[HN Gopher] Internet in a Box
___________________________________________________________________
Internet in a Box
Author : homebrewer
Score : 849 points
Date : 2025-04-27 19:26 UTC (1 days 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).
| gioazzi wrote:
| They are based in Switzerland as I am, but it so happened we
| met in Doha
|
| 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
| myself248 wrote:
| Ooo, there's another one to look at. There seem to be a bunch
| of these with variously-overlapping goals. Two more I'm aware
| of:
|
| https://bibliosansfrontieres.gitlab.io/olip/olip-documentati...
|
| https://wrolpi.org/
|
| And I feel like the PirateBox concept is sort of adjacent.
| nobodyknowin 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.
|
| Amazing stuff all without internet.
| syncsynchalt wrote:
| 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.
| 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
| jasoneckert wrote:
| The Internet has been stored safe on my desk since that time:
| https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/i-created-the-internet/...
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| And I have a picture of the real one :-)
|
| https://www.flickr.com/photos/brajeshwar/113742187/in/album-...
| al_borland wrote:
| I have a very similar picture from The Henry Ford. Ars
| Technica unboxed it and tried it out.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2014/10/openi...
| voidUpdate wrote:
| 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
| timeon wrote:
| We can say in two days: "It's over, April!"
| snitty wrote:
| I wonder what percentage of HN readers assumed that's what this
| was about.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Probably very high. I certainly thought that's what it was
| about when I read the title.
| RajT88 wrote:
| It's so light!
|
| The internet doesn't _weigh_ anything
|
| Ohhh!
| theospeak wrote:
| One of my absolute favourite shows. what a gem -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg . Also one of the
| best bits in my opinion -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj490uNht4o . For those who
| have never indulged - Enjoy :-)
| geocrasher wrote:
| It's _wireless!_
| 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)
| SamBam wrote:
| 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.
| 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?
| esseph wrote:
| Some people REALLY like jerks.
| netsharc wrote:
| What if the system allowed anonymous accounts?
|
| 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.
| squigz wrote:
| Guys... people are jerks IRL too, in small communities too.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Sure, but no one gives them a bag of tomatoes / a pie /
| helps fix their roof? Being a jerk to people IRL has
| obvious consequences.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| 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)
| 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.
| drilbo wrote:
| Well, I have a few flash drives with USB-C connections built
| in, and 1 or 2 with USB-B
| 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.)
| metasj wrote:
| 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.
| 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?
| WorldWideWebb wrote:
| Being indebted to Elon and the Orange Administration. Probably
| not the best solution to a problem like this.
| esseph wrote:
| So far my answer would be: "US government subsidies"
| 9x39 wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| prepperdisk wrote:
| 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 ).
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| 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).
| int_19h wrote:
| These things shouldn't need writable FS though.
| prepperdisk wrote:
| 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.
| kh_hk wrote:
| And yet there's neither mention of projects over
| https://www.prepperdisk.com/pages/about-us
| squigz wrote:
| Yeah, the only mention I can find of many of the open-
| source projects they use seems to be in one of the FAQs.
| entropie wrote:
| And even with you writing that it was not easy to find
| because its under an unrelated topic.
| prepperdisk wrote:
| 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).
| entropie wrote:
| I asked Kiwix and Marc replied and said they are indeed
| affiliated. Marc also stated they offered help and are pretty
| cool guys.
| SamBam wrote:
| 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.
| avni5 wrote:
| Raspberry Pis that have a Wi-Fi module with Access Point
| support are a good solution for the classroom use case.
|
| 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
| 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.
| metasj wrote:
| Sounds like something r/datahoarders would be / may already
| be into.
| 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.
| ericb wrote:
| 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.
| int_19h wrote:
| 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.
| ericb wrote:
| To serve multiple users, probably not.
|
| 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.
| moffkalast wrote:
| 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.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| I've gone a step further, I have built a 50 TB NAS and I'm
| loading up as much as I possibly can.
| aspectmin wrote:
| I'd love some detail on your setup. Which NAS, which drives?
| Key data sets? (Would love to build one myself)
| kilroy123 wrote:
| I have 4 Seagate Exos X18 14TB drives crammed into a JONSBO
| N2 Black NAS ITX Case. 2 TBs of SSDs, and 64 GB of RAM.
| (Going to double the ram soon)
| simgt wrote:
| Why is it useful to have as much as 64GB of RAM in a NAS?
| xandrius wrote:
| What if you want to load all of Wikipedia and images on
| the RAM for even faster access of every page?
| 9x39 wrote:
| 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.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| 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.
| int_19h wrote:
| 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:
|
| 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.
| myself248 wrote:
| 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.
| dachris wrote:
| 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.
| dev0p wrote:
| And a couple of hours later, major blackout in Spain.
| encipriano wrote:
| 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
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > would my neighbors understand it?
|
| 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.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > easily download Wikipedia and Openstreetmap
|
| 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.
