[HN Gopher] Internet in a Box
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Internet in a Box
Author : homebrewer
Score : 117 points
Date : 2025-04-27 19:26 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (internet-in-a-box.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (internet-in-a-box.org)
| gnabgib wrote:
| Popular in:
|
| 2023 (356 points, 120 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35750165
|
| 2021 (620 points, 142 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27568332
| gioazzi wrote:
| 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.
| Bengalilol wrote:
| Did you meet Beekee in Geneva?
|
| 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).
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I thought they meant this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg
|
| Chuckles aside, it's a cool concept.
| dmonitor wrote:
| Their device should definitely have a big red light on top of
| it
| realo wrote:
| So this allows people in poor countries to have access ONLY to
| the best curated resources available on the Internet?
|
| And those people then have a better chance at a much better
| education?
|
| Why not in developed countries schools as well?
| skylerwiernik wrote:
| Someone already thought of this and uploaded all of the
| contents of the box to a website! You can find it at
| wikipedia.com
| sgt wrote:
| 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.
| bl4ckneon wrote:
| 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)
| netsharc wrote:
| 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.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Doesn't seem likely - the key to trolling is lack of
| accountability, in a small community everyone would know you
| were being a jerk?
| bobsmooth wrote:
| This is cool but I feel like buying a 1000 count of cheap USB
| sticks and loading them with wikipedia or whatever would be
| cheaper and more useful.
| jackphilson wrote:
| probably access to chatgpt4o is a million times more useful
| than wikipedia imo
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| Yes, why does the developing world need an education system
| when we could be flooding them with AI hallucinations?
| dymk wrote:
| Cool all they'll need to do is find $20/month per person for
| the subscription, how hard could that be in rural South
| Africa or Nepal?
| urbandw311er wrote:
| And an internet connection
| minhazm wrote:
| 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.
| brewdad wrote:
| Won't most Android phones accept a USB device for
| reading/storage? Not much iPhone penetration in the
| developing world.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| 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.)
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| It's the Innernette!
| <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9S2ciB-6jc>
| malux85 wrote:
| This is such a cool idea.
|
| 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.
| amelius wrote:
| What would it take to give these poor children a Starlink
| connection?
| kh_hk wrote:
| Seeing the demo I noticed it looks like this "prepper disk" that
| was submitted days ago
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43790409
|
| Makes me think the prepper disk was maybe a rebrand of internet
| in a box without proper attribution?
| entropie wrote:
| > 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.
|
| > https://www.404media.co/sales-of-hard-drives-prepper-disk-
| fo...
|
| From the hn-thread. You might be right.
| dcreater wrote:
| 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.
| thefreeman wrote:
| I think part of the point is you _can't_ hear from them...
| because they don't have access to the real internet?
| flaburgan wrote:
| 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?
| tarruda wrote:
| 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.
| pixl97 wrote:
| 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.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commotion_Wireless
| didgeoridoo wrote:
| "This, Jen, is the Internet."
| zkiihne wrote:
| I want this but an LLM.
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(page generated 2025-04-27 23:00 UTC)