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Internet in a Box

internet-in-a-box.org

81–90 of 263 posts

Re: Internet in a Box

#81

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 )

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

Re: Internet in a Box

#82
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.

Re: Internet in a Box

#83

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 m…

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.

Re: Internet in a Box

#84
post #51

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 m…

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.

LLMs are a bad deal when you look at how much power you need to run that inference. A device that could barely run one instance of QwQ-32B at glacial speeds will be able to serve multiple concurrent users of Kiwix.

Re: Internet in a Box

#85

I thought they meant this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg Chuckles aside, it's a cool concept.

And I have a picture of the real one :-) https://www.flickr.com/photos/brajeshwar/113742187/in/album-...

I have a very similar picture from The Henry Ford. Ars Technica unboxed it and tried it out.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/10/openi...

Re: Internet in a Box

#87
post #84
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

LLMs are a bad deal when you look at how much power you need to run that inference. A device that could barely run one instance of QwQ-32B at glacial speeds will be able to serve multiple concurrent users of Kiwix.

To serve multiple users, probably not.

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.

Re: Internet in a Box

#88
> ... 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?"

Re: Internet in a Box

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are actually IIAB partners, we attribute to all the various OOS projects (Kiwix, IIAB)in our credits and comply with all the licensing. Our goal was just to make those packages polished as a consumer product and add newer content (some licensed and some commissioned ).

Curious why you went with a 512GB SD card for the Prepperdisk, instead of a usb drive? I guess it might make the enclosure bigger, but every RPi thing I have built has been undone by SD card corruption (unless I used the overlay filesystem).

These things shouldn't need writable FS though.

Re: Internet in a Box

#90

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" whic…

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!
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