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| More like 54TB
|
| https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tile_disk_usage
| habi wrote:
| But about 70% of all images are something like
| https://tile.openstreetmap.org/10/399/390.png, e.g. water...
| numpad0 wrote:
| 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.
| 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
| yapyap wrote:
| 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.
| freefrog1234 wrote:
| 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.
| thenthenthen wrote:
| 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?
| aspenmayer wrote:
| > 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.
| didgeoridoo wrote:
| "This, Jen, is the Internet."
| zkiihne wrote:
| I want this but an LLM.
| notarealllama wrote:
| OpenwebUI and you can run quantized or low end models (Llama 3
| 4b or gemma 4b) on a 4-6gb graphic card.
|
| It's a game changer to run local (no usage caps for a weekend
| blitz project)
| drittich wrote:
| 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.
| bdcravens wrote:
| 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.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| That sounds like the last few universities I taught in. (quite
| seriously).
| aaron695 wrote:
| Internet in a Box _DOES NOT WORK_
|
| 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.
| nchmy wrote:
| Could you elaborate on/point us towards resources about why it
| does not work?
| aaron695 wrote:
| It's been around since 2012 and the best _Wikipedia_ has -
| "explored using these boxes in the Dominican Republic for
| three months." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet-in-a-
| Box
|
| 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.
| RenThraysk wrote:
| Your analogy with books doesn't really work. As a book is
| only usable by one individual at a time. Whereas a digital
| book can be shared.
| nchmy wrote:
| 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.
| pluto_modadic wrote:
| Agreed - it's not all of wikipedia, it's the parts that
| matter. They could do this with much less storage. Maybe
| just an SD card in an old phone?
| nchmy wrote:
| 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.
| nchmy wrote:
| 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)
| einpoklum wrote:
| 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.
| SamBam wrote:
| I was thinking this too.
|
| 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.
| avni5 wrote:
| 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.
|
| Related FAQ #4, #5 here: - https://wiki.iiab.io/go/FAQ#Can_te
| achers_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...
| zeroday28 wrote:
| Internet with privacy
| teleforce wrote:
| 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 p/4 differential quadrature phase-shift keying (p/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:
|
| https://ctu.ieee.org/challenge/2022-ctu-challenge-2/
| caseyy wrote:
| I wonder if Starlink et al won't soon solve the global internet
| access problem.
| metasj wrote:
| 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.
| freefrog1234 wrote:
| 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
| asdefghyk wrote:
| This article made me remember, that in the early 90s there was a
| service to retrieve any webpage by email
| dredmorbius wrote:
| RMS still largely browses in this way:
|
| _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>
| asdefghyk wrote:
| 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 )
| iwantonething wrote:
| I would love a little box that contains a huge database of info
| with an LLM on top that I could use offline.
| avni5 wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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...
| ?
| aspectmin wrote:
| Such a cool idea.
|
| In addition to Wikipedia, I'd love to see a mirror of all the
| health (NIH) and similar data
|
| - key imagery, for example the human body
|
| - (wishful) chatGPT 4o
| asdefghyk wrote:
| This seems to be the Wikipedia webpage for it
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet-in-a-Box
| metasj wrote:
| There's also a longer overview here:
| https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Internet-in-a-Box
|
| And (when supplies return) you can get one in a 3d-printed box
| with Wikipedia pre-installed here:
| https://store.wikimedia.org/products/internet-in-a-box
|
| Sustained by a wonderful international community of builders,
| authors, and translators (and always looking for more to join
| in)
| aspectmin wrote:
| A mirror of Khan Academy would be great as well.
| FerretFred wrote:
| That's already an option on IIAB.
| Uptrenda wrote:
| This has off-grid written all over it. You could build your own
| content pool for education + entertain and you would never have
| to pay a forever subscription for an Internet connection.
