It's an apparently simple problem on the surface, but quite hard to get it right... I once worked on a wireless network deployment for a transit refugee camp, and at least that was built on the assumption that some sort of Internet connection would be available at all times, making remote management possible. And even then it was tough to manage considering all other constraints.
I can only imagine how hard it is to deliver this kind of service reliably when Internet is rarely if ever available.
I bet those kind of boxes work very well when there are less than 30 connections at once. All in all, if it is about accessing useful information, I think this is somehow brilliant (as you wrote).
IIRC they support 40 concurrent users, and in their model that would always be a school class, which I guess shouldn’t be larger anyway
https://bibliosansfrontieres.gitlab.io/olip/olip-documentati...
And I feel like the PirateBox concept is sort of adjacent.
They had a GIS team working on mapping updates to fire lines, cut lines, dozer paths, crew assignments, etc. And as required they'd upload everything to the pirate box and the commanders / captains could download the maps to their tablets.
Amazing stuff all without internet.
Chuckles aside, it's a cool concept.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/brajeshwar/113742187/in/album-...
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/10/openi...
And those people then have a better chance at a much better education?
Why not in developed countries schools as well?
How to market it in developed countries is going to be a tough nut to crack though.
It's aimed at places with little to no, or unreliable, internet. So if you have normal internet speed there is nothing you can't get that's on the box. Also it seems that its not even a curated Wikipedia, it's just a full clone of it (assuming for whatever language your downloading)
My kid's school uses a software called GoGuardian, which allows individual teachers to whitelist specific websites for the students in their class during their class period.
I wonder if allowing it to have instant messaging (including offline asynchronous messaging) would change how people in a small community communicate each other. I wonder if, for one, it would induce Internet trolling.
It'd be interesting if one had to go visit an admin (in real life) to get an account, and accounts are really associated with people.
Both of these things make me worry about liability in the event of the type of jerks where the term "jerk" is possibly the nicest way to describe the person.
(I have it on a GL.Inet Mango device and it took me a lot of digging to find the install binaries and instructions, and I don't even know if said binaries and instructions specific to the Mango exist anymore - I don't have the time / energy / motivation to try to dig it up again, I remember there were lots of trails that led to almost the right information)
In practice USB keys run a slightly higher risk of being wiped and repurposed for personal storage. Some IIAB users glue the SD card into their socket for that reason, making it take a lot longer to swap out.
When I was about 7-8 years old I used to get the "Tell me why" books, which were books that had 5-ish pages on all sorts of different topics.
https://archive.org/details/heresmoretellmew0000leok/page/n3...
These books sparked a lifelong curiosity in learning, I would sit for hours and hours and read them in my room. I hope that internet in a box inspires another generation of me's out there, who, like me, wouldn't otherwise have had access to this info.
Makes me think the prepper disk was maybe a rebrand of internet in a box without proper attribution?
> https://www.404media.co/sales-of-hard-drives-prepper-disk-fo...
From the hn-thread. You might be right.
Something like the internet archive, but fully decentralized.
I would also store it in a steel Oscar the Grouch style trash can for a cheap faraday cage, which gets you protection from solar flares, and EMP blasts.
But--if you don't think of asking Hacker News every single thing you need to know beforehand, I think you still want the LLM to answer questions and help you bootstrap it.
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.
You can build a hotspot and try setting up meshes with any of the available hardware or software packages out there, but you're going to end up being the gatekeeper to the service. HAM radio ends up working out the same way, as I understand. It's just too technical for people to have this spring up collectively without a single person or team doing everything.
Lack of tech experience to even know how to build a mesh let alone prioritize its limited bandwidth is why the general public isn't going to assist.
>And then, could they repeat the hotspot, to build a mesh? I know there are projects to do that, but what do they accomplish exactly?
Yes, pretty much. The problem is poor definition of the problem, though.
What are we trying to solve? A way to send trickles of comms out, like "Mom and Dad, we're alive?" or "We have life-threatening casualties at x',y'?" Emergency kiosk to send emails one at a time? Doable if you have an Internet source like a Starlink, or any other uplink that's still up somehow.
Or is to restore the "Internet" as generally known, which might as well be synonymous with YouTube and Netflix and web browsing for people. You and your system would be overwhelmed as soon as your mesh comes up.
I guess a requirement for that is a sufficiently generalized protocol with a matching hardware stack.
https://www.arednmesh.org/content/supported-devices-0
It's self-configuring, too - as soon as the node spins up, it will automatically find and connect to nearby nodes and start routing.
The real scenario long-term is that quality content like Wikipedia could either be taken offline, be poisoned by AI or taken over or censored by authoritarians or corporations or interest groups. Like social media and parts of the normal internet already.
So archiving is good anyways.
