It's an offline stash of free knowledge, such as Wikipedia, Khan Academy, and OpenStreetMap. It brought to mind El Paquete Semanal, Cuba's sneakernet culture drop: https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-cuban-cdn/
Webaroo[1] was one such product
Internet in a Box
91–100 of 146 posts
Re: Internet in a Box
#92I love it! I just hope this gets deployed with more rugged hardware than a raspi. Especially if they're relying on it for medical info.
Sd cards suck.
Re: Internet in a Box
#93These don't work and never have. We have 20 years on this. I get in the 90's it would have seemed like a quick win. But it didn't work. This inability to move on is frustrating. If you care , which most people don't. But if you do, what you want on them is porn and copyright TV. If you don't understand why I can't really help you, it's a pretty simple idea. You can't do that obviously, so how do you do it by proxy? T…
I'm confused by this comment. They cite examples of it working. Similar setups have been working in Cuba for a long time. What isn't working? Are you just saying that actual free internet access would be better? Sure, that's true, but not practical everywhere.
> Similar setups have been working in Cuba for a long time.
Official Sneakernet is terrabytes of TV (Government 'sanctioned' without porn or politics) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal
If this is what it is, then I'm totally wrong. This is a really good idea. A wireless hotspot, anyone can setup to distribute terabytes of material to others, preferably with a charge/login option.
Years ago we did this with a wireless access point 'Login for free movies" in our apartment. But couldn't (at the time) work out an easy way to distribute the AVI's once randoms connected.
Wikipedia not clear IIAB is this and I didn't see it from the web site - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet-in-a-Box
To do this, what's vital is cafe owners and teachers and students can buy this product and easily dump stuff on. A movies section, comics section, a books section they can make pretty, they need ownership in their collations.
Their FAQ is on OLPC's site which had a horrific attitude of not allowing others to use their products and locking them down.
Once you pay someone to set IIAB up, giving them Starlink would be around the same price. IIAB has to be open and easy to buy.
> They cite examples of it working
Where? The Dominican Republic video was 4 years ago. Is it up and running? These things are easy to send in a team for and have running for a few months. I would be surprised if one was running for more than a year without an expat there.
Re: Internet in a Box
#94To clarify, the "box" is any UNIX computer (very well suited for Raspberry PI devices, since the wifi can act as a hotspot), and the "internet" consists of all the best FOSS apps and open content that get served from localhost, see full list here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/IIAB/FAQ#What_services_.28IIAB_app... The use case is to make apps/content/tools normally requiring internet accessed work offline (either on loca…
I would love to have one myself. I may have to put one together. Just thinking if I had the device and if even only Wikipedia were on it — would save perhaps a small amount of internet traffic? Maybe negligible, but I think if I knew I had a "local cache" of all of Wikipedia I might rely on it more. Then I wonder if there was a way to integrate it with my browsing of the actual internet — perhaps keeping a running fe…
For my wikipedia cache I use IPFS companion and https://en.wikipedia-on-ipfs.org/wiki/. All the devices that use this approach on a local network can share data. And to make sure unused wikipedia pages aren't garbage collected, https://github.com/ipfs/distributed-wikipedia-mirror#cohost-...
Re: Internet in a Box
#95To clarify, the "box" is any UNIX computer (very well suited for Raspberry PI devices, since the wifi can act as a hotspot), and the "internet" consists of all the best FOSS apps and open content that get served from localhost, see full list here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/IIAB/FAQ#What_services_.28IIAB_app... The use case is to make apps/content/tools normally requiring internet accessed work offline (either on loca…
Surely an old android smartphone can do all this better than a hard to replace/repair UNIX "internet-in-a-box"? Old Android phone: 1. Has screen - (strong, tested, replaceable). 2. All the Android apps. 3. Wifi hotspot functionality + FTP + server hotspot. 4. MicroSD slot for massive and switchable data store. 5. Solar powerable, with removable and replaceable battery. 6. Touch friendly, kid friendly, low IQ requirem…
Ignoring the other comments point that this is meant as a server rather than a direct kiosk, lets smash each of these points.
> 1. Has screen - (strong, tested, replaceable).
Broken/scratched/hard to read in sunlight/draining power.
> 2. All the Android apps.
All the android apps for that old version of android, presuming they work without a wifi connection.
> 3. Wifi hotspot functionality + FTP + server hotspot.
Very dependant on the phone make/model, and server/hotspot wouldn't be that performant.
> 4. MicroSD slot for massive and switchable data store.
Again, very dependant on the make/model.
> 5. Solar powerable, with removable and replaceable battery.
Solar power I will give you, but you'll be hard pressed to find a phone suitable as server/hotspot with a removable battery.