| (Assuming you don't work online or something.) Quite an
| interesting idea to consider how to add the tools to this so its
| practical to unplug. This idea appeals to me a lot tbh.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| I've encountered a few instances (mostly friends) who have done
| similar ideas. Around 2007 - 2012 (ish) many corners of India
| were yet to have access to the Internet (Jio hasn't introduced
| super cheap, almost free Internet). A few friends did like
| download Wikipedia and take it to these corners and teach kids.
|
| In my case, a friend/colleague Freeman Murray,[1] had that idea
| and I told him I will try in my hometown (one of the most remote
| corner of India). We did and I got a few young kids to be the
| maintainer, have a few desktop (not Laptop) that they carry
| around and watch videos to learn to program. It was good while it
| lasted. Now, those isolated places that I was scared to go alone
| when I was a kid have fiber Internet connections.
|
| On a fun note, I do have a picture of an "Internet in a Box".
| This was Detroit in the mid 2000s.
| https://www.flickr.com/photos/brajeshwar/113742187/in/album-...
|
| 1. https://www.mars.college
| fitsumbelay wrote:
| Reminds me of PirateBox/Library Box -- more the latter in terms
| of mission -- but w/ RPI instead of a router running OpenWRT
| (which was a wild experience ....)
| audiodude wrote:
| Volunteer for Kiwix here (https://kiwix.org), we do a lot of
| offline Wikipedia stuff. I've personally worked on MWOffliner
| (https://github.com/openzim/mwoffliner) which scrapes MediaWikis,
| primarily Wikipedia.
|
| We have apps for basically every platform. Our PWA even supports
| IE 11!
|
| You can use the WP1 tool which I'm the primary maintainer of
| (https://wp1.openzim.org/#/selections/user) to create
| "selections" which let you have your own custom version of
| Wikipedia, using categories that you define, WikiProjects, or
| even custom SPARQL queries.
| freedomben wrote:
| Neat, thanks! I'm CTO of Ameelio (non-profit) and have been
| eyeing Kiwix for awhile. Getting content to incarcerated people
| is a unique challenge due to the exceptional security
| requirements, and an offline solution like kiwix might fit in
| well. Being able to narrow down categories is a huge capability
| for us. Thank you!
| gehwartzen wrote:
| Just wanted to comment on what a great mission Ameelio seems
| to have! Glad you guys are helping some of the most unseen in
| our society. Kudos!
| benoitberaud wrote:
| Feel free to reach to us (Kiwix), we've already helped NGO
| deploy our content to prisons for the exact reason you
| mention.
| freedomben wrote:
| Neat, thanks! I'll definitely do that :-)
| strofocles wrote:
| May I suggest somebody out of your company reviews the website.
| It is not clear to me what you do, what the apps do and so on.
| The copy is also kind of abstract "we make the world a better
| place" type of copy. From your comment I understand you do good
| work and would be a shame for people new to your products to
| struggle understanding what are you doing.
| bcraven wrote:
| I don't agree with your assessment. Did you find the 'About
| Us' page insufficient?
| blazerunner wrote:
| I don't think the previous comment was trying to be snarky
| - I can see where they're coming from.
|
| Take my feedback with a grain of salt, as I am entirely not
| the target audience, but...
|
| "Stay Connected, Always" - weird way to put it, given it's
| for offline situations. At this stage it sounds like it
| could be a 4G or portable wifi solution?
|
| "Use our apps for offline content or the Kiwix Hotspot for
| reliable access." - so it's probably a desktop or mobile
| app, maybe a web app. What is Kiwix Hotspot, another app?
| Unclear there is a hardware at this point, or any on the
| home page unless I watch the video that hints at it.
|
| The summary in the footer was a lot clearer to me: "Kiwix
| is an offline reader for online content like Wikipedia,
| Project Gutenberg, or TED Talks. It makes knowledge
| available to people with no or limited internet access"
|
| Again, not trying to complain for the sake of it, I think
| this is a cool project helping under-served communities,
| but if people can't easily understand what you do, they may
| not dig deeper.
|
| If I can't tell what is being offered without much thinking
| or digging, the home page isn't doing as much as it could
| be.
|
| Perhaps it is ticking the boxes for your target audience if
| you have done some testing. Great! If not, some quick user
| testing could help optimise the messaging to make sure what
| you offer is landing.