To your actual question - quality non-fiction e-books would be valuable. Wikipedia is a superficial skimming of human knowledge, lots of the real stuff is in books (think medicine, agriculture, algorithms, engineering etc.).
Practically, a home WIFI has a very limited range, so just handing out sheets with instructions to your neighbors would work. And for a wider mesh network, you'd need to make do with whatever evolves in that scenario.
I think this identifies a real problem in western society; there's a crisis situation of sorts, but instead of people talking to each other, this comment worries about whether people can figure it out on their own.
I believe that if there were to be a crisis situation like that, long-term power outage or whatever, people would find each other again instead of the individualism we have right now.
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.
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.
Sure, we can hand them access to all of the internet and have them scrolling social media till they’re hollow people and earn money by doing anything cause they have seen the way you can live in luxury and start idolizing that. Or you give them just the useful parts of the internet.
One project that was semi-successful were USAID sponsored internet cafes that were supposed to enable access to political information just before an election. The USAID staff were annoyed to find most Cambodians used them for international VoIP calls.
Never assume you know better than the end users what they want from the internet. Now mobile companies move in so fast to conflict countries (from my experience in Afghanistan and Iraq), internet access is up there with electricity on the list of requirements.
Implying you (or anyone) knows better what is most useful to someone else isn’t fair to them. What if the sites that are most useful aren’t included in the backup because of blind spots or license/copyright issues?
Saving a single page to view offline is simple enough for me, but many non-technical folks would struggle. A whole site? That is a bit harder. Most people could not do this outside manually crawling the site.
Web archiving tools that are easy to use and allow offline use also have a role to play that other tools can’t fill due to many issues that are outside developers’ ability to change, and putting archiving capabilities in the hands of users directly allows users’ fair use rights to be used to good effect.
It's a game changer to run local (no usage caps for a weekend blitz project)
1. It was very fast, between 35 and 70 tokens per second, with initial response in under 200ms. That kind of speed is a feature.
2. It was very useful. I had a brainstorming session with it that was both fluid and fruitful
3. I can't wrap my head around so much knowledge being contained in about 3GB of data. It seems to know something about everything. Imperfect, but very useful.
I don't know how many more times this needs to be proven.
You do not understand data, you do not understand the reality around you, you do not understand 80:20 style engineering rules, you can't look at previous implementations of the Internet in a Box and see it didn't work.
Worse, you now live in a Starlink era where you can give them a real "Internet in a Box" and there is no solution people can just roll out. Talking a proper Linux setup, real hacker and nerd stuff, but because it's not Data Hording 101 no one will tackle it.
Internet in a Box is a great example of why Western foreign aid is failing and China is moving in. The West no longer builds infrastructure for the poor (like a Linux build) and feeds them wishy washy stuff. Facebook does more for the poor in this area.
Where is a follow up study 3 years later? Are there any follow up studies [1]?
(I have said in past comments the medical version might work, it failed in the Dominican Republic [1])
One follow up study - [1] https://www.sipa.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/2023-01/In... which is not real positive.
Why does it not work? An idea to think about, physical encyclopedias and university textbooks have been around forever and accessible.
I've worked in schools with 1000's on one ADSL trying to use proxies to cache. I've volunteered for a few years in country on mobile apps for use in very low PPI villages without internet. I'm not coming at this with zero experience.
It's impossible to discuss these things on HN, there is neither the technical or process knowledge here, I could be totally wrong but I have looked hard to disprove myself.
The solution I propose Starlink -> box with billing / access control + terabytes of offline vids/books + fun online games, that an idiot with determination can manage and make a profit or run free and works well in a country where the MPAA doesn't exist.
It would have been more "Internet in a box" if it would have helped people set up their own services and pages; and if it were extensible using other radio-capable devices.
They do talk about using FileZilla or Nextcloud to upload files, and mention using CMSes like WordPress, so maybe it's quite possible, just not a big focus.
I agree that making it easy for teachers, students, and anyone in the community making their own discoverable webpages would be a great aspect to this.
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:
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.
( 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 )
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
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)
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-...
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.
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.
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?"
> ... 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.
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.)
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
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-...
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)
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.
<https://www.acmi.net.au/stories-and-ideas/the-it-crowd-the-i...>
> 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...
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.
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?
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
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.
[1]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/17/textsearch-intro.html
Otherwise agreed.
https://www.adlinktech.com/en/pocket-ai-with-nvidia-rtx-a500...
Every postgres search implementation has atleast one internet connected postgres nerd on standby.
https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
Contains Internet links, channels, etc. Work in progress. You can find various domains, channels etc.
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.
gnabgib•16h ago
2023 (356 points, 120 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35750165
2021 (620 points, 142 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27568332