Internet in a Box • Hacker News Board

Re: Internet in a Box

#111

Post by doodlesdev » Sat, Apr 29, 2023, 5:10 PM UTC

aaron695 wrote: post #51

This is stupid for schools as always, but does seem to be working in medical settings - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHlfs__nBkE This seems to be the content - http://med.iiab.me/ The "The Global Emergency Medicine Wiki" is pretty cool, external link where they get it from - https://wikem.org/ Preppers seem interested too which is cool - https://www.tiktok.com/@deweylikedonuts/video/71236508943983...

You were flagged, I imagine because of the tone of your comment, but I wonder why you think this is stupid for schools?

Living in a third world country I can tell you this has huge potential to improve schooling in areas with limited or no internet accessibility.

Re: Internet in a Box

#112

Post by asynchronous » Sat, Apr 29, 2023, 5:10 PM UTC

lxgr wrote: post #85

rakoo wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for what you're doing. Couldn't that be achieved with kiwix as well ? It can serve content over WiFi as well

The project seems to be using Kiwix, but not only that. For example, you can't serve OpenStreetMaps cards using Kiwix (at least to my knowledge).

It seems to be Kiwix+OSM+Archive.org downloads which is really nice. I wonder how the interface works

Re: Internet in a Box

#113

Post by doodlesdev » Sat, Apr 29, 2023, 5:13 PM UTC

shaburu wrote: post #44

i checked their GitHub repo and looks like the project is dead, any update from anyone working on it?

Which repo did you look at? The one at [0] seems pretty active, specially for an application that probably doesn't need updates all that often anyways.

[0]: https://github.com/iiab/iiab

Re: Internet in a Box

#114

Post by enos_feedler » Sat, Apr 29, 2023, 6:09 PM UTC

We've gone full circle. I remember the day this little box came in the mail and my world changed:

https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/the-web/20/408/20...

Hopefully this project does something similar for others.

Re: Internet in a Box

#115

Post by sph » Sat, Apr 29, 2023, 9:06 PM UTC

Is there something like this, for "guerrilla" situations? An open source DIY project, a Raspberry PI image, and some kind of WiMAX antenna/WiFi AP combo to give internet access to a wide area in emergency situations.

I have no experience with that field but I think that would be really neat, for people in unstable countries where internet is blocked, or inaccessible. A plug and play, ghetto way of restoring internet access on the go, when all you have is a crappy, flaky and possibly filtered internet connection.

Re: Internet in a Box

#116

Post by Epa095 » Sat, Apr 29, 2023, 9:45 PM UTC

Nice to see the OLPC xo laptop again "in the wild" (the green laptop in the bottom picture) Hopefully it's still useful for someone out there:-)

Re: Internet in a Box

#117

Post by e808 » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 12:32 AM UTC

The few instances I travelled in remote areas with little to no Internet, and moreover no over the air TV reception, I always mulled how a simple 1K-2k setup with a mini PC running plex and a 10-20TB of disk space could provide an plex TV media library (movies, tv, audio) for a small neighborhood. Throw in Ubooquity for books and audiobooks, you can provide a massive library of media entertainment and education to the area. (of course, copyrights be damned) also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg

Re: Internet in a Box

#118

Post by asjfka » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 4:48 AM UTC

Technically this is a cool experiment because it's a bit like a cordless BBS from the '80s. However, I think it's doomed to failure. People aren't morons and they don't need an occidental savior to bring the knowledge to them on a newfangled toy computer. If really it was useful and needed, it would already exists because a local somewhere would have found a way to build it by himself and start a business around it. Then the idea would have propagated to other places and soon, there would be unconnected hotspots everywhere. No need for a website to promote the idea with a link asking for money.

Re: Internet in a Box

#119

Post by eru » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 4:53 AM UTC

zamnos wrote: post #76

eru wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. At the moment they are great for entertainment. But for factual information, you are better off just grabbing a copy of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia's information often isn't collated how you want. Eg List the states where the biggest city is larger in population than the state capital? There isn't specifically an article for that. Sure you could take the List of United States cities by population article and assemble the list yourself, or you could just have ChatGPT do it for you.

Yes, language models are already great for collating information, but they are still too unreliable to rely on.

Re: Internet in a Box

#120

Post by chclt » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 6:05 AM UTC

asjfka wrote: post #118

Technically this is a cool experiment because it's a bit like a cordless BBS from the '80s. However, I think it's doomed to failure. People aren't morons and they don't need an occidental savior to bring the knowledge to them on a newfangled toy computer. If really it was useful and needed, it would already exists because a local somewhere would have found a way to build it by himself and start a business around it.…

Yeah, I think this is a solved issue. People just share physical media with the content they need. Which is more useful than this proposed solution, because they usually don't misguidedly respect copyright monopolies.