| eru wrote:
| The quote from the footer sounds pretty good. That should
| probably be front and centre.
| westpfelia wrote:
| agreed. It hits the nail on the head.
| ehutch79 wrote:
| I honestly thought this was a self contained relay to
| provide internet access to remote locations...
| Angostura wrote:
| The open sentence of the 'About Us' page is very good. The
| problem is, it is on the about us page, rather than front
| and centre on the home page
| pluto_modadic wrote:
| it is often true that the people who made a thing are
| unable to adequately explain it to others, and think their
| own explanation works just fine. The site isn't self-
| explanatory.
| yreg wrote:
| Regarding mwoffliner: Why scrape Wikipedia when you can just
| download a dump?
| dal wrote:
| I was thinking the same. It must take much less space in
| database form than all the html pages.
| josephg wrote:
| Its also kind of bad form to scrape a huge website when
| there's a downloadable dump available. Save yourself, and
| more importantly wikimedia, a whole lot of bandwidth & CPU
| cycles.
| detaro wrote:
| If you want to test Mediawiki tooling, wikipedia is good test
| target, because it uses _a lot_ of the features
| (unsurprisingly), compared to smaller wikis. (OTOH, the
| latter often have custom extensions, so it 's not quite
| enough)
| yreg wrote:
| Sure, but I understood the parent as saying that the tool
| primarily serves for scraping Wikipedia.
| hoseja wrote:
| I had an offline copy of wikipedia from like five years ago,
| just in case. When I recently needed it I opened the kiwix app
| and everything was broken by some godforsaken overhaul update.
| I don't have an offline copy of wikipedia on my new phone
| anymore.
| flipgimble wrote:
| If I'm reading this right, the last full zim archive of all of
| english wikipedia is wikipedia_en_all_maxi_2024-01.zim which is
| now about 16 months old. Is that right, or is are another more
| recent sources?
|
| The current US administration is actively trying to interfere
| with Wikipedia and censor public speech or information that is
| detrimental to their disinformation campaign. [1]
|
| Do you know if there is an effort to publish more recent
| archives ? Or do you have any advice how outside developers
| could jump in to help with that project?
|
| [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43799302
| prepperdisk wrote:
| Kiwix team is close on this, it's even a partnership directly
| with Wikipedia to work on the newer APIs and function
| reliably.
| iwantonething wrote:
| Do you know when this might be back in stock?
| https://www.prepperdisk.com/products/prepper-disk-premium-
| ai...
| prepperdisk wrote:
| Thanks for asking, we just opened up our second preorder
| wave. Those will ship mid June.
| themadturk wrote:
| Is there concern for AI-produced slop in Wikipedia? I have
| the 2024-01 version which may be out of date, but may also
| have less slop.
| aussieguy1234 wrote:
| Let put this "internet in a box" and send it via baloon into
| North Korea
| lutusp wrote:
| > ... Now you too can put the internet in a box and customize it
| with the very best free content for your school, clinic or
| family!
|
| Yes ! And at very low cost! It doesn't require a network, a power
| connection or high technology! It prepares its users for adult
| life!
|
| How can people read this article and not think, "Wait ... don't
| we already have books?"
| zipping1549 wrote:
| Books - take up a lot of space - are not free & not necessarily
| cheap - are not searchable - take a lot of effort to index -
| are heavy, prone to damage & loss - cannot be accessed by
| multiple users simultaneously - need physical copy to back up
| lutusp wrote:
| Most of these points are true for computer media as well if
| separated from some degree of computer power, especially "not
| necessarily cheap".
|
| > ... need physical copy to back up
|
| Certainly true for computer storage, which, if left to the
| whims of nature and given time, will self-destruct.
|
| Years ago I got a call from Tom Clancy, who was writing "Hunt
| for Red October" using my word processor "Apple Writer." He
| said a diskette had become unreadable and asked how to
| recover its contents. I delivered the bad news and
| recommended that he use his backup diskette. I'm sure you can
| guess how that turned out.
| nsonha wrote:
| So by intent it's like a CDN node, but decentralized
| Sparkyte wrote:
| Title reminds me of that time Moss introduces Jen to the
| internet.
| pryelluw wrote:
| I don't think the elders of the internet would mind.
