread2023 (356 points, 120 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35750165
2021 (620 points, 142 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27568332
It's an apparently simple problem on the surface, but quite hard to get it right... I once worked on a wireless network deployment for a transit refugee camp, and at least that was built on the assumption that some sort of Internet connection would be available at all times, making remote management possible. And even then it was tough to manage considering all other constraints.
I can only imagine how hard it is to deliver this kind of service reliably when Internet is rarely if ever available.
I bet those kind of boxes work very well when there are less than 30 connections at once. All in all, if it is about accessing useful information, I think this is somehow brilliant (as you wrote).
IIRC they support 40 concurrent users, and in their model that would always be a school class, which I guess shouldn’t be larger anyway
https://bibliosansfrontieres.gitlab.io/olip/olip-documentati...
https://wrolpi.org/
And I feel like the PirateBox concept is sort of adjacent.
They had a GIS team working on mapping updates to fire lines, cut lines, dozer paths, crew assignments, etc. And as required they'd upload everything to the pirate box and the commanders / captains could download the maps to their tablets.
Amazing stuff all without internet.
Chuckles aside, it's a cool concept.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/brajeshwar/113742187/in/album-...
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/10/openi...
The internet doesn't weigh anything
Ohhh!
And those people then have a better chance at a much better education?
Why not in developed countries schools as well?
How to market it in developed countries is going to be a tough nut to crack though.
It's aimed at places with little to no, or unreliable, internet. So if you have normal internet speed there is nothing you can't get that's on the box. Also it seems that its not even a curated Wikipedia, it's just a full clone of it (assuming for whatever language your downloading)
My kid's school uses a software called GoGuardian, which allows individual teachers to whitelist specific websites for the students in their class during their class period.
I wonder if allowing it to have instant messaging (including offline asynchronous messaging) would change how people in a small community communicate each other. I wonder if, for one, it would induce Internet trolling.
It'd be interesting if one had to go visit an admin (in real life) to get an account, and accounts are really associated with people.
Both of these things make me worry about liability in the event of the type of jerks where the term "jerk" is possibly the nicest way to describe the person.
(I have it on a GL.Inet Mango device and it took me a lot of digging to find the install binaries and instructions, and I don't even know if said binaries and instructions specific to the Mango exist anymore - I don't have the time / energy / motivation to try to dig it up again, I remember there were lots of trails that led to almost the right information)
In practice USB keys run a slightly higher risk of being wiped and repurposed for personal storage. Some IIAB users glue the SD card into their socket for that reason, making it take a lot longer to swap out.
When I was about 7-8 years old I used to get the "Tell me why" books, which were books that had 5-ish pages on all sorts of different topics.
https://archive.org/details/heresmoretellmew0000leok/page/n3...
These books sparked a lifelong curiosity in learning, I would sit for hours and hours and read them in my room. I hope that internet in a box inspires another generation of me's out there, who, like me, wouldn't otherwise have had access to this info.
Makes me think the prepper disk was maybe a rebrand of internet in a box without proper attribution?
> https://www.404media.co/sales-of-hard-drives-prepper-disk-fo...
From the hn-thread. You might be right.
Some good Internet-in-a-Box (IIAB) testing on RPi 3 B+ & RPi 4 boards on # of Wi-Fi clients supported: https://github.com/iiab/iiab/issues/823#issuecomment-6622852..., e.g., up to 32 clients in certain scenarios.
More info here: https://wiki.iiab.io/go/FAQ#What_hardware_should_I_use? and https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/3010
Something like the internet archive, but fully decentralized.
I would also store it in a steel Oscar the Grouch style trash can for a cheap faraday cage, which gets you protection from solar flares, and EMP blasts.
But--if you don't think of asking Hacker News every single thing you need to know beforehand, I think you still want the LLM to answer questions and help you bootstrap it.
Which militaries are working on battle field AI. All of them.
Could a 64Gb dual xeon run say 50 to 100 users of kiwix?
