Internet in a Box

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!

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

And I have a picture of the real one :-)

https://www.flickr.com/photos/brajeshwar/113742187/in/album-...

The Internet has been stored safe on my desk since that time: https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/i-created-the-internet/...

Their device should definitely have a big red light on top of it

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've gone a step further, I have built a 50 TB NAS and I'm loading up as much as I possibly can.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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)

Doesn't seem likely - the key to trolling is lack of accountability, in a small community everyone would know you were being a jerk?

I would love a little box that contains a huge database of info with an LLM on top that I could use offline.

I don’t think the elders of the internet would mind.

> 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.

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.