| asdefghyk wrote:
| Reminds me of a research paper I once saw many years ago.. It
| described a dual caching ( web traffic) proxy system. with a
| (very) slow/ unreliable link in between. The proxies worked
| together to compress the data as it was transferred across the
| link. ( The proxy on the receiving sided cached information and
| only retried if it had changed.) My recollection is it also had
| options to reduce the resolution of images.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| So if I bought the $58 one from the Wikipedia Store...
|
| What exact solar products (panels, battery, converter?) would I
| need to buy, near Chicago, to run one of these 24/7, year round,
| and let's say it's gotta be up and running most of the time -
| say, 99% of the time. (That means it can be down over 3 days a
| year, and still be acceptable to me.)
| pastage wrote:
| This is not for that kind of setup, this is more of a button
| you press to get internet when you need it IMHO. It is 1 watt
| idle, so you need 24Wh to keep it running if there is no sun.
| On bad short days you might get 5% of solar power. A battery
| system might lose you 30% on that. Uptime is not primarily an
| technical issue, it depends on what your goals, skills and
| needs are.
| jzemeocala wrote:
| I actually did something just like this with the second
| raspberry pi and an offline copy of Wikipedia.
|
| Although I don't know this devices specs I recall being able to
| reliably power the pi 2b + a 3.5 inch touchscreen with a random
| 15,000mah solar power Bank from amazon
| godelski wrote:
| It is running a Pi Zero 2 W, and that should run max draw
| 2.5A@5V (12.5W)[0]. So a Watt hr is using a Watt for an hour.
| So the question is how many hours continuously you would allow
| your Pi to run. For 24hrs, that's 24hrs*12.5W = 300Whrs. Just
| for an estimate, a shargeek is $100 and will give you 24
| Whrs[1]. I'm sure you could build your own solution for much
| better, but assuming since you're asking, I'm assuming this
| isn't a great option.
|
| So probably a bit more expensive than you're thinking.
| Especially if you're putting it outside, as you'll need to make
| the thing more secure from weather. But also the good news is
| you probably aren't going to actually be pulling those 12.5Ws
| on your pi. You should probably measure and see.
|
| For solar, I'm not sure especially since you'll need to adjust
| for your requirements. But there are nice resources that can
| tell you average capacity, but be careful to note that these
| will usually show averages and you're going to be significantly
| affected by seasons in Chicago.
|
| Honestly, I'd get a small battery (like for a phone) and hook
| it up to an outlet and tuck it away somewhere. That's a much
| cheaper option. Even if you're "going rogue" with it... the
| power draw is so little you won't really notice it.
|
| [0]
| https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/getting-...
|
| [1] https://sharge.com/products/shargeek-170
| varenc wrote:
| A 50Ah 12V deep cycle car battery would give you at most 600Wh.
| This RPi's max draw is 12.5W, but an average draw is 6W is
| probably reasonable. So that battery alone would get you at
| most `600 watt-hours / 6 watts = 100 hours` of run time (minus
| some voltage conversion loss and other imperfections). Then
| just hook up some solar to charge the battery and assume at
| least 25% loss. ~70W should probably be enough even for a
| Chicago winter. The RPi might actually idle at around 1W making
| it even easier.
|
| All that said, there might be a better solution for you if 99%
| uptime offline personal Wikipedia is your only goal. And IIAB
| isn't really optimized for high availability I assume. (just
| get a local copy of Kiwix on your phone+laptop? Or a cheap
| dedicated tablet for Kiwix would probably cost less than the
| battery+solar setup)
| Qqqwxs wrote:
| I'm running a Raspberry Pi based GNSS receiver from a 26 Ah SLA
| battery and an 80W panel. Just passed 2 weeks of uptime in a
| cloudy period of southern hemisphere autumn.
|
| A monte carlo simulation using historical conditions said it
| had a ~95% chance of no downtime over 3 winter months. A
| slightly larger battery would bring that up to 99%.
|
| The Pi (3b+), GNSS reciever (u-blox ZED F9P), and Waveshare
| 7600G 4G modem average about 3.5W idle. The GNSS reciever is
| about 0.1 - 0.2 W of that. Wifi would be more energy efficient,
| I imagine.
| simgt wrote:
| Is it an RTK base station? If so I'd love to know more about
| why you set one up.
| myself248 wrote:
| Are you contributing to Galmon.eu? Sounds like you might be
| in a useful location.