Having something that you can plainly ask how to start that will point you in the right direction and explain the base concepts is worth a lot more, it turns raw data into genuine information. Yes it can be wrong sometimes, but so can human teachers and you can always verify, which is a good skill to practice in general.
My NAS has 2x2Tn striped and a video 1Tb. It streams 4k to multiple sources. If I needed faster, I'd throw it on the install server. 4x1TB striped, and 8Gb of ram. 2xGbit net. Did it tell you this cost all of $60?
You can build a hotspot and try setting up meshes with any of the available hardware or software packages out there, but you're going to end up being the gatekeeper to the service. HAM radio ends up working out the same way, as I understand. It's just too technical for people to have this spring up collectively without a single person or team doing everything.
Lack of tech experience to even know how to build a mesh let alone prioritize its limited bandwidth is why the general public isn't going to assist.
>And then, could they repeat the hotspot, to build a mesh? I know there are projects to do that, but what do they accomplish exactly?
Yes, pretty much. The problem is poor definition of the problem, though.
What are we trying to solve? A way to send trickles of comms out, like "Mom and Dad, we're alive?" or "We have life-threatening casualties at x',y'?" Emergency kiosk to send emails one at a time? Doable if you have an Internet source like a Starlink, or any other uplink that's still up somehow.
Or is to restore the "Internet" as generally known, which might as well be synonymous with YouTube and Netflix and web browsing for people. You and your system would be overwhelmed as soon as your mesh comes up.
I guess a requirement for that is a sufficiently generalized protocol with a matching hardware stack.
https://www.arednmesh.org/content/supported-devices-0
It's self-configuring, too - as soon as the node spins up, it will automatically find and connect to nearby nodes and start routing.
Because inevitably, you find a bunch of them after you've lost access.
The real scenario long-term is that quality content like Wikipedia could either be taken offline, be poisoned by AI or taken over or censored by authoritarians or corporations or interest groups. Like social media and parts of the normal internet already.
So archiving is good anyways.
To your actual question - quality non-fiction e-books would be valuable. Wikipedia is a superficial skimming of human knowledge, lots of the real stuff is in books (think medicine, agriculture, algorithms, engineering etc.).
Practically, a home WIFI has a very limited range, so just handing out sheets with instructions to your neighbors would work. And for a wider mesh network, you'd need to make do with whatever evolves in that scenario.
I think this identifies a real problem in western society; there's a crisis situation of sorts, but instead of people talking to each other, this comment worries about whether people can figure it out on their own.
I believe that if there were to be a crisis situation like that, long-term power outage or whatever, people would find each other again instead of the individualism we have right now.
"Congo."
I personally have not known shame for decades. I was ashamed.
Then someone tried to burn down the library.
Isn't OSM like 2TB to host if you include all tile scales? I guess you could skip the last few where most of the size explosion lies but that doesn't give you much precision.
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tile_disk_usage
That could be easily compressed by having all of these link to one water image though, no?
The Commotion "Internet in a Suitcase" project (~2012) was much more up my alley. Is much more the sort of thing I wish that, for example the State Department would still fund.
> Commotion relies on several open source projects: OLSR, OpenWrt, OpenBTS, and Serval project.
So, mesh, wifi, cellular, and voice technologies, packaged onto semi affordable hardware... That's the real stuff! That's what democratic values should look like, that'a what we could build that would embody our (USA's) founding principles, would fight tyrant info-control.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commotion_Wireless
Sure, we can hand them access to all of the internet and have them scrolling social media till they’re hollow people and earn money by doing anything cause they have seen the way you can live in luxury and start idolizing that. Or you give them just the useful parts of the internet.
One project that was semi-successful were USAID sponsored internet cafes that were supposed to enable access to political information just before an election. The USAID staff were annoyed to find most Cambodians used them for international VoIP calls.
Never assume you know better than the end users what they want from the internet. Now mobile companies move in so fast to conflict countries (from my experience in Afghanistan and Iraq), internet access is up there with electricity on the list of requirements.
