Internet in a Box • Hacker News Board

Re: Internet in a Box

#201

Post by avni5 » Mon, Apr 28, 2025, 3:46 PM UTC

SamBam wrote: post #57

einpoklum wrote: post #42

It is the opposite of Internet in a box. This exemplifies how, in our day and age, "The Internet" is mostly a one-sided experience where a few large organizations offer a bunch of content, which they control, for your perusal. It would have been more "Internet in a box" if it would have helped people set up their own services and pages; and if it were extensible using other radio-capable devices.

I was thinking this too. They do talk about using FileZilla or Nextcloud to upload files, and mention using CMSes like WordPress, so maybe it's quite possible, just not a big focus. I agree that making it easy for teachers, students, and anyone in the community making their own discoverable webpages would be a great aspect to this.

Teachers / organizers being able to share their own content is a top-requested feature indeed. A few years ago, we implemented functionality similar to LibraryBox, to mount "teacher content" from USB sticks / drives and make it instantaneously available for students. More recently, after a teacher in the Yucatan requested it in November, we implemented functionality to enable students to be able to submit homework privately to their teacher OR share their summer photos (or any other content) akin to a traditional community bulletin board with their peers, i.e., Upload2USB. There's much more to be done, but the ability to share your own content and create community exchanges of information and ideas is central to Internet-in-a-Box's (IIAB)'s ethos.

and README: - https://github.com/iiab/iiab/blob/master/roles/usb_lib/READM...

Re: Internet in a Box

#202

Post by katabasis » Mon, Apr 28, 2025, 3:59 PM UTC

fritzo wrote: post #187

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.

The modern internet is filled with content designed to track, mislead, and manipulate users (especially young users who don't have a full set of critical thinking skills). I think it is totally appropriate to want to give families (not the state, FWIW) the tools to take back some control.

Giving kids accessed to a curated experience online sounds much more feasible than keeping them offline all together, but most parents don't really have the technical know-how to do this themselves (and tech giants like Google, FB, etc. are not interested in providing these capabilities).

Re: Internet in a Box

#203

Post by habi » Mon, Apr 28, 2025, 4:03 PM UTC

moffkalast wrote: post #146

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…

> easily download Wikipedia and Openstreetmap Isn't OSM like 2TB to host if you include all tile scales? I guess you could skip the last few where most of the size explosion lies but that doesn't give you much precision.

But about 70% of all images are something like https://tile.openstreetmap.org/10/399/390.png, e.g. water...

Re: Internet in a Box

#204

Post by JasserInicide » Mon, Apr 28, 2025, 4:13 PM UTC

The fact that this has a promotional image from someone using one of those One Laptop per Child laptops (which was an abject failure) just says to me this is another misguided "white savior" attempt to solve a problem in parts of the world they don't fully understand.

Re: Internet in a Box

#205

Post by blacksmith_tb » Mon, Apr 28, 2025, 4:19 PM UTC

squigz wrote: post #131

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't seem likely - the key to trolling is lack of accountability, in a small community everyone would know you were being a jerk?

Guys... people are jerks IRL too, in small communities too.

Sure, but no one gives them a bag of tomatoes / a pie / helps fix their roof? Being a jerk to people IRL has obvious consequences.

Re: Internet in a Box

#206

Post by iwantonething » Mon, Apr 28, 2025, 4:24 PM UTC

prepperdisk wrote: post #184

flipgimble wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you know when this might be back in stock? https://www.prepperdisk.com/products/prepper-disk-premium-ai...

Re: Internet in a Box

#207

Post by mock-possum » Mon, Apr 28, 2025, 4:40 PM UTC

fritzo wrote: post #187

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.

That’s the first thing I thought as well - as long as Wikipedia remains open and public and free there’s a degree of transparency and accountability there -

But if you download your own separate offline version, it can be whataver you want it to be, and that will be all your users get - whether your goal is to ensure access to the ‘right’ parts, or to disappear the ‘wrong’ parts. You could even start out with the former objective, but end up with the latter situation, depending on how things go.

That isn’t quite the same situation with the definitive version of Wikipedia live on the World Wide Web.

Re: Internet in a Box

#208

Post by kitd » Mon, Apr 28, 2025, 4:48 PM UTC

fritzo wrote: post #187

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.

s/censorship/content curation/

Re: Internet in a Box

#209

Post by avni5 » Mon, Apr 28, 2025, 4:48 PM UTC

SamBam wrote: post #55

kh_hk wrote: post #15

Seeing the demo I noticed it looks like this "prepper disk" that was submitted days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43790409 Makes me think the prepper disk was maybe a rebrand of internet in a box without proper attribution?

I'm not really sure I understand how a "Prepper Box" is different from an external hard drive. Unlike the devices in TFA, which are meant for many students in a classroom using at once, this seems to be more of a single-person-looking-up-things concept.

Raspberry Pis that have a Wi-Fi module with Access Point support are a good solution for the classroom use case.

Some good Internet-in-a-Box (IIAB) testing on RPi 3 B+ & RPi 4 boards on # of Wi-Fi clients supported: https://github.com/iiab/iiab/issues/823#issuecomment-6622852..., e.g., up to 32 clients in certain scenarios.

More info here: https://wiki.iiab.io/go/FAQ#What_hardware_should_I_use? and https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/3010

Re: Internet in a Box

#210

Post by econ » Mon, Apr 28, 2025, 4:56 PM UTC

JasserInicide wrote: post #204

The fact that this has a promotional image from someone using one of those One Laptop per Child laptops (which was an abject failure) just says to me this is another misguided "white savior" attempt to solve a problem in parts of the world they don't fully understand.

Agreed, pirate box was more fun.