| ninjazee124 wrote:
| "This Jen, is the internet"
| dredmorbius wrote:
| For the culturally deprived:
|
| <https://www.acmi.net.au/stories-and-ideas/the-it-crowd-
| the-i...>
| lovegrenoble wrote:
| Brilliant idea btw!
| petesergeant wrote:
| Surprised that there are still so many people without access to
| the internet[0], and even more surprised that that's true in
| India and China, both of which have pretty high population
| densities (in most areas, but also, those are the areas people
| live in, obviously).
|
| > But these user figures also suggest that 652 million people in
| India did not use the internet at the beginning of 2025,
| suggesting that 44.7 percent of the population remained "offline"
| at the start of the year.[1]
|
| I guess I'm mentally comparing this to SE Asia, where smart phone
| usage (and cell coverage) is ubiquitous; Vietnam at 80%,
| Philippines at 75%, Thailand at literally everyone. Fewer in
| Indonesia, but geography there is especially challenging
|
| 0: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1155552/countries-
| highes...
|
| 1: https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2025-india
| Akatama wrote:
| Hey everyone!
|
| I actually recently learned about Internet-in-a-Box myself and
| started contributing. Its cool to see that for the most part
| people seem to think this is a positive idea! Internet-in-a-Box
| has been around for a while (at least 10 years) and it's a great
| project with a lot of very passionate people working on it.
| rishikeshs wrote:
| I was thinking about this recently! Can we make an LLM-in-a-box ?
| npteljes wrote:
| The ability is there for sure:
| https://www.prepperdisk.com/products/prepper-disk-premium-ai...
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _I also need an IC to convert the I2S signal (currently sent to
| the MAX98357A) to a headphone output. I haven 't researched
| options yet. The motherboard will need additional routing to send
| the I2S signal from the ESP32-S3 to both the MAX98357A and this
| new IC. Suggestions welcome!_
|
| isn't a headphone just a high impedance speaker? you just grab
| the same output that goes to the speakers and reroute it through
| a big resistor to the headphones.
|
| did a little searching, here you go (the extra resistance isn't
| that great)
|
| https://samtechpro.blogspot.com/2014/03/how-to-use-speaker-o...
|
| put your efforts into stereo, speaker and headphones, why
| wouldn't stereo set the stage for more complex brain development?
| denysvitali wrote:
| Wrong discussion?
| CoolDogs wrote:
| Huge respect to everyone who's worked on this, it's really cool!
| keepamovin wrote:
| I like the idea of a hardware set up for this. One thing I'm
| considering for DiskerNet (dn - an offline, searchable, curated
| archive of the web that works in a normal browser) is using NNCP
| for updates. That way you can "request" pages that aren't in the
| archive, and "patch" them in from hardware updates later, USB
| sticks, floppies (haha) - whatever! And securely, thanks to the
| crypto in NNCP.
|
| If anyone has a better idea of a protocol for this than NNCP,
| please suggest at: https://github.com/DO-SAY-GO/dn/issues/221
| FerretFred wrote:
| I've set up IIAB and tried Kiwix as well. I used a Pi Zero 2 and
| as it's only me using it, I found the user experience was good,
| although given the Zero's power, not high-speed. I managed to
| gain enough knowledge to create my own ZIM files of some selected
| YouTube content ( including my own). Being aware of the recent
| propensity of useful data to "vanish" I've approached a couple of
| online content providers to see if they'd ask to get their
| content added to Kiwix: sadly I heard nothing back, but I'll keep
| trying.
| dragonw wrote:
| This could be helpful even for people who already have internet
| access. The internet is full of distractions, and we often end up
| seeing ads instead of actually learning something. It would be
| great to create personal collections of useful websites and have
| a powerful search tool to explore them--without relying on Google
| and getting sidetracked.
|
| Right now, Kiwix's search function is quite basic and doesn't
| work well with large amounts of content. It might be worth
| exploring the use of a generative language model or embedding
| model to improve its accuracy and usefulness.
| rollcat wrote:
| These devices are insanely underpowered for running LMs. We've
| had pretty decent search long before the current hype wave.
| Postgres has built-in support for FTS in multiple languages[1];
| if you want to get fancy you can maybe throw in a table of
| common synonyms.
|
| [1]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/17/textsearch-intro.html
|
| Otherwise agreed.