Implying you (or anyone) knows better what is most useful to someone else isn’t fair to them. What if the sites that are most useful aren’t included in the backup because of blind spots or license/copyright issues?
Saving a single page to view offline is simple enough for me, but many non-technical folks would struggle. A whole site? That is a bit harder. Most people could not do this outside manually crawling the site.
Web archiving tools that are easy to use and allow offline use also have a role to play that other tools can’t fill due to many issues that are outside developers’ ability to change, and putting archiving capabilities in the hands of users directly allows users’ fair use rights to be used to good effect.
What does this mean?
Social media is exactly working as Zuc planned, it's a survalience state where you are the product. I do like the brasserie ads.
It's a game changer to run local (no usage caps for a weekend blitz project)
1. It was very fast, between 35 and 70 tokens per second, with initial response in under 200ms. That kind of speed is a feature.
2. It was very useful. I had a brainstorming session with it that was both fluid and fruitful
3. I can't wrap my head around so much knowledge being contained in about 3GB of data. It seems to know something about everything. Imperfect, but very useful.
I don't know how many more times this needs to be proven.
You do not understand data, you do not understand the reality around you, you do not understand 80:20 style engineering rules, you can't look at previous implementations of the Internet in a Box and see it didn't work.
Worse, you now live in a Starlink era where you can give them a real "Internet in a Box" and there is no solution people can just roll out. Talking a proper Linux setup, real hacker and nerd stuff, but because it's not Data Hording 101 no one will tackle it.
Internet in a Box is a great example of why Western foreign aid is failing and China is moving in. The West no longer builds infrastructure for the poor (like a Linux build) and feeds them wishy washy stuff. Facebook does more for the poor in this area.
Where is a follow up study 3 years later? Are there any follow up studies [1]?
(I have said in past comments the medical version might work, it failed in the Dominican Republic [1])
One follow up study - [1] https://www.sipa.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/2023-01/In... which is not real positive.
Why does it not work? An idea to think about, physical encyclopedias and university textbooks have been around forever and accessible.
I've worked in schools with 1000's on one ADSL trying to use proxies to cache. I've volunteered for a few years in country on mobile apps for use in very low PPI villages without internet. I'm not coming at this with zero experience.
It's impossible to discuss these things on HN, there is neither the technical or process knowledge here, I could be totally wrong but I have looked hard to disprove myself.
The solution I propose Starlink -> box with billing / access control + terabytes of offline vids/books + fun online games, that an idiot with determination can manage and make a profit or run free and works well in a country where the MPAA doesn't exist.
I've lived in many deeply impoverished communities, and they don't need a full version of Wikipedia, or a medical encyclopedia. They need to know how to easily and cheaply implement basic sanitation and hygiene, basic first aid and nutrition, efficient sustainable cooking and agricultural practices etc... Plenty of effort was spent on that stuff in the Appropriate Technology movement, but all I ever see from it all is wiki articles or 70 page pdfs (which many can't even read, even even if they were in their native language). No one is learning anything from those resources.
I brought this up with some orgs similar to IIAB, and they were just bewildered. So, I made it my life's work to address this in a genuinely useful, accessible, practical way. Hopefully I'll be able to share something in the next year or two...
This, of course, is not to say that they don't have the current or future potential to learn these things, let alone that such info should be withheld. But it's just a matter of practicality of time, resources, efficacy etc. If they can get out of extreme poverty - which many basic things can very much help with - maybe they'll have more time, health and money to pursue academic education, etc
The proof of this, of course, is that we have access to all of humanity's knowledge, and have self-evidently done very little with it.
Once those issues are sorted out via more appropriate teaching and logistical methods, solidarity, etc... they'll have health, time, and money with which academics and anything else can be pursued.
Its just basic Maslow's hierarchy of needs...
All of the people who are working on these sorts of offline education projects are completely out of touch.
