Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Internet in a Box

internet-in-a-box.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 263 posts

Re: Internet in a Box

#181

Post by encipriano »

dev0p wrote: post #173
dachris wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah who knows whats the real cause. Maybe some fire, maybe a cyberattack or could even be someone messed up greatly in their pc because government security is disastrous so who knows

Re: Internet in a Box

#182

Post by katabasis »

I'd love to see something like this that is marketed to parents or schools who want to give kids a way to access the good parts of the internet (Wikipedia, e-books, etc) without the toxic parts. Maybe throw in some kind of de-centralized social media or file sharing for collaboration with other students or like-minded families. Kiwix + Pi-hole + Activity Pub basically. The device could create its own network (that only allowed access to an allowed list of sites, defaulting to a list of educational projects).

If no one produces such a device I may need to make one myself by the time my toddler gets old enough to go online.

Re: Internet in a Box

#183

Post by rollcat »

RenThraysk wrote: post #175
rollcat wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> running a rdbms

I agree with you on every step and every point except the LM. Your entire argument hinges on FTS requiring a fat RDBMS. This is not the case.

Postgres is what I have experience with, but I just looked up SQLite and indeed it has FTS5[1]. This is not an LM-grade problem, this is a solved problem.

[1]: https://www.sqlite.org/fts5.html

Re: Internet in a Box

#184

Post by prepperdisk »

flipgimble wrote: post #180
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 pu…

Kiwix team is close on this, it’s even a partnership directly with Wikipedia to work on the newer APIs and function reliably.

Re: Internet in a Box

#185

Post by daniel_iversen »

katabasis wrote: post #182

I'd love to see something like this that is marketed to parents or schools who want to give kids a way to access the good parts of the internet (Wikipedia, e-books, etc) without the toxic parts. Maybe throw in some kind of de-centralized social media or file sharing for collaboration with other students or like-minded families. Kiwix + Pi-hole + Activity Pub basically. The device could create its own network (that on…

You could maybe install something like NextDNS? (even the free version might cut it) - I think that can block major categories including. the ones you mention.

Re: Internet in a Box

#186

Post by prepperdisk »

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #77
prepperdisk wrote: post #54

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).

Good question. Cost and ease of use were the primary drivers. It’s a read-heavy / write-light which means we came expect more life than some use cases. Alternatively we went with nvme on the 1TB/LLM model due to its heavier write profile. Making a backup of the SD card is wise though as a backup.

Re: Internet in a Box

#187

Post by fritzo »

katabasis wrote: post #182

I'd love to see something like this that is marketed to parents or schools who want to give kids a way to access the good parts of the internet (Wikipedia, e-books, etc) without the toxic parts. Maybe throw in some kind of de-centralized social media or file sharing for collaboration with other students or like-minded families. Kiwix + Pi-hole + Activity Pub basically. The device could create its own network (that on…

It's exciting seeing grassroots censorship efforts like this.

Re: Internet in a Box

#188

Post by prepperdisk »

kh_hk wrote: post #120
prepperdisk wrote: post #54

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 ).

And yet there's neither mention of projects over https://www.prepperdisk.com/pages/about-us

Good feedback. Most of our customers are shopping for a turnkey device and we try not to include prominent details that can confuse that use cases. But we are going to elevate the content for folks that would be interested (today).

Re: Internet in a Box

#189

Post by benoitberaud »

freedomben wrote: post #90
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…

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!

Feel free to reach to us (Kiwix), we've already helped NGO deploy our content to prisons for the exact reason you mention.

Re: Internet in a Box

#190

Post by bigstrat2003 »

snitty wrote: post #160
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #4

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

I wonder what percentage of HN readers assumed that's what this was about.

Probably very high. I certainly thought that's what it was about when I read the title.
Post reply on HN