| RenThraysk wrote:
| ADLink make Pocket AI
|
| https://www.adlinktech.com/en/pocket-ai-with-nvidia-
| rtx-a500...
| rollcat wrote:
| Yeah that's $350 vs $35 - just to run text search?
| RenThraysk wrote:
| I don't think determining factor is price, it is how easy
| or hands off the appliance can be.
|
| Every postgres search implementation has atleast one
| internet connected postgres nerd on standby.
| rollcat wrote:
| > I don't think determining factor is price
|
| This is a solution that is supposed to be affordable in
| third-world countries, where 99% of all personal
| computing happens on low-to-mid-end smartphones.
|
| Unless you specifically mean first-world countries, in
| which case you can just run a hotspot from your PC or
| laptop.
|
| > it is how easy or hands off the appliance can be.
|
| I can already barely justify having a single RasPi
| plugged into my router, and I'm a devops nerd. That box
| does one single thing that is too annoying to set up on
| my Mac mini. 99% of people do _not_ want yet another
| blackbox appliance, this is why every single SOHO router
| has a built-in switch and AP.
|
| > Every postgres search implementation has atleast one
| internet connected postgres nerd on standby.
|
| It doesn't have to be postgres specifically, just
| pointing out that decent FTS has been commodity software
| for decades. Throwing LMs at every already-solved problem
| is _the_ problem with LMs.
| RenThraysk wrote:
| It's not a solved problem for people that aren't
| technically capable, and do not have internet access.
|
| It's why Kiwix was developed, so people don't have to run
| a full web stack (which requires a rdbms) for wikipedia.
|
| I don't know if LM is the answer and probably not in
| power deprived areas, but running a rdbms is defintely
| isn't it.
| rollcat wrote:
| > running a rdbms
|
| I agree with you on every step and every point except the
| LM. Your entire argument hinges on FTS requiring a fat
| RDBMS. This is not the case.
|
| Postgres is what I have experience with, but I just
| looked up SQLite and indeed it has FTS5[1]. This is not
| an LM-grade problem, this is a _solved_ problem.
|
| [1]: https://www.sqlite.org/fts5.html
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| While I did not put Internet in a box I put "search" in a box.
|
| https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
|
| Contains Internet links, channels, etc. Work in progress. You can
| find various domains, channels etc.
| flobosg wrote:
| Somewhat related: Cuba's "El Paquete Semanal" -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36285363)
| joncrane wrote:
| This is what I immediately thought of. "El Paquete" is an
| ingenious solution to the issues on the island.
| drmacak wrote:
| Would be great to have this kind of internet in box but for 90s
| or 00s internet.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| It is a bit of a tangent, but I noticed that the picture on the
| lower right features an OLPC XO laptop. These are very
| interesting little machines from around 2010 [1], I wonder if
| some of them are still around today.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| They never really delivered on the promise and the non-profit
| structuring of the org wasn't conducive to actually delivering
| a product.
| npteljes wrote:
| There is some on ebay, at least.
| xvokcarts wrote:
| How does it work?
| kolleykibber wrote:
| Have to mention World Possible (https://worldpossible.org/) here.
| They are doing amazing similar work, with rpis and Intel CAP
| servers.
|
| They also have Datapost (https://datapost.site/map) which uses
| android phones as data carriers between the remote location and
| the Internet, for email, stats and updates.
| asdefghyk wrote:
| Low bandwidth recollections I have Dialup modems , 2400 baud 33K
| and finally 56K Dialup connections early in morning, say 5 - 6 am
| would give very noticeably faster webpage loading times Mail
| client ( like Eudora email client) connect and just load email
| headers ( or titles) then select which emails I wanted to
| retrieve the bodies for... This would have been early 90s to
| early 2000s , when I stopped using dial up connection.
| souhail_dev wrote:
| raspberry pi + SSD + http server
| katabasis wrote:
| I'd love to see something like this that is marketed to parents
| or schools who want to give kids a way to access the good parts
| of the internet (Wikipedia, e-books, etc) without the toxic
| parts. Maybe throw in some kind of de-centralized social media or
| file sharing for collaboration with other students or like-minded
| families. Kiwix + Pi-hole + Activity Pub basically. The device
| could create its own network (that only allowed access to an
| allowed list of sites, defaulting to a list of educational
| projects).