> 6. Touch friendly, kid friendly, low IQ requirement UI/UX.
That's very dependant on the app developers if we go with point 2, I know plenty of apps with terrible UI/UX.
> 7. Easy to code to extend functionality any way you like.
Not on phone, you can maybe automate stuff with the likes of Tasker (see counterpoint 6 about UI/UX though) To really extend it you'd need a PC at which point... just use the PC? Or a pi.
Re: Internet in a Box
#96This is awesome. A friend of mine and I once did something for the local kids of our hometown way back (I guess, 2005-2007) where there was no proper Internet in that part of the country. A local LAN setup with few Desktop computers, where we load up videos for education. While kids takes turn to use the computers, they can watch videos in groups -- Videos which are readily available for free on the Internet. It didn…
I vividly remember my dad buying that internet in a box thing in the 90s. What a ridiculous product.
I don't think it was ridiculous, except perhaps for the name, but non-tech people back then didn't even really know what the Internet was. It probably didn't seem far-fetched, since most (all?) products were basically tangible things that could fit into a box, and it probably bridged the gap.
In that box was a browser and list of dial-up POPs and designed to compete with AOL, which offered AOL's version of the Internet and was peppering the country with free floppies (and later CD-ROM's).
Other than AOL, most people in the country could only do dial-up to gain access to the World Wide Web (it sounds so quaint when you write it out now!).
Juno did this even better -- for free, with ads:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juno_Online_Services
Shockingly, they're still doing it today! I had no idea there was a market for free dial-up internet in 2021! That is so cool.
A lucky few within a certain distance from their CLEC's CO could get DSL or would spring $800/mo (or a lot more!) for a 1.5Megabit/s T1.
I think it was around the late 90's that Time Warner and a few other cable companies started testing out high-speed cable.
So, to me, the Internet-In-A-Box product was a cool thing that didn't last that long because most people migrated from dial-up to broadband as quickly as they were able. I wonder, though, why it died so quickly while Juno is still around 20-something years later! Freemium is a better business model?
Re: Internet in a Box
#97Does this solve real people's actual problems? Selling the 32 gig SD card together with an Android app to browse the data seems far better. The majority of the world either has an Android phone (possibly a decade old), or a family member with one. Have the android app available in the app store and the data downloadable for those who occasionally have internet connectivity (for example visiting a big city), but don't…
If you think a smart phone lasts 10 years in the hands of poor people, you are extremely optimistic. From what I can tell, even here in South Africa's townships they are using fairly new Samsung, Huawei etc smart phones (always with a broken screen - this happens without exception), albeit cheap ones. Even my gardener has a Samsung 10 something. Not entirely sure how he can afford it, but I suspect he borrowed a lot…
> Not entirely sure how he can afford it, but I suspect he borrowed a lot of money to afford it
There's a gray/black market for second hand phones whose provenance is...questionable. As someone who involuntarily contributed a phone to this surprisingly international parallel supply chain, the sellers are probably not selling at Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price.
Re: Internet in a Box
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not my kind of humor (I'm the guy in the audience who wasn't laughing).
That particular gag is rather meh, compared to the rest of the show, IMHO.
It's iconic, but there were many more subtle gags
The IT Crowd popularised "have you tried turning it off and on again"
Re: Internet in a Box
#99These don't work and never have. We have 20 years on this. I get in the 90's it would have seemed like a quick win. But it didn't work. This inability to move on is frustrating. If you care , which most people don't. But if you do, what you want on them is porn and copyright TV. If you don't understand why I can't really help you, it's a pretty simple idea. You can't do that obviously, so how do you do it by proxy? T…
Yes, what very, very poor rural schools and hospitals in the heart of Africa really want is porn and not access to teaching aids and medical databases.
What's an example medical database they could and would want to setup and will IIAB run those services?
Re: Internet in a Box
#100This is awesome. A friend of mine and I once did something for the local kids of our hometown way back (I guess, 2005-2007) where there was no proper Internet in that part of the country. A local LAN setup with few Desktop computers, where we load up videos for education. While kids takes turn to use the computers, they can watch videos in groups -- Videos which are readily available for free on the Internet. It didn…
I vividly remember my dad buying that internet in a box thing in the 90s. What a ridiculous product.
I worked for the division of CompuServe responsible for that. I even have "Internet In a Box For Kids" still in the shrink-wrap on a shelf behind me. I keep it in case I ever need to bootstrap the Internet after a disaster.
That division had some .. uh .. interesting sales ideas. One of the ones I remember painfully was an attempt to cross-promote our sign-up disks with a heavy metal band. Disks were given out for free at concerts. The net result, to be expected, I suppose, was an impressive number of confused fans calling up support and asking when the next concert was.