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Internet in a Box

internet-in-a-box.org

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Re: Internet in a Box

#171

Post by RenThraysk »

aaron695 wrote: post #111
nchmy wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate on/point us towards resources about why it does not work?

It's been around since 2012 and the best Wikipedia has - "explored using these boxes in the Dominican Republic for three months." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet-in-a-Box 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/si…

Your analogy with books doesn't really work. As a book is only usable by one individual at a time. Whereas a digital book can be shared.

Re: Internet in a Box

#172

Post by simgt »

kilroy123 wrote: post #79
aspectmin wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d love some detail on your setup. Which NAS, which drives? Key data sets? (Would love to build one myself)

I have 4 Seagate Exos X18 14TB drives crammed into a JONSBO N2 Black NAS ITX Case. 2 TBs of SSDs, and 64 GB of RAM. (Going to double the ram soon)

Why is it useful to have as much as 64GB of RAM in a NAS?

Re: Internet in a Box

#173

Post by dev0p »

dachris wrote: post #108
flaburgan wrote: post #26

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…

If the internet would go offline "for real" even for days, all hell would break lose. It would not be as bad as electricity going offline, but it's in the same category now. No credit card payments payments (food, gas), no logistics. Prepper stuff. 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 corporat…

And a couple of hours later, major blackout in Spain.

Re: Internet in a Box

#174

Post by simgt »

Geo_ge wrote: post #110
VikingCoder wrote: post #97

So if I bought the $58 one from the Wikipedia Store... 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.)

I'm running a Raspberry Pi based GNSS receiver from a 26 Ah SLA battery and an 80W panel. Just passed 2 weeks of uptime in a cloudy period of southern hemisphere autumn. 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 avera…

Is it an RTK base station? If so I'd love to know more about why you set one up.

Re: Internet in a Box

#175

Post by RenThraysk »

rollcat wrote: post #170
RenThraysk wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think determining factor is price, it is how easy or hands off the appliance can be. Every postgres search implementation has atleast one internet connected postgres nerd on standby.

> I don't think determining factor is price This is a solution that is supposed to be affordable in third-world countries, where 99% of all personal computing happens on low-to-mid-end smartphones. Unless you specifically mean first-world countries, in which case you can just run a hotspot from your PC or laptop. > it is how easy or hands off the appliance can be. I can already barely justify having a single RasPi pl…

It's not a solved problem for people that aren't technically capable, and do not have internet access.

It's why Kiwix was developed, so people don't have to run a full web stack (which requires a rdbms) for wikipedia.

I don't know if LM is the answer and probably not in power deprived areas, but running a rdbms is defintely isn't it.

Re: Internet in a Box

#176

Post by nchmy »

aaron695 wrote: post #111
nchmy wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate on/point us towards resources about why it does not work?

It's been around since 2012 and the best Wikipedia has - "explored using these boxes in the Dominican Republic for three months." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet-in-a-Box 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/si…

I've spent the past 8 years focused on this theme, more or less, because my conclusion after finding things like internet on a box (and various similar projects) was that they offer too much information (and also present it in a useless manner).

I've lived in many deeply impoverished communities, and they don't need a full version of Wikipedia, or a medical encyclopedia. They need to know how to easily and cheaply implement basic sanitation and hygiene, basic first aid and nutrition, efficient sustainable cooking and agricultural practices etc... Plenty of effort was spent on that stuff in the Appropriate Technology movement, but all I ever see from it all is wiki articles or 70 page pdfs (which many can't even read, even even if they were in their native language). No one is learning anything from those resources.

I brought this up with some orgs similar to IIAB, and they were just bewildered. So, I made it my life's work to address this in a genuinely useful, accessible, practical way. Hopefully I'll be able to share something in the next year or two...

This, of course, is not to say that they don't have the current or future potential to learn these things, let alone that such info should be withheld. But it's just a matter of practicality of time, resources, efficacy etc. If they can get out of extreme poverty - which many basic things can very much help with - maybe they'll have more time, health and money to pursue academic education, etc

The proof of this, of course, is that we have access to all of humanity's knowledge, and have self-evidently done very little with it.

Re: Internet in a Box

#177

Post by joncrane »

flobosg wrote: post #144

Somewhat related: Cuba’s “El Paquete Semanal” – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36285363 )

This is what I immediately thought of. "El Paquete" is an ingenious solution to the issues on the island.

Re: Internet in a Box

#180

Post by flipgimble »

audiodude wrote: post #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" whic…

If I'm reading this right, the last full zim archive of all of english wikipedia is wikipedia_en_all_maxi_2024-01.zim which is now about 16 months old. Is that right, or is are another more recent sources?

The current US administration is actively trying to interfere with Wikipedia and censor public speech or information that is detrimental to their disinformation campaign. [1]

Do you know if there is an effort to publish more recent archives ? Or do you have any advice how outside developers could jump in to help with that project?

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43799302

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