|
| If no one produces such a device I may need to make one myself by
| the time my toddler gets old enough to go online.
| daniel_iversen wrote:
| You could maybe install something like NextDNS? (even the free
| version might cut it) - I think that can block major categories
| including. the ones you mention.
| fritzo wrote:
| It's exciting seeing grassroots censorship efforts like this.
| settsu wrote:
| That is entirely not how a healthy society works.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
| fritzo wrote:
| Do you think katabasis' proposal is unhealthy for a
| society? It strikes me as healthy for parents to keep their
| kids at ideological home during an information pandemic, to
| provide access to educational material and shelter from
| social media.
| jeffhuys wrote:
| I think your original comment was mostly parsed as
| sarcastic.
| settsu wrote:
| Yes, that's how it read to me.
|
| I.e., interpretation...
|
| katabasis: (Suggests sensible guardrails for children)
|
| fritzo: THOUGHT-POLICE!!
| jjulius wrote:
| I don't think it's productive to assume we know exactly why
| someone would use this, and how they would both implement
| this _and_ discuss it with their children in their own home,
| and then attack them based on said assumption.
| katabasis wrote:
| The modern internet is filled with content designed to track,
| mislead, and manipulate users (especially young users who
| don't have a full set of critical thinking skills). I think
| it is totally appropriate to want to give families ( _not_
| the state, FWIW) the tools to take back some control.
|
| Giving kids accessed to a curated experience online sounds
| much more feasible than keeping them offline all together,
| but most parents don't really have the technical know-how to
| do this themselves (and tech giants like Google, FB, etc. are
| not interested in providing these capabilities).
| mock-possum wrote:
| That's the first thing I thought as well - as long as
| Wikipedia remains open and public and free there's a degree
| of transparency and accountability there -
|
| But if you download your own separate offline version, it can
| be whataver _you_ want it to be, and that will be all your
| users get - whether your goal is to ensure access to the
| 'right' parts, or to disappear the 'wrong' parts. You could
| even start out with the former objective, but end up with the
| latter situation, depending on how things go.
|
| That isn't _quite_ the same situation with the definitive
| version of Wikipedia live on the World Wide Web.
| kitd wrote:
| s/censorship/content curation/
| xandrius wrote:
| I'd definitely support this (even help). My non-related wish
| for my future kids would be to have some modern version of the
| BASIC games you would have to type in manually.
|
| I never did that but it sounds a really fun to get into
| technology and programming. The difference is that I'd use
| different languages and maybe also allow them to draw images
| (with paint) and such. Everything offline and simple.
| Rediscover wrote:
| Didn't England or GB do (does?) a curated dump precisely for
| that purpose? I'll pull up the info tonight if no one else
| chimes in.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Wikipedia qualifies as toxic Internet for many people for
| several reasons: it's heavily manipulated by political and
| corporate interests as part of their image polishing media
| strategy, the links that are used to provide credibility for
| articles are poorly curated and often broken, and the internal
| power (deciding which articles get heavily edited by invested
| interests etc.) structure of Wikipedia is mostly hidden from
| the public.
|
| If anything, children should be taught that Wikipedia is not a
| reliable source, meaning citing a Wikipedia article in a
| bibliography for a paper should never be allowed by any
| responsible educational institution.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > the links that are used to provide credibility for articles
| are poorly curated and often broken
|
| I didn't appreciate this until a few years ago when I got
| into the habit of going on deep dives to find primary
| sources. Easily half of all the sources I checked were either
| paywalled, out of print, or simply didn't say what the
| Wikipedia article claimed they said.
| JasserInicide wrote:
| The fact that this has a promotional image from someone using one
| of those One Laptop per Child laptops (which was an abject
| failure) just says to me this is another misguided "white savior"
| attempt to solve a problem in parts of the world they don't fully
| understand.
| econ wrote:
| Agreed, pirate box was more fun.
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| I understand the main use-case, but wonder if there is another
| one: distracted, and social media exhausted Tech workers, or
| distracted writers, ... people who might not want to kill all
| access entirely but maintain accessibility to selected sources of
| information (Gutenberg, Wikipedia, anything that is on libgen
| lol).
|
| Like an offline whitelist of sources you trust not to distract
| you while you're reading that 1000+ page book.
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(page generated 2025-04-28 23:02 UTC)