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2023 (356 points, 120 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35750165

2021 (620 points, 142 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27568332

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 thought they meant this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg

Chuckles aside, it's a cool concept.

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?

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.

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.

It's the Innernette! <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9S2ciB-6jc>

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.

What would it take to give these poor children a Starlink connection?

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?

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?

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

“This, Jen, is the Internet.”

I want this but an LLM.

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.

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.

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.

Internet with privacy

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:

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/

I wonder if Starlink et al won't soon solve the global internet access problem.

This article made me remember, that in the early 90s there was a service to retrieve any webpage by email

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 )

System Architecture Perspective:

The "box" appears to be a self-contained server with wireless capabilities Would be interesting to discuss the technical specifications needed (storage, processing power, battery vs AC power) The mesh networking capabilities to serve multiple devices simultaneously

Content Architecture:

The article mentions customizing with "the very best free content" This raises questions about content curation, compression, and update mechanisms How the system handles different media types (text, video, interactive content)

Deployment Scenarios:

The mention of remote mountain villages suggests ruggedization requirements Power considerations in off-grid locations Scalability from single classroom to entire village implementations

Human-Computer Interaction:

The "community fountain" metaphor is powerful - how does this manifest in UI/UX? Multi-language support for diverse regions Accessibility features for different user capabilities

Sustainability Model:

Maintenance requirements in resource-constrained environments How content stays current without regular internet connectivity Potential for peer-to-peer updates when partial connectivity exists

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

This seems to be the Wikipedia webpage for it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet-in-a-Box

A mirror of Khan Academy would be great as well.

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.

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

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 ....)

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.

Let put this "internet in a box" and send it via baloon into North Korea

> ... 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?"

So by intent it's like a CDN node, but decentralized

Title reminds me of that time Moss introduces Jen to the internet.

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.