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Internet in a Box
121–130 of 263 posts
Re: Internet in a Box
#122I thought they meant this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg Chuckles aside, it's a cool concept.
We can say in two days: "It's over, April!"
Re: Internet in a Box
#123Huge respect to everyone who’s worked on this, it's really cool!
Re: Internet in a Box
#124Volunteer 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…
Regarding mwoffliner: Why scrape Wikipedia when you can just download a dump?
Re: Internet in a Box
#125[deleted]
Re: Internet in a Box
#126Vaguely 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…
I think that giving the poor(er) people access to just the information that’s accessible on the internet, like Wikipedia, like Khan academy to learn programming. Is so much more helpful than handing them access to “the internet” as in what the internet is for people in the rich parts of the western world. Sure, we can hand them access to all of the internet and have them scrolling social media till they’re hollow peo…
I saw many projects while working in Cambodia, including One-Laptop-Per-Child, projects designed to share market information with farmers, etc and none made an impact like mobile phones.
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.
Re: Internet in a Box
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
May I suggest somebody out of your company reviews the website. It is not clear to me what you do, what the apps do and so on. The copy is also kind of abstract "we make the world a better place" type of copy. From your comment I understand you do good work and would be a shame for people new to your products to struggle understanding what are you doing.
I don't agree with your assessment. Did you find the 'About Us' page insufficient?
I don't think the previous comment was trying to be snarky - I can see where they're coming from.
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.
Re: Internet in a Box
#128I like the idea of a hardware set up for this. One thing I'm considering for DiskerNet (dn - an offline, searchable, curated archive of the web that works in a normal browser) is using NNCP for updates. That way you can "request" pages that aren't in the archive, and "patch" them in from hardware updates later, USB sticks, floppies (haha) - whatever! And securely, thanks to the crypto in NNCP.
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
Re: Internet in a Box
#129I wonder if Starlink et al won't soon solve the global internet access problem.
Every such provider likes to play games with who they give good rates to or who they exclude altogether from their network. People said the same about cellular access and it's still far too expensive for most people in most rural areas.
Which countries are you referring to? I know from personal experience everyone in Cambodia and Afghanistan owns a mobile phone with internet access. They might not have a computer or reliable power, but they have Facebook accounts. Rest of ASEAN has excellent coverage as well, and I've heard Africa is similar
Re: Internet in a Box
#130A mirror of Khan Academy would be great as well.
That's already an option on IIAB.