The guy running it was bewildered and even offended when i said a huge medical encyclopedia was worthless - there's like 10 conditions that affect the majority of people here (smoke, parasites, diabetes, dental issues, obesity, malnourishment, sleep deprivation, emotional/psychological trauma, etc), all of which are simple to treat and also to fix/prevent with basic technologies and living practices. As with people who have access to all information, they don't actually need it - just live well. If they need real medical knowledge, they'll need to find their way to a doctor anyway. The same applies to the rest of the knowledge - they'd learn more effectively anyway through practical, effective projects.
I also tried to talk to/work with the people in charge of rachelplus technology in improve it in many ways, but they were enormously disinterested as well. Such are the ways of the majority of non-profit orgs in the social/economic development world (and probably in most other realms as well)
It would have been more "Internet in a box" if it would have helped people set up their own services and pages; and if it were extensible using other radio-capable devices.
They do talk about using FileZilla or Nextcloud to upload files, and mention using CMSes like WordPress, so maybe it's quite possible, just not a big focus.
I agree that making it easy for teachers, students, and anyone in the community making their own discoverable webpages would be a great aspect to this.
Related FAQ #4, #5 here: - https://wiki.iiab.io/go/FAQ#Can_teachers_display_their_own_c...? - https://wiki.iiab.io/go/FAQ#Can_students_upload_their_own_wo...?
and README: - https://github.com/iiab/iiab/blob/master/roles/usb_lib/READM...
Fun facts, about one third or 2.6 Billions of the world's population has no or very limited Internet connectivity [2]. The main root cause is most probably power not the infrastructure.
Most of the people in authority probably don't realize that this rural connectivity does not need a fast high speed network as long as it has connectivity. It can be slow as kbps bandwidth, a kind of "sipping" Bittorent based download, but a download nonetheless.
The main problem of the Internet connectivity it's not really the infrastructure itself but the overall power budget requirements for the connectivity infrastructure.
We need to bring back the very efficient wireles modulation for the remote and rural Internet as exemplify by the DMR with its very efficient 4-FSK [3],[4]. This type of wireless modulation employed constant envelope modulation that is far more efficient (8 to 15 times more efficient) than the alternative TETRA with comparable bandwith [5]. It's reported that DMR operates on 1 kWh per day while TETRA is on 15 kWh per day thus the former can be sustained by only solar panels but not the latter.
Please note that TETRA itself is not a very efficient modulation with π⁄4 differential quadrature phase-shift keying (π⁄4-DPSK) since it requires linear amplifiers due to its non-constant envelope wireles modulation. It's even worst for typical OFDM based system (e.g Wi-Fi HaLoW, LTE, 5G, etc) [6]. This is because a similar power budget setup to DMR would have required probably around 100 times more power or more than 100 kWh per day including the air-conditioning systems for the linear power amplifier systems [7].
Thus these remote and rural base stations can be potentially powered by merely solar panels and the infrastructure does not need to be expensive since the base station structure can be made from bamboo [8].
[1] Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud:
https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first/
[2] About one-third of the global population, or 2.6 billion people, remain offline.
https://www.itu.int/en/mediacentre/Pages/PR-2023-09-12-unive...
[3] Digital mobile radio (DMR):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_mobile_radio
[4] DMR networks for health emergency management: A case study:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220761899_DMR_netwo...
[5] TETRA:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TETRA
[6] Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonal_frequency-division_...
[7] Base Station ON-OFF Switching in 5G Wireless Networks: Approaches and Challenges:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315696556_Base_Stat...
[8] IEEE Connecting the Unconnected (CTU) 2022 Challenge Winners:
Even less common, one headed by a person like Elon Musk.
I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see <https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git>) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it.
<https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html>
( However having worked as a technical software tester in similar systems for over 20 years , its probably to complex to implement reliably, being able to handle all the edge cases. Is my GUESS )
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43814433#43816392
For less ephemeral learning bouquets (i.e., curated content), an implementor can customize their IIAB their specific content and then image/clone as needed.
https://wiki.iiab.io/go/FAQ#How_do_I_customize_my_